Flickr
Close Authorship
Growing up in North Richmond, California, Denny Khamphanthong didn’t think much of the siren that wailed once a month at 11 a.m. every first Wednesday. The alarm is a test of the community’s emergency warning system, which has alerted residents to numerous incidents over the years at the nearby Chevron oil refinery. One accident there a 2012 fire sent a cloud of black smoke billowing over San Francisco Bay and left thousands of local residents struggling to breathe.
Now, when Khamphanthong explains the sound to his young nieces, he sees the fear in their eyes. I forget that this isn’t normal, he says. Nor is the fact that Khamphanthong and most of his childhood friends carried inhalers. Richmond, a diverse, industrial city where housing prices and incomes have lagged behind its Bay Area neighbors, has poor air quality and some of the highest rates of respiratory and cardiovascular disease in California.
(CPUC)
Gov. Gavin Newsom has appointed California Public Utilities Commissioner Liane Randolph to replace the outgoing Mary Nichols, long the center of gravity for the state’s climate policy, as the chair of the California Air Resources Board.
Nichols amassed a considerable amount of power in California as the state’s top air regulator, shepherding through sweeping regulations on power plants, implementing cap-and-trade legislation, and piloting pollution control measures that are some of the strongest in the nation.
A deft political operative, Nichols, who is retiring at the end of the month, was also on the front lines of the state’s policy battles with the Trump administration over the environment and climate change, most notably in her fostering an agreement between the state and five major automakers to follow California’s stricter clean-car rules after Trump sought to relax federal standards. She is reportedly President-elect Joe Biden’s top pick to be the next hea