IN THE LATE ’60s and early ’70s, when runaway development with little study or oversight led to the draining of the Everglades, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire, to name but a few catastrophes, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state-level counterparts, like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), were passed to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony.” These laws demanded that the environmental impacts of proposed projects be thoroughly studied, discussed with the public, and mitigated where feasible.
Sounds totally reasonable, right? But as policymakers grapple with climate change and a national housing crisis, there’s a growing recognition that, as law professors J.B. Ruhl and Jim Salzman put it, the Green New Deal is an awkward fit with the old green laws. City councils and
