Feature Archives

Oil produced in California is among the most climate-damaging on the planet and is getting worse, according to a new report released by the Center for Biological Diversity. 'Killer Crude: How California Produces Some of the Dirtiest, Most Dangerous Oil in the World' finds that California oil emits more carbon dioxide per barrel than the rest of the global supply refined in the state. It’s now even more climate-heating than Canadian tar sands oil refined in California. The report comes as record heat and drought bake the West.

Conservation groups and whale lovers gathered on June 8, World Oceans Day, at Crissy Field Beach in San Francisco to honor the 12 dead whales that have washed up in the Bay Area this year and to call for greater protections. Attendees called for solutions to the three top threats to whales: ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and climate change. Against the backdrop of the Golden Gate, speakers at the event called for a mandatory 10-knot speed limits for ships passing through whale habitat along California’s coast.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife reported on June 23 that a new wolf pack has established itself in southern Plumas County. Named the Beckwourth pack, the group of three wolves was first confirmed in May but not officially announced. Photographs of the three wolves composing the Beckwourth pack were captured on a trail camera. A preliminary DNA analysis shows one wolf is LAS12F, a 2-year-old female wolf born into the Lassen Pack’s 2019 litter.

For 50 years, UC administrators have schemed to take People's Park from those who turned a dirt lot into a public sanctuary. Now, UC Berkeley is on the verge of permanently destroying the park. It installed fencing around the park on January 19. On January 27, police and public works crews evicted several unhoused residents. But people are resisting the coming construction of a 16-story housing complex. At a rally to save the park on January 29, protesters tore down fencing and carried it to Sproul Hall on UCB campus.

Erica Aitken of Reimagine Santa Cruz writes: The next City Council elections will decide the future of Santa Cruz. Do we open our doors to Silicon Valley with luxury rentals and our very own Santana Row? Or do we take control and build beautiful affordable housing for those who work and would like to live here? If we ask ourselves this question, it is because we have recently been the victims of a particularly galling breach of trust from our current City Councilmembers.

Facebook blocked hundreds of accounts days before a September 21 online event targeting the Coastal GasLink pipeline. The pipeline is set to cut through sovereign Wet’suwet’en land, defiantly ignoring hereditary chiefs of their rights, title, and consent for the project. The project would lock in decades of increased fracked gas and the impacts to climate, air, water and the risks posed to Indigenous camps built along the route.

President Trump has said little about the wildfires raging in California, Oregon and Washington for weeks, other than to suggest poor forest management was primarily to blame. “These are climate fires,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, an Oregon-based wildland fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter. “Though some scientists hesitate to attribute a single event to climate change, these are exactly the conditions predicted by climatologists.”