With the presidential election over, Joe Biden faces a U.S. Senate that still hangs in the balance. But even with a Democratic runoff sweep in Georgia next month, it will be very divided. So what will be possible for a President Biden and his administration to achieve on climate change?
Agency action, foreign policy changes, and spending can all make a difference on emissions, with any COVID stimulus and budget deals with Congress, if feasible, providing potential avenues for further climate action. Here are some ideas along those lines, broken out by key sectors of the economy.
Action on Transportation
As the EPA chart above of 2018 emissions shows, transportation contributes the largest share of nationwide greenhouse gas emissions at 28%. The best way to reduce those emissions is to decrease per capita driving miles through boosting transit and the construction of housing near it, as well as switch to zero-emission vehicles, primarily battery electrics.
Transit-oriented housing is largely governed by local governments, who generally resist construction. Absent state intervention or federal legislation from a divided Congress, the Biden administration will have to make surgical regulatory changes directing more grant funds to infill housing and potentially use litigation and other enforcement tools to prevent and compensate for racially discriminatory home lending and racially exclusive local zoning and permitting practices.
On transit, a Biden administration would be very pro-rail, especially given the President-elect’s daily commuting on Amtrak in his Senate days. If the Senate flips to the Democrats, high speed rail could be a big part of any bipartisan COVID stimulus package, if it happens, which would be a lifeline to the California project that is otherwise running out of money. Other urban rail transit systems could benefit as well, and the U.S. Department of Transportation could favor and streamline grants for transit over automobile infrastructure. Notably, LA Metro CEO Phil Washington, responsible for implementing the nation’s most ambitious rail transit investment program in Los Angeles County, is chairing Biden’s transition team on transportation.
On zero-emission vehicles, Biden may have relatively strong tools to improve deployment of this critical clean technology. First, perhaps through a budget agreement with Congress, he could reinstate and extend tax credits for zero-emission vehicle purchases, which have expired for major American automakers like General Motors and Tesla. Second, he could use the enormous purchasing power of the federal government to buy zero-emission vehicle fleets. And perhaps most importantly to California, his EPA can rescind its ill-conceived attempt at a fuel economy rollback for passenger vehicles and then grant the state a waiver under the Clean Air Act to institute even more stringent state-based standards, toward Governor Newsom’s new goal of phasing out sales of new internal combustion engines by 2035.
Reducing Electricity Emissions
The electricity sectors comes in a close second place, with 27% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. The move toward renewable energy, particularly solar PV and wind turbines, is so strong that even Trump had difficulty slowing it down during his single term in office, in order to favor his fossil fuel supporters. But nonetheless, the Trump administration created some strong headwinds which can now be reversed.
First and foremost, President-elect Biden can drop the tariffs on foreign solar manufacturers, which drove up prices for installation here in the United States. Second, as with the zero-emission vehicle tax credits, a budget deal with Congress could bolster the federal investment tax credit for solar, which steps down from the initial 30% toward an eventual phaseout for residential properties and 10% for commercial properties. The credit could also be extended to standalone energy storage technologies, like batteries and flywheels, if Biden budget negotiators play their hands well (easy for me to say). A Biden administration could also improve energy efficiency by dropping weak regulations on light bulbs and appliances like dishwashers at the U.S. Department of Energy and introducing more stringent ones instead.
Legislatively, any COVID stimulus deal (again, if it happens) could potentially contain money for a big renewable energy buildout, including for new transmission lines, grid upgrades, and technology deployment. In terms of regulations, if Biden is able to get any appointments through the Senate to agencies like the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC), that agency could make climate progress by simply letting states deploy more renewables and clean tech, including demand response, as well as potentially supporting state-based carbon prices (a move supported by Trump’s FERC appointee Neil Chatterjee, which promptly resulted in his demotion last week).
Slowing Fossil Fuel Production
The two big moves for the Biden administration will be to stop new leases for oil and gas production on public lands (including immediately restoring the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments) and bringing back the methane regulations on oil and gas producers that the Trump administration rolled back. As a bonus, his Interior Department could engage in smart planning to deploy more renewable energy on public lands, where appropriate, including offshore wind.
