Category: CALIFORNIA_CN Electrify_Everything_CN LM_COMMUNITY_CN

Underfoot in our cities lies a mammoth network of pipelines, delivering natural gas to millions of homes and businesses. In one small California city, plans are afoot to pare back this system: Albany, in the San Francisco Bay Area, wants to electrify an entire city block so that it can shut down its gas line — for good. It has the blessing of the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded the project a $200,000 grant from its Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program.

Just a few weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom returned from a trip to China that he claimed was focused on tackling the climate crisis, his appointees back home voted to slash financial incentives for rooftop solar power — for the second time.

A federal climate grant program has been monopolized by five large states that together have collected half of its money, highlighting an uneven disbursement of government funding that often leaves poorer regions with less financial help to prepare for intensifying disasters.

After decades of unrestricted pumping in the rain-starved northwestern corner of the Mojave Desert, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin Authority has the distinction of managing one of the most critically overdrawn aquifers in California.

As Jen Goodlin tends the snapdragons and squash in her fertile garden, she is surrounded by a town that is a charred skeleton of its former self.

It is also a blank slate, offering a fresh start to a young and energetic generation of newcomers — who vow to build a new Paradise, a smarter community that will never burn again.

Before the fire that destroyed almost everything here, Paradise was one of those blunders of American suburbia, a misplaced place that made little ecological sense. It inhabited a California landscape that wasn’t quite rolling foothill or rugged Sierra but an in-between zone where Ponderosa pines, Douglas firs and incense cedars kept the earth from baking like the great valley below.

A wildfire in Southern California has burned more than 2,000 acres and prompted more than 4,000 people in Riverside County to evacuate.

What is now being called the Highland Fire was first reported on Monday and exploded in size from Monday night and into Tuesday morning, Reuters reported.

Faced with growing losses from hurricanes, floods and wildfires, major insurance companies are pulling out of California, Florida and Louisiana — a shift that threatens to undermine the economies of those states.

San Diego has made enormous strides toward getting more of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar in recent years. But according to the city’s latest inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, that progress is being canceled out by the city’s biggest source of pollution: cars and trucks.

The start of the commercial Dungeness crab season in California has been delayed for the sixth year in a row to protect humpback whales from becoming entangled in trap and buoy lines.