CEJA ACTION STATEMENT ON 2025 LEGISLATIVE SESSION
For Immediate Release
September 13, 2025
(Sacramento, CA) – The 2025 legislative session has left California at a crossroads. At a time when communities need bold climate action, transparency, and direct pollution reductions, state leaders instead chose backroom deals that put polluters first. The lack of openness around major bills on cap-and-trade and oil and gas legislation, like SB 237(Grayson), excluded community voices and even many legislators from the legislative process, leaving environmental justice neighborhoods to bear the consequences. CEJA Action and our members are calling for a reset—one that prioritizes equity, health, and community-driven climate solutions over giveaways to Big Oil and California’s largest polluters.
With the last votes of many bills spilling over to a rare Saturday session, the California 2025 Legislative Session has finally come to a close. The last two weeks of each legislative session are critical for advocacy, as the rush to push bills through the process leads to rapid amendments, often made behind closed doors. Immediately after hosting our 9th Annual Congreso event, where 230+ community members and advocates across the state gather to meet with their representatives and discuss environmental justice (EJ) priorities, our members, staff and environmental justice allies have been working tirelessly to ensure that our communities concerns and voices are at the center of these conversations.
CEJA Action’s Priorities
For those less involved in state policy spaces, generally, each bill, a proposed change in state law, must be approved by both the State Assembly and State Senate before it progresses to the governor’s desk, where it is either signed into law or vetoed. September 5 was the last day for bill amendments to be submitted for review by each body for their final vote, and today, September 13, is the final day for the Assembly and Senate to consider bills. If a bill passes both houses, the last day for Governor Gavin Newsom to sign or veto it is October 12, this year. To learn more about the legislative calendar, click here.
This March, CEJA Action determined our priorities for this session, informed by the communities of our member and partner organizations, to advance California state law toward supporting an environmentally just future. While the prioritized bills evolved as the year progressed, the overall goals were the same – working toward an environmentally just future for all Californians.
With California historically being a front runner on environmental and social justice policy, we were hopeful this session would show that California’s elected officials will push back on the hostile federal administration and its rollbacks on environmental and climate policies.
California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)
California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) protects the rights of communities disproportionately impacted by pollution and poverty through its robust environmental review processes. The law is one of the few tools that overburdened EJ communities can use to address the environmental and human impacts of development including housing that’s being proposed on top of contaminated land or next to sources of pollution. Check out a previous overview of CEQA we put together for more information.
Protecting CEQA from attempts to weaken it or to create loopholes under the guise of expediting housing development must be stopped. We reject the narrative that we have to choose between safe and healthy affordable housing and democratic processes, environmental safety, and economic justice. Our communities deserve it all! We are committed to championing several causes that are critical for protecting communities living on the front lines of environmental harms.
SB 131, which passed in June 2025 as part of the State Budget (an unprecedented and undemocratic process) notably does nothing to address our housing crisis and instead creates a harmful, broad CEQA exemption for “advanced manufacturing,” a broad term that includes some of the most harmful projects in the state. Immediately after its passage, we called for a clean-up bill for SB 131, including releasing this call to action, to demand commonsense safeguards to this harmful exemption.
While the promises made by legislative leadership were left unfilled, we are encouraged by the Friday introduction of AB 1083 by Assemblymember Connolly and a coalition of 20 coauthors. While it was not taken up for a vote this legislative session, AB 1083 is the comprehensive clean up needed to protect frontline communities. CEJA Action looks forward to working with Assemblymember Connolly to ensure prompt action on AB 1083.
Cap and Trade Reauthorization
This year, we engaged in the Cap-and-Trade renewal process in good faith, demanding that the Legislature protect investments in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), prevent further pollution in the state’s most impacted areas, support AB 617 air quality reforms, and adjust the California Climate Credit to improve access for low-income communities and those in high-heat regions. Our efforts, led with our strong environmental justice allies, focused on securing greater equity, energy affordability, and meaningful air quality improvements in overburdened communities as the program, currently set to expire in 2030, is renewed. Frontline communities are still paying the price for Cap-and-Trade’s failures, which is why we opposed AB 1207 (Irwin).