Other Climate Action
The list goes on for how the Biden administration can embed smart climate policy into all agencies and facets of government, with or without Congress. Of particular note, his appointees at financial agencies like the Federal Reserve and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could bolster and require climate risk disclosures for institutional and private investors. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget could ramp back up, based on the best science and economics, the social cost of carbon, which represents the cost in today’s dollars of the harm of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide equivalent gas into the atmosphere. This measure provides much of the economic justification for the federal government’s climate regulations. And of course, President-elect Biden can have the U.S. rejoin the 2015 Paris climate agreement immediately upon being sworn in (though the country will need to set a new national target).
Overall, Biden’s win means the U.S. will regain some climate leadership at the highest levels, with much that can be done through congressional negotiations, agency action, and spending. However, the stalemate in the US Senate likely means that any hopes for big new climate legislation will be dashed. As a result, continued aggressive action at the state and local level, as well as among the business community, will be critical to continue to help push the technologies and practices needed into widespread, cost-effective deployment to bring down the country’s greenhouse gas footprint.
One election certainly won’t solve climate change, and the costs continue to rise to address the impacts we’re already seeing from extreme weather. But given the current political climate, the actions described above could allow the U.S. to still make meaningful progress to reduce emissions over the next four years and beyond, even in an era of divided government.
Governor Newsom made a major announcement this week, issuing an executive order that California would ban the sale of new internal combustion engine passenger vehicles by 2035, and medium and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045. I’ll discuss the order and its implications this morning at 9am on KQED radio’s Forum.
We released a report at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) on this very subject in 2018, called 100% Zero. The bottom line: this is a major new announcement that is necessary to tackle climate change and should be economically and technically feasible, assuming the state takes additional implementation steps discussed in the report.
However, whether it’s legally feasible for California to implement this order will almost inevitably revolve around this or future presidential elections, as well as the composition of the United States Supreme Court.
Tune in today for more details!
On January 27, 2017, just one week after Trump’s inauguration, UC Berkeley Law’s Henderson Center for Social Justice held a daylong “Counter Inauguration,” featuring various panels in reaction to Trump’s victory. I spoke on an afternoon panel that day entitled “Monitoring the Environmental, Social and Governance Impacts of Business in the Trump Era” and offered my predictions on what the Trump years would bring for environmental law and policy.
I recently reviewed these predictions, three months out from the upcoming November election, to see how they measured up against the reality of Trump’s near-complete term in office. Bottom line: these predictions mostly tracked with what happened with Trump and his administration’s leaders, albeit with some steps I missed, some that never came to pass, and some positive outcomes for environmental protection.
First, I predicted the Trump Administration would follow through on the campaign pledges to boost fossil fuels in the following ways:
- Opening up public lands for more oil and gas extraction
- Slashing regulations that limit extraction and related pollution, such as the Clean Power Plan and methane rules
- Weakening fuel economy rules for passenger vehicles
- Financing more infrastructure that could boost automobile reliance (i.e. more highways and less transit)
These were all relatively predictable actions, and they all pretty much happened as predicted. On public lands and fossil fuels, Trump rolled back National Monument protection at Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, as well as streamlined permitting for oil and gas projects on public lands. On environmental rules in general, here is a list of 100 environmental regulations that the administration has tried to reverse. On vehicle fuel economy standards, here’s my article on EPA’s proposed rollback. And transit funding went from 70 percent of transportation grants under Obama to 30 percent under Trump, with the rest funding highways.
Second, I predicted that his administration would try to undermine clean technologies by:
- Weakening tax credits for renewables and electric vehicles
- Undoing federal renewable fuels program
- Revoking California’s ability to regulate tailpipe emissions
- Attempting to undermine California’s sovereignty to regulate greenhouse gases through legislation
- Cutting funding for high speed rail and urban transit
- Withdrawing from Paris agreement
On these predictions, I was correct on most accounts. The administration did weaken tax credits for renewables (both by not extending them or preventing them from decreasing over time, save for a recent one-year extension on wind energy as a budget compromise) and electric vehicles (by letting them expire and threatening to veto Democratic legislation that would have extended them in a recent budget bill). His EPA did revoke California’s waiver to issue tailpipe emission standards. And he famously withdrew from the Paris agreement (to take actual effect later this year) and has tried to cancel almost $1 billion in high speed rail funding in California.
