Are California’s environmental reforms a model for the ‘Abundance Agenda?’

By saying "yes" to housing and advanced manufacturing, California said "no" to other priorities. That could point to a new style of governing.

The June 30 signing ceremony for the biggest reforms ever to the California Environmental Quality Act. (Credit: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom)

The Abundance book tour may be over, but don’t tell Gavin Newsom.

When he took the lectern last week after signing the most sweeping reforms ever to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the governor thanked the state legislature for its “abundant mindset.” He then name-checked Ezra Klein, the book’s co-author. To erase any doubt about his new favorite book, Newsom’s press release on the legislation described how the governor is “advancing an abundance agenda.”

In Abundance, Klein and co-author Derek Thompson identify CEQA as one of the ostensibly liberal policies that make it hard for liberals to achieve their goals, like building housing, high-speed rail, and clean energy infrastructure. The book “clearly gave [Newsom] some talking points and a framework to explain what it was he was trying to do,” Matthew Lewis, communications director for California YIMBY, told me for my CityLab story on the CEQA reforms.

In other words, the most abundance-pilled governor just muscled through the most abundance-coded legislation yet.

This is true not just on a branding level, but on a substantive level, as well. California’s environmental reforms show what the abundance agenda could actually look like in the weeds of policymaking. The legislation offers grist for those on both sides of the abundance debate over the future of the Democratic party.

In their pursuit of the greater good, Democratic leaders like Newsom feel increasingly empowered to disregard “the groups” that Klein and Thompson identify as impediments to progress. They’re prioritizing a few discrete policy goals, instead of crafting complex (and ultimately less impactful) policies designed to reflect the diverse desires of their entire coalition.

This “abundant mindset” could be a prelude to a more outcomes-oriented style of governing for Democrats that’s better equipped to move the needle on major issues like housing. It could also mean that once-powerful constituencies and erstwhile political priorities will have to take a back seat. Members of those constituencies, and supporters of those priorities, are duly concerned.

To see why, it’s essential to look beyond the headlines about last week’s legislation, as well as deeper into the abundance canon.

National news coverage of California’s environmental reforms focused on the new CEQA exemption for infill housing, based on a bill by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. This is the biggest and most significant provision in the bills Newsom signed last week. The most vocal opponents of this change were not environmentalists but the building trades, which have historically used the threat of CEQA lawsuits to pressure developers to use union labor. The trades eventually dropped their opposition after the law was rewritten to require union-level wages for certain, limited types of projects.

It’s hard to dispute the environmental and affordability benefits of this CEQA exemption. New housing in existing cities allows more people to live a greener lifestyle in more energy efficient multifamily buildings and in more walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods. It encourages development in places that are safe from wildfires and floods, and makes it easier to build housing in the expensive cities where it is most desperately needed.

But there were other major provisions in the laws Newsom signed last week that received far less attention in the news, and whose impacts are less clear. The most significant of these are a new CEQA exemption for “advanced manufacturing” facilities and a pause in building code updates through 2031.

The purpose of the advanced manufacturing exemption, devised by state Senator Scott Wiener, is to make it easier for California to attract companies building things like semiconductors and solar panels. It is, in effect, a state-level industrial policy exercise, meant to help California compete with other states that were far more successful in winning projects supported by federal programs like the CHIPS Act.

Critics contend that the state’s definition of “advanced manufacturing” is overly broad and vague. Facilities producing biotechnology, nanotechnology, semiconductors, “advanced materials” and “advanced transportation technologies,” and several other categories can now be built on industrially zoned land without any environmental review.

As environmental groups point out, “advanced does not mean clean.” It’s quite possible that this exemption could create new pollution, noise, and other environmental harms in under-privileged areas already burdened by them. California has other environmental laws, like its clean air and water acts, that could still mitigate these impacts, but it remains to be seen how effective these laws will be without the CEQA process.

The pause on building code updates through 2031, based on a bill by Assemblymember Robert Rivas, is meant to make housing cheaper and faster to construct in the wake of the LA wildfires. It ensures that cities cannot impose their own overly-onerous codes meant to block new housing altogether. (Future code changes legalizing single-stair architecture are still allowed under the bill.)

But this pause will also delay higher energy and water efficiency standards from taking effect, pushing the next statewide code update back to 2035, based on current schedules. And it will mean cities cannot impose their own bans on gas heating and appliances, or other similar rules. The building code pause will likely make it harder for the state to meet its climate goals.

It’s understandable why environmentalists are up in arms about these policies. It’s not just bad-faith criticism or reflexive NIMBYism. Especially as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections, it’s distressing to see the biggest bluest state do the same.

But, even within a progressive ideological framework, it’s also understandable why Newsom, Wicks, Wiener, and Rivas thought these policies were worth pursuing despite the potential downsides. Housing is the state’s biggest issue; it makes sense that leaders felt it should supercede other concerns. Advanced manufacturing, while hardly a top priority for voters today, will be essential for curbing climate change and preparing the state’s economy for the future.

California leaders weighed the tradeoffs and made tough decisions that are going to anger some of their constituents. By prioritizing the changes that they believe are most important, instead of watering down the core policy objective to please various constituencies, California leaders eschewed the “everything bagel” approach that has characterized so much of the state’s policymaking in recent years.

California High-Speed Rail’s original sin

This sounds a lot like the prescription Marc Dunkelman puts forward Why Nothing Works, a sort of political theory of the abundance agenda released earlier this year.

“We need to empower figures to take all relevant factors into consideration, weight them against one another, and green-light the best options,” Dunkelman writes. “Progressivism needs to work on building governing structures capable of making the hard, expensive, painful, inconvenient, and often politically unpalatable choices required to steer humanity in a new direction.”

If leaders are unable or unwilling to make difficult, high-impact decisions, then nothing really happens, and people are left believing that government doesn’t work. That creates a vacuum for conservative populists who claim that they can fix government by tearing it all down, Dunkelman argues. “We need… to give government the leash required to permit public authority to prove itself competent.”

Of course, as previous decades have shown, strong public authority can be rife with corruption and abuse. The excesses of figures like Robert Moses are precisely the reason there are so many safeguards against strong public authority today, with CEQA being the most prominent example. Dunkelman argues that the pendulum has swung too far, and now needs to move back towards a more visionary, unencumbered approach to government power. “We can’t forever endure the false choice of tyranny or nothing,” he writes.

California’s CEQA reforms won’t come anywhere close to unleashing the kinds of transformative, destructive development that Moses and his contemporaries brought forth. But it pushes the pendulum infinitesimally back in that direction. It’s a political pivot that comes with great risk. But, according to Dunkelman, “that’s a risk progressives need to take, a bargain they need to accept.”

California’s leaders seem inclined to agree.