California’s economic growth surge of the 1960s and afterward came at the price of environmental degradation. At the same time, the state, with its growing population and power needs, was hit by several energy crises beginning in the 1970s.
A new set of environmental challenges faced Californians in the last decades of the twentieth century. A major oil leak on January 28, 1969, from a well just off the Santa Barbara coast, blackened the city’s picturesque Pacific beaches, killed thousands of seabirds and marine mammals, and caused millions of dollars in property damage. In the early 1980s some of Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies were found to have leaking underground storage tanks filled with toxic chemicals that presented a health hazard to the public’s water supply. Agribusiness was using 120 million pounds of pesticides yearly, causing birth defects and illnesses among farm workers’ families, and endangering wildlife. Chemical and other plants were producing nearly 26 million truckloads of contaminants annually by 1985. In the 1990s Governor Peter (“Pete”) Wilson authorized the relaxation of environmental laws, such as the California Endangered Species Act, to create jobs and help businesses. The state’s Pacific coastline, bays, and adjacent wetlands were becoming polluted largely by urban runoff and industrial emissions, while increasing development restricted public access to beaches. In 1997, 30 dated levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta broke, resulting in nine deaths and $2 billion in property damage. To all of this must be added the toxic cleanups necessitated by the closure of military bases in the state, such as the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County that shut down in 1999. The federal government’s discovery of residues of the chemical degreaser TCE, Trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing substance, heightened public fears about the extent to which people living near the base were at risk.
Santa Barbara’s oil catastrophe rallied local residents, especially after Union Oil Company President Fred Hartley trivialized his firm’s colossal spill, publicly insisting it had not been a “disaster” and had merely resulted “in the loss of a few birds.” Angry Santa Barbarans and many others demanded no more offshore drilling; meanwhile, citizens throughout the state organized to safeguard the coast and prevent unchecked development from despoiling the natural environment. San Francisco, home to a hundred environmental organizations including the powerful Sierra Club, led the way. From there, environmentalism, also known as the ecology movement to distinguish it from the early twentieth-century conservation effort to make more efficient use of natural resources, gained momentum as a force in politics nationwide.
The Santa Barbara oil spill triggered the state legislature’s passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in 1970. Passed over resistance from pro-growth business and labor groups, the law required the preparation of environmental impact reports for major construction projects undertaken by private parties and government agencies that had the potential of affecting the natural environment. State officials could disallow such projects on environmental grounds. The CEQA process stopped the Peripheral Canal and many other large-scale projects.
Building on a 1960 state law, the first in the nation, to reduce automobile emissions causing smog, environmentalists secured the passage of numerous measures that addressed multiple concerns. The California Air Resources Board was established in 1967 to set standards and enforce laws. In the 1970s the state’s clean air regulations imposed fines on car manufacturers whose vehicles violated legal standards. Enforcement was sporadic under governors Reagan and George Deukmejian who, in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, viewed regulations as an unwarranted interference with the free market. In 1990 California passed a law mandating that automobile manufacturers produce and make available nonpolluting vehicles by 1998. At the federal level the Environmental Protection Agency helped by enforcing national emission and air-quality standards that had met with resistance from some states, and some counties - such as Los Angeles, America’s car capital.
To safeguard drinking water and resolve other water-related issues, California established the State Water Resources Control Board in 1967. The board sets water-quality standards and was instrumental in blocking the proposed Peripheral Canal that would have diverted fresh water flows around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those flows have a cleansing effect on Delta waters and help keep the saline content in check. The charge of the board was daunting and despite its success in the Delta region, much else remained to be done. For example, a 1979 Congressional study identified 177 toxic dumps in California that leaked contaminants into water systems. Seven years later voters passed an initiative making it illegal to discharge known carcinogens into public watercourses and holding government officials criminally liable if they neglected to stop such dumping. In the 1980s Governor Deukmejian’s administration took a long time listing the toxics to be regulated, which slowed implementation of the initiative measure. Corporate dischargers were doubtlessly alarmed when in 1996 investigatory work by a law office file clerk led to a court verdict awarding $333 million to 600 residents of Hinckley, California, whose health had suffered due to Pacific Gas and Electric’s leakage of hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen, into the city’s water supply. The file clerk’s name was Erin Brockovich and a movie by that name, released in 2000, told her story.
California is known the world over for the grandeur of its 1,264-mile Pacific coastline. Steady population growth and the built environment, with their accompanying landform alterations, urban runoff, and habitat destruction, however, have exacted a toll on the Golden State’s shoreline. To meet these challenges, attorney Peter M. Douglas co-drafted and citizens passed Proposition 20 in 1972, establishing a temporary Coastal Commission. The commission was to be an independent, quasi-judicial state agency tasked with regulating land and water use within the coastal zone. This zone embraces an offshore three-mile-wide band of ocean, and inland a swath of terrain varying from several hundred feet in urban areas to 5 miles in rural regions. To make the commission permanent, the state legislature passed and Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Coastal Act of 1976, co-authored by Douglas. The Coastal Commission’s charge is to: “Protect, conserve, restore, and enhance environmental and human-based resources of the California coast and ocean for environmentally sustainable and prudent use by current and future generations.” Public access to coastal beaches and waters falls within the purview of the commission.
As the passage and enforcement of this Act suggest, no region in the state since the mid-1970s has occasioned more public and private concern than the ribbon of coveted coastline under the charge of the Coastal Commission. At the center of that concern was Douglas, who from 1985 until his retirement in 2011 served as the commission’s high-profile executive director. To environmentalists he was a champion of coastal preservation and public access; to developers and their Sacramento-based ally - the Pacific Legal Foundation - Douglas was often portrayed as an overzealous government regulator and enemy of private property.
Governor Deukmejian vowed to abolish the commission in order to promote business. While he did not succeed, he did cut the agency’s budget by 19 percent and reduced its staff of experts by one-quarter.
Lake Tahoe, much like California’s coast, needed protection from development-driven silting, urban runoff, and sewage contamination. Since the deep, sapphire-colored lake straddles the Nevada-California border, both states had jurisdiction over its use. In 1969 the two states and the federal government established the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) to manage growth and protect the ecology of the lake. Concerted action required agreement by the delegates from both states. California’s members’ favored environmental protections while Nevada’s insisted on economic development. The standoff undermined TRPA’s effectiveness.
Environmentalists made more headway in their efforts to save Mono Lake, located 13 miles east of Yosemite National Park, which was being drained by a thirsty, growing population of Angelinos. The lake has served as a stopover along the Pacific Flyway, an aerial corridor taken yearly by millions of migratory birds from Asia and the Americas. A lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, initiated in 1979 by the Audubon Society and Friends of the Earth, resulted in a victory for environmentalists. The decision handed down by the state supreme court in 1983 held that the common law principle of “public trust” (meaning tidal areas and submerged lands belong to the people en masse, not private parties) allowed for the alteration and even revocation of deeded water rights. In addition to this precedentsetting case, the struggle to save Mono Lake marked the first time, in 1994, that the state’s Water Resources Control Board rescinded water rights on environmental grounds. Los Angeles thereby lost access to most of the water it had previously received from the Mono Basin, making possible the replenishment of the lake’s water.
Less well known, but ecologically consequential nevertheless, has been the work of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust founded in 1992 to preserve one of the last marine wetlands in southern California. A dozen or so visionaries, led by biologist Flossie Horgan among others, built an organization that successfully staved off a coastal development project that would have situated more than 4,884 homes in wetlands and surrounding upland mesas located in Huntington Beach.
To forestall the Pacific Lumber Company’s plans to harvest old-growth redwoods in Humboldt County, in December 1997 Earth First activist Julia Butterfly Hill climbed a thousand-year-old giant tree named Luna, and lived atop its huge branches for two years. The media publicity she aroused saved the tree and raised public awareness nationwide about the potential harm unchecked economic growth posed to the state’s forests.
Environmental issues, as the Santa Barbara oil spill along the coast underscored, are at times closely tied to energy matters. During the last four decades of the twentieth century Californians and their officials in Sacramento grappled with the difficult challenge of supplying the state with safe, affordable energy.
Against the backdrop of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Governor Jerry Brown created the Office of Appropriate Technology to investigate and advance where advisable alternative energies, including solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear power. The office also stressed conservation of resources and recycling. The California Energy Commission, established in 1975, set efficiency standards for new houses and businesses. Wall insulation, double-paned windows, and low-intensity lighting were promoted, leading to energy savings.
Alternative energy gained traction. In 1986 construction began on the world’s largest solar thermal electricity facility, located in the Mojave Desert. Soon afterward rooftop solar panels that converted sunlight into electricity made their appearance. Pacific winds that once filled the sails of Spanish galleons plying California’s coast were now harnessed by the world’s largest concentration of windmills, sited on hills around Livermore. Wind-generated electricity was soon produced in the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield and at San Gorgonio Pass in Riverside County.
Nuclear power proved more controversial. Southern California Edison’s nuclear facility at San Onofre, located along the Pacific shoreline in San Diego County and in operation since 1968, was the first power station of its kind in California. By 1980 the plant generated 4 percent of Edison’s power. In 1969 Pacific Gas and Electric began construction of a nuclear facility farther north along the Pacific Coast at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo. The problem of safely disposing of nuclear waste from these plants led to mounting public opposition to this form of energy. In 1976 the state legislature ordered the California Energy Commission to stop giving clearances for the building of more nuclear power plants until the federal government solved the problem of radioactive waste disposal. Since then the nuclear power industry has not built another facility in the state.
As a result of the foregoing developments, California remained oil-dependent. An expanding population’s reliance on fossil fuels for transportation and other needs paved the way for an impending and calamitous energy crisis.
The untimely convergence of the deregulation of California’s energy providers, the state’s ever-increasing power needs, and out-of-state corporate greed struck with full force in early 2001. As a result of pressure from Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison, Governor Wilson, on September 23, 1996, signed a bill removing the cap on consumers’ electricity rates, assuming that competition would increase supply and lower charges. Instead, as public demand for energy increased, supplies fell short, especially when expected natural gas resources did not materialize. Meanwhile, wholesale energy prices rose dramatically, tripling many consumers’ electricity bills. Among 30 out-of-state providers, Texas-based Enron Corporation manipulated the state’s energy market, a later investigation revealed, as California began experiencing “rolling blackouts” in January 2001. Homes and businesses suffered electricity outages. Enron took plants off line at will for “maintenance,” adding artificial power shortages to the existing ones. Taped phone conversations captured Enron executives laughing about “Grandma Millie” and other luckless Californians held in the grip of their corporation’s control over the previously regulated energy market. Kenneth Lay, Enron’s chief executive officer, was eventually convicted of criminal fraud and conspiracy. The crisis passed in 2002 as new supplies came online.
World History