But I was incorrect that the administration would pursue legislation to preempt California’s (and other states’) sovereignty to set their own climate change targets. There was little appetite in Congress to do so, though Trump’s Justice Department did seek unsuccessfully to declare California’s cap-and-trade deal with Quebec to be unconstitutional. And his record on renewable fuels is more mixed but did deliver some gains to corn-based ethanol producers, though the environmental benefits are suspect with this type of biofuel. I also failed to predict the administration’s efforts to impose tariffs on foreign solar PV panels and wind turbines, which slowed those industries somewhat.
Finally, I predicted some possible bright spots for the environment in the Trump years, much of which did occur:
- Clean tech generally has bipartisan support in congress
- Infrastructure spending in general could be negotiated to benefit non-automobile investments
- Lawyers can stop or delay a lot of administrative action on regulations
- A shift will happen now to state and subnational action on climate, which probably needed to happen anyway
Sure enough, clean technology, particularly solar PV, wind and batteries, has continued to increase in the Trump years, though not at the same pace as under Obama due to the policy headwinds. But infrastructure spending has definitely favored automobile interests, as noted above.
But more importantly, two critical predictions did come to pass. First, attorneys have successfully stopped most administrative rollbacks. In fact, the administration has an abysmal record defending its regulatory actions in court. As NYU Law’s Institute of Policy Integrity has documented, the administration has lost 94 cases in court and won only 12 to date, as tracked in this chart:
And perhaps more importantly, the lack of federal climate action has moved the spotlight to state and local governments, which often have significant sovereignty to enact aggressive policies that add up to serious national climate action. Take renewable energy, for example, per the Center for American Progress, with this map of states and municipal governments that have enacted 100% clean electricity standards:
And on clean vehicle standards, 13 states plus the District of Columbia now follow California’s aggressive zero-emission vehicle standards, representing about 30 percent of the nation’s auto market.
As a result, in many ways, environmental law and climate action appears to have survived the Trump term in office mostly intact, despite losing progress and facing some setbacks on key issues. Most of the regulatory actions can be reversed by a new administration, while Congressional action during the Trump years was relatively minimal in scope. Meanwhile, the counter-reaction to Trump spurred some significant policy wins at the state and local level.
But while one term is perhaps survivable for environmental law and climate progress, a second one could paint a completely different picture. So the stakes certainly remain high this November.
CLEE and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) are pleased to release today the new report “Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain.” The report identifies key challenges and solutions to ensure battery supply chain sustainability through a multi-stakeholder approach, based on our outreach to experts in the field.
The global transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to battery electric vehicles (EVs) will require the production of hundreds of millions of batteries. This massive deployment frequently raises questions from the general public and critics alike about the sustainability of the battery supply chain, from mining impacts to vehicle carbon emissions.
To address these questions, CLEE and NRGI are conducting a stakeholder-led research initiative focused on identifying strategies to improve sustainability and governance across the EV battery supply chain. CLEE and NRGI convened leaders from across the mining, battery manufacturing, automaker, and governance observer/advocate sectors, to develop policy and industry responses to human rights, governance, environmental, and other risks facing the supply chain.
“Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply” identifies the following key challenges to ensuring battery supply chain sustainability:
- Lack of coordinated action, accountability, and access to information across the supply chain hinder sustainability efforts
- Inadequate coordination and data sharing across multiple supply chain standards limit adherence
- Regulatory and logistical barriers inhibit battery life extension, reuse, and recycling
The report recommends the following priority responses that industry, government and nonprofit leaders could take to address these challenges:
- Industry leaders could strengthen mechanisms to improve data transparency and promote neutral and reliable information-sharing to level the playing field between actors across the supply chain and between governments and companies
- Industry leaders and third-party observers could ensure greater application of supply chain sustainability best practices by defining and categorizing existing standards and initiatives to develop essential criteria, facilitate comparison and equivalency, and streamline adherence for each segment of the supply chain
- Governments and industry leaders could create new incentives for supply chain actors to participate in and adhere to existing standards and initiatives, which may include sustainability labeling and certification initiatives
- Industry leaders could design batteries proactively for disassembly (enabling recycling and reuse), and industry leaders and governments could collaborate to build regional infrastructure for battery recycling and transportation and create regulatory certainty for recycling
We hope the responses to the supply chain challenges outlined in this report will provide guidance on the initial actions stakeholders can take to make this broader vision of implementation a reality, ensuring a more robust future for communities around the globe as well as for all-important electric vehicle adoption to meet climate change goals.
