California Environmental Quality Act Rescued

In June 2025, Our City and scores of other organizations coordinating statewide saved the crucial heart of California's most important environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) which requires that possible serious impacts of projects must be studied and avoided.

Trump's Supreme Court Undermines US Environmental Law

In May of 2025, Donald Trump's stacked Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to the bedrock 1970 US law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA states that any project requiring federal approval which has possible "reasonably foreseeable environmental effects" has to undergo an Environmental Assessment, and alternatives must be proposed to avoid those environmental impacts.

But in its new decision, the US Supreme Court fundamentally twisted the interpretation of the law, stating that a project only has to undergo environmental assessment if there is substantial evidence of likely, near term environmental impacts. This completely guts the law because until an environmental assessment is done of possible impacts, there's no way to fully uncover and understand evidence of likely impacts that must be avoided. If there is no assessment, no evidence will be found!

The Supreme Court decision gives a free pass to projects (including fossil fuel and mining projects) to only address obvious environmental harms (like the actual drilling or mining impacts on the landscape) while completely ignoring less predictable but possible environmental harms like future and downstream air and water pollution, or contamination from spills or other accidents.

State Senator Scott Wiener's Attack On California Law

In California, during the same period that Trump's Supreme Court was preparing to undermine NEPA, State Senator Scott Wiener, colluding with State Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, launched exactly the same attack on California's version of the law.

Wiener's bill, SB 607, would have directly changed the text in the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) from mandating environmental review of projects that "may have a significant effect on the environment" to instead only require review when there is "substantial evidence" that a project will have a significant effect on the environment.

But just as with the US Supreme Court decision, if there is no review of possible environmental effects, there can be no way to uncover "substantial evidence" of likely impacts. Evidence has to be looked for before it can be found.

Statewide Coalition Stops Wiener's Attack

Our City, CEQA Works, and scores of other grassroots organizations in California coordinated together to stop Scott Wiener's underhanded attack on our environmental protections, and by June 2025, SB 607 was dead in the water and couldn't get out of committee.

Since California has preserved its crucial environmental review standard that all potential environmental harms of a project must be studied before a project can be built, we are now setting a strong example that can be used to restore the national law in the future.