From the start, environmental justice communities have raised serious concerns about California’s Cap-and-Trade program. While intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the program has fallen short of delivering the meaningful, equitable reductions our state needs to meet its climate goals. For more than a decade, frontline communities—already overburdened by pollution from regulated facilities—have borne the brunt of climate impacts, highlighting the urgent need for direct, community-centered strategies to cut emissions and protect public health.
The reauthorization conversation was an opportunity to make the program better serve EJ communities. Although they do reflect some token amendments to meet EJ community demands, such as earmarking additional funding for frontline communities and creating a framework to (painfully slowly) reduce free allowances to the fossil fuel industry, they pale in comparison to the deprioritization of GGRF funding. GGRF provides the resources necessary to improve clean transportation, solar energy, and electrification, but these are the first to be cut if revenue is lower than projected. CEJA Action will remain committed to working with both the legislative and executive branches to ensure that this program is designed to provide meaningful direct emission reduction measures to meet our environmental and climate goals while not sacrificing frontline communities in the process.
An Affordable Transition from Fossil Fuels
Despite the state’s commitment to carbon neutrality by 2045, the Governor and legislators moved forward a rushed gut-and-amend bill rolling back California’s environmental and health protections to allow drilling of thousands of new oil & gas wells per year within already overburned communities. SB 237 allows the fossil fuel industry to skirt accountability through bypassing CEQA requirements and expanding oil extraction operations in Kern County, one of the most overburned counties of our state. Environmental justice communities are once again being sacrificed so the fossil fuel industry can expand its operations, despite evidence that additional extraction does not lead to energy affordability for households. We opposed SB 237 because it falls woefully short of protecting the Kern communities already facing the worst pollution levels nationally, sacrificing them for the expansion of oil drilling that is endorsed in this bill, and, more broadly, fails to ensure California is prepared to navigate a critical moment in California’s transportation fuels transition. It is truly disappointing that the Governor and Legislature chose to make significant concessions to Big Oil billionaires while leaving behind extraction communities, refinery communities, and refinery and extraction workers.
Combined Impact
While bad enough on their own, the combination of these bills will have grave consequences for frontline communities. Without our proposed language to create enforceability of emissions reductions, allowing “advanced manufacturing” to bypass CEQA regulations, and giving Big Oil the greenlight for additional extraction in Kern County, air quality will continue to decline in the areas that are already disproportionately impacted. Instead of working toward a better future for all of California, Legislative leadership has determined that it is acceptable to sacrifice some communities in exchange for bloated industry profits.
“The fallout from these legislative decisions will be dangerous for public health and the environment for years to come,” says Senior Legislative Manager Raquel Mason. “ This session we failed to meaningfully tackle air quality improvements in cap and trade reauthorization, gave big oil the green light to extract every last drop of oil in Kern County, and exempted some of the dirtiest projects from any environmental review. While we are encouraged by the commitments made by our legislative champions to continue this work, we know our communities deserve so much more than promises. Our alliance stands ready to partner with legislative leaders on real, community-led solutions in 2026.”
What’s Next?
We will appeal to Governor Newsom’s office to veto the bills that are worse than the status quo, and continue to work with Legislative leadership to prepare for the next session to advance environmental justice initiatives. We will not be distracted by token concessions or divided by false narratives. We will continue to work together until all communities are safe from environmental harms.
We can’t do this work without you. Whether you sign up for our newsletter to receive updates and action alerts, join one of our member and partner organizations in your area, or make a donation to support our efforts in Sacramento, we need you. Together, we can move toward an environmentally just future for us all.
Despite a tough legislative session, we have many environmental justice champions in both houses to thank in our upcoming annual EJ Scorecard, scheduled to be shared at the end of 2025 or shortly thereafter.
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California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) Action is a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice by advancing policy solutions. We unite the powerful local organizing of our members in the communities most impacted by environmental hazards – low-income communities and communities of color – to create comprehensive opportunities for change at a statewide level. We build the power of communities across California to create policies that will alleviate poverty and pollution. Together, we are growing the statewide movement for environmental health and social justice.