To learn more about this issue and the new report, join our 9am PT / Noon ET webinar today, featuring:
- Patrick Heller, Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) & Advisor, Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI)
- Michael Maten, Automotive Public Policy, Electrification, Portfolio Planning and Strategy, General Motors
- Daniel Mulé, Senior Policy Advisor for Tax and Extractive Industries, Oxfam
- Payal Sampat, Mining Program Director, Earthworks
You can register for the webinar; read our recent FAQ on EV batteries for more information on current supply chain impacts on human rights, climate change and the local environments; and download the new report “Sustainable Drive, Sustainable Supply: Priorities to Improve the Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain.”
Building a low-carbon economy will rely on a transition from gasoline-powered automobiles to electric vehicles, which will require a significant increase in production of component minerals. Extracting and refining these minerals, like cobalt and lithium, can often entail challenges related to governance, human rights, and environmental quality in host countries.
To help launch a forthcoming CLEE and Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) report on this topic, join our upcoming webinar on Thursday, July 23rd, at 9am PT/noon ET/6pm CET. Panelists will discuss mechanisms to address sustainability concerns and build a better supply chain for this key emission reduction technology, as well as summarize findings from the new report.
Speakers include:
- Patrick Heller, Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) & Advisor, Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI)
- Michael Maten, Automotive Public Policy, Electrification, Portfolio Planning and Strategy, General Motors
- Daniel Mulé, Senior Policy Advisor for Tax and Extractive Industries, Oxfam
- Payal Sampat, Mining Program Director, Earthworks
You can register here and read our recent FAQ on EV batteries for more information on current supply chain impacts on human rights, climate change and the local environments.
The Trump Administration finally released in March its long-planned rollback of federal fuel economy standards, a gift to the oil industry and its allies. However, the rollback is riddled with errors that will lead to a lengthy court battle and could be halted by a new president next January. Furthermore, long-term industry trends and international efforts to promote cleaner vehicles may make the rollback meaningless.
I detail the administration’s rule-making and the potential for more optimistic outcomes in a new opinion piece published today by the Regulatory Review at University of Pennsylvania Law School. The stakes for the climate fight, given the centrality of transportation emissions to overall greenhouse gas emissions, couldn’t be higher.
The global transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to battery electric vehicles (EVs) will require the production of hundreds of millions of batteries. This massive deployment frequently raises questions from the general public and critics alike about the sustainability of the battery supply chain, from mining impacts to vehicle carbon emissions.
Join me and Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment’s Patrick Heller and Ted Lamm today at noon Pacific Time for a discussion and Q&A session on the road to a sustainable EV battery supply chain.
You can register for this free event and download our recent FAQ on EV battery supply chains. Hope you can join!
It might seem obvious that phasing out oil and gas production in California would benefit the climate. But the reality is much more complicated, in terms of emissions, economics and even geopolitics.
CLEE just released the report Legal Grounds with policy options to reduce in-state production, but the question of how much a phase out would benefit the climate was mostly beyond the scope of our analysis (which we’ll be discussing in more detail on a free webinar on Tuesday, May 12th, at 11am). However, it’s a question worth examining in more detail.
The challenge is that demand for fossil fuels in the state will remain for the foreseeable future, even if local production ceases. If we stop producing oil here, we’ll start importing more from elsewhere.
While California’s oil demand is already decreasing due to market and policy factors, until consumers completely transition to zero-emission vehicles and find alternatives to petroleum-based products like plastic and asphalt — and until refineries in the state stop exporting to markets around the Pacific — the supply will still find its way to the state. If that oil comes from out-of-state sources, the carbon footprint may even be higher than if California produced it domestically due to shipping emissions.
