California is home to some of the nation’s most ambitious climate, housing, and social policy experiments. This archive tracks the progress stories and milestones emerging from the state — from clean energy breakthroughs to community health wins.
PFAS are used in nonstick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, and firefighting foams, and have been linked with higher cholesterol, lower fertility, developmental delays in children, and a greater risk of cancer.
In addition, all Apple-designed printed circuit boards will use 100% recycled tin soldering and 100% recycled gold plