With rising costs and delays, California risks losing public trust in climate action | Opinion

California is America’s testing ground for big ideals in the sectors of innovation, progress and, as recent events showed, the defense of individual rights against presidential overreach and a rollback on climate progress. Yet California consistently struggles to translate its grand ambitions into everyday realities.

On paper, we’re visionary; in practice, we’re gridlocked — electricity prices soar, housing stays out of reach and transportation is stuck in park.

Call it the California paradox: The state with the boldest vision for the future can’t seem to build it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fight against climate change.

For example, California aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, a goal that requires 68% more clean electricity. Yet, under the state’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a single power line can require 70 permits and an 11,000-page impact report — processes can stretch five years, even in the best-case scenario. We can’t hit a 20-year climate target if it takes five just to get started.

That’s our problem: perfectionism. We’ve built a system where every new project must solve every problem, offend no interest group and survive a regulatory gauntlet before it’s even allowed to exist.

This isn’t just frustrating for Californians, it’s also dangerous for the broader mission of decarbonizing society.

California was supposed to prove that climate ambition and economic growth can go hand in hand. Instead, clean energy is becoming synonymous with high costs, endless delays and projects that never get built. If that perception sticks, public support for climate action will fall apart. And judging by California’s rightward shift in last year’s election — and nearly every conversation I’ve had since — it’s already at risk.

Californians haven’t lost faith in climate goals. But many no longer believe those goals are compatible with affordability. When you spend two-thirds of your income on rent, crawl through gridlock and still face spiking utility bills, climate action stops feeling like an investment in the future and starts feeling like a tax on the present.

That’s the real environmental risk: not losing red tape, but losing the public.

What California needs now isn’t more vision, it’s a new governing mindset. Let’s not just dream big, let’s build fast. That mindset is captured in “Abundance,” a recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It mentions California more than 170 times — nearly twice as often as any other state — and mostly as a cautionary tale about how good intentions can harden into paralysis.

The book quotes a Sacramento Bee piece lamenting the 1972 Friends of Mammoth decision, which gave CEQA the power to delay virtually any construction project in California: “the daisy-pickers came out of the woods and plunged into the tangle of government influence.” And the consequences are still with us today: In 2023, San Francisco approved just 7,500 new homes, while Houston approved 70,000.

There’s been a lot of debate over whether the “abundance agenda” is the future of the Democratic Party. Who knows. What matters is that it becomes the future of California.

Where do we start? First, by reauthorizing California’s cap-and-invest program, which puts a price on carbon and channels the revenue into clean infrastructure. For builders and investors, it’s a growth signal. Reauthorization tells builders and investors: California is serious about scaling batteries, hydrogen and clean transit. This vote shifts climate policy from moral gesture to market reality. Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders deserve credit for moving forward.

Next, we need to reform CEQA. It’s done important work — from protecting fragile wetlands to cleaning up the Santa Susana Field Lab. But it’s also being used to block the very projects we need to lower emissions and costs. Recent legislation from Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks aims to streamline clean energy development and infill housing. This leadership and directional vision are a great start to a necessary conversation.

We need to be honest: regulation has a role. But if we don’t reform how we regulate, we won’t build anything that matters. When every new project faces layers of review, litigation, consultation and delay, we end up with a system exquisitely designed to prevent harm and increasingly incapable of doing good.

If we can’t accept a manageable level of disruption for decarbonization, nature will impose a catastrophic one for us.

This story was originally published June 25, 2025 at 3:02 PM with the headline "With rising costs and delays, California risks losing public trust in climate action | Opinion."