However, economic theory indicates that a decrease in California production will mean some decrease in consumption, as global prices will rise slightly from reduced overall supply. One study indicated it could lead to global emission reductions of 8 to 24 million tons of CO2 per year. And any oil left in the ground is oil not burned in the long run, meeting one of the highest priorities of climate activists. So a California phase-out could help avoid some emissions, though the rate is unclear.
What about the political implications of phasing out oil and gas consumption for climate policy? One argument is that a phase-out here might inspire other jurisdictions to follow suit. As most climate models indicate that some percentage of fossil fuels will have to remain untapped as an imperative for avoiding the worst of climate change, why not start in California, a state committed to climate action? It might be hard to imagine that top oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran (or other U.S. states) would be so inspired, but perhaps places like Norway or Colorado might be more politically open to it. And if the oil industry in California phased out, its lobbying power might also wane, allowing the state to pursue more aggressive policies on the demand side.
The economic impacts of a phase-out for climate policy are also complicated. As Severin Borenstein at UC Berkeley Energy Institute at Haas blogged in 2018, a phase-out in California would mean slightly higher worldwide oil prices, which would in turn enrich the major oil producing companies and countries who are still providing supply. As he summarized:
One could think of this as similar to a very small worldwide carbon tax, except in this case the revenue is not rebated to the population as a whole or used to reduce other taxes, but rather handed to those who own and control the world’s oil production
But there is one clear benefit from phasing out in-state oil and gas production in California: improved health and safety of surrounding communities. Scientists have linked drilling for oil and gas to numerous public health challenges, including increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other health threats. And much of the drilling in California occurs in or near residents of disadvantaged communities, adding to the urgency.
Another certainty is that California is firmly committed to reducing demand for fossil fuels, through boosting zero-emission vehicles, requiring lower-carbon fuels, and pricing carbon through cap and trade. As this activity increases, it will put pressure for corresponding reductions on the supply side, regardless of any other uncertainties involved.
So while the benefits of a phase-out of California production may be somewhat unclear in terms of avoided carbon emissions, the health and safety value is clear. California’s ability to manage the process with a careful, just transition could demonstrate a viable path forward for this long-term climate effort.
Note: This article was co-authored with Fan Dai, Aimee Barnes (California-China Climate Institute, University of California, Berkeley [CCCI]), Yunshi Wang (University of California, Davis) and Angela Luh (University of California, Berkeley) and cross-posted at CCCI. In addition, Mary Nichols and Candace Vahlsing (California Air Resources Board); Patty Monahan and Ben De Alba (California Energy Commission); Lauren Sanchez (California Environmental Protection Agency); Prof. Ouyang Minggao and Prof. Wang Hewu (Tsinghua University); Gong Huiming (Energy Foundation China) and Evan Westrup (California-China Climate Institute) contributed to this piece.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the globe, now is the time for us to reflect not only on our shared vulnerability, but also on what’s possible through collective action. California and China, which have both confronted this virus with great force, are also uniquely positioned to tackle the climate crisis head-on – together. One of the most effective steps we can take is to get more zero-emission vehicles on our roads.
Why focus on transportation? The answer is simple: it’s one of the greatest sources of carbon emissions and major sources of air pollution. In China, analysts estimate that transportation emissions constitute more than 9 percent of the country’s overall carbon footprint – and that share is expanding rapidly. In cities, for example, transportation accounts for as much as 65 percent of carbon emissions in Shenzhen, and vehicle emissions are responsible for 45 percent of the total particulate matter concentrations in Beijing. Meanwhile in California, 41 percent of overall emissions come from transportation, due mostly to passenger vehicles. The share rises to nearly 50 percent when carbon emissions from producing gasoline and diesel are factored in. Notably, transportation emissions have continued to increase in California, while emissions in nearly every other sector have declined steadily in recent years.
