California greening.

• Author: Mirken, Bruce
• Position: WE HEAR YOU - Letter to the editor

Jason Mark's piece, "The Green Energy Revolt" (May issue), was encouraging on many levels. But it did not touch on one crucial aspect of California's climate change policy that should be a model for the nation: California's 2006 climate change law, AB 32. This required that fees collected from polluters under the cap-and-trade system go into a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to be used to finance activities that further reduce pollution and CO2 emissions. But the law only gave general direction as to how that money would be allocated.

Environmental justice advocates banded together a few years ago and successfully pushed for adoption of a second law, SB 535, that guarantees that a minimum of one quarter of these funds must go to projects that benefit economically disadvantaged, highly polluted neighborhoods. This effort to bring real benefits from the state's burgeoning clean energy economy to the neighborhoods hit first and worst by pollution, climate change, and the...