NEWS
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“One could not have wished for a more perfect storm created by humans,” said Stephanie Pincetl, who directs the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, of the current crisis in heat and drought.
Blog
“Natural gas bans” refer to a diversity of municipal building code changes that disallow certain uses of natural gas in new residential buildings. Gas bans vary in terms of their provisions, but all are intended, along with complementary building electrification programs, to limit the amount of fossil fuels that must be extracted, transported, and burned to meet residential energy needs, thus reducing carbon emissions from buildings, which currently account for approximately 30 percent of the US’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
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‘“If you suppress fire and ignite fire, guess what? You get big fires,” says Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. And suppressing flames doesn’t just amp up the risk for humans living in fire zones—in places that have been very tightly managed like the Sequoia National Forest, the trees aren’t able to bounce back without natural, low-level fires, Pincetl says.
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“While natural gas burns more cleanly than coal does, its usage still results in significant co-product emissions and corresponding public health impacts,” said Eric Daniel Fournier, the research director at the University of California, Los Angeles’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, who was not involved in the study. “As gas comes to represent a larger fraction of the county’s primary fuel portfolio, it will naturally come to be responsible for a larger proportion of the health impacts from stationary sources, of which electricity production is a major contributor.”
Headline
But Stephanie Pincetl says, “Trees don't grow well in this region. So you must create conditions that are hospitable in the urban environment for those trees to survive.” She’s a founder of the Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, and she advocates denser zoning in some places, surrounded by trees to provide shade for parks, playgrounds and sidewalks.
Blog
A conversation with Dr. Erik Porse (Sacramento State University & CCSC/UCLA Institute of the Environment) about urban water resources, energy, conservation, and engineering economics in California.