The good news is that we know what we need to do – and California and China have set world-leading zero-emission vehicle goals to get us there. In China, the goal is for zero-emission vehicles to account for 25 percent of total vehicle sales by 2025, increasing to 40-50 percent of total sales by 2030. Meanwhile, California aims to have 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025 and 5 million by 2030. California also established a voluntary framework with five vehicle manufactures to reduce emissions that can serve as a path forward – alternative to the one which the federal government has now chosen – for clean vehicle standards nationwide. To help achieve these goals, both California and China have offered numerous incentives to consumers and manufacturers and aggressively invested in research and development.
As a result, in part, of these policies, California and China are dominating the global zero-emission vehicle market and have put a significant share of these vehicles on our roads. In fact, China, the number one market in the world for plug-in electric vehicles, accounted for 54 percent of the world’s 2.26 million vehicles sold last year. And by the end of 2019, 3.8 million plug-in vehicles were on China’s roads. Similarly, California accounted for nearly half of America’s plug-in vehicle sales in 2019 with 156,101 vehicles sold and approximately 700,000 vehicles on the state’s roads.
While these figures are encouraging, the road ahead is long and winding. In 2019, plug-in vehicles represented just 8.26 percent of California’s annual new vehicle sales and overall sales of these vehicles declined year-over-year by 12 percent. And after years of zero-emission vehicle sales growth, China saw a similar trend in 2019, recording a 4 percent decline in sales year-over-year. In China, experts attribute this drop primarily to demand-side subsidy cuts and in California, the expiration of federal tax credits for purchases from many of the major manufacturers was a contributing factor.
So where do we go from here? What can California and China do to reverse recent trends and encourage much faster adoption of zero-emission vehicles? We start by accelerating our cooperation. This means taking steps to align California and China’s zero-emission vehicle goals, policies, research and investment. Possible actions include:
- Internal Combustion Engines: Studying options to phase out the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by a specific date.
- Zero-Emission Vehicle Goals: Harmonizing zero-emission vehicle goals for 2030 – and beyond, with shared targets for new vehicles sales (as the ZEV Alliance has done) and/or zero-emission vehicle market share.
- Charging Infrastructure: Agreeing to mutual charging infrastructure targets, while also expanding and sharing research on market opportunities and technological innovation, from the battery to the charger.
- Procurement: Accelerating and aligning procurement requirements – in both the public and private sectors.
- Credit-Based Requirements: Encouraging China to adopt and adapt California’s credit-based zero-emission vehicle mandate, which requires auto manufacturers to produce a specific number of zero-emission vehicles each year, based on the total number of vehicles sold by the manufacturer in the state.
- Market Demand: Collaborating on innovative ways to drive zero-emission vehicle market demand, including sharing best practices, expanding public-private-nonprofit partnerships (e.g. Veloz, Go Ultra Low models) and supporting demonstration projects to deploy hydrogen fuel cell technologies.
- Innovation and Investment: Allowing and encouraging both zero-emission heavy-duty and passenger vehicle manufacturers to compete in California and Chinese markets, while continuing to expand government and business-to-business investment, loans and grants focused on research and development of new technologies, as well as workforce development.
Current geopolitical tensions and the COVID-19 crisis complicate this partnership between California and China, but this uncertainty should remind us that we have no time to waste. The University of California-wide California-China Climate Institute, working in partnership with the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, stands ready to drive this collaboration forward. And as California and China work ever more closely together, we have to bring in other players like the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico. All of this, with the goal of getting more zero-emission vehicles on the road before the next United Nations climate talks. By doing this, we send a clear message to the world: zero-emission vehicles are the future.
California (and the nation as a whole) is getting worse in our efforts to reduce emissions from transportation (i.e. driving). Last week, I gave a talk in the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies lecture series on what we can do about it. You can view the recording here:
In brief, we’re failing because driving miles are up while transit usage is down, in part due to poor land use policies that pushing housing farther from jobs. We need to encourage housing near transit and encourage electric vehicle usage for all other driving.
And on the subject of how we’re failing to build enough housing near transit, you can view a recording of a January 30th symposium at UC Hastings School of Law on this topic, featuring two panel discussions (I spoke on the second) and a closing keynote from State Senator Scott Wiener. You can also read a summary of the symposium from Hastings student Leigha Beckman, who helped organize the event.
Happy viewing!
