Opinion: California’s budget surplus can help achieve a climate-safe future
California is becoming ground zero for the climate crisis. Intensifying drought and wildfire emergencies caused by climate change are the harbingers of a great gamble that risk the loss of California as we know it. The drought is not an anomaly but part of a multi-decadal pattern caused by climate change, threatening dust bowl-like impacts to California’s agricultural heartland. It fueled the largest wildfires in state history. More than 4.2 million acres burned last year, causing a toxic smoke storm that smothered much of the state.
-Written by Nayamin Martinez, the executive director of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, and Judith Mitchell, who served for seven years on the California Air Resources Board, and 10 years on the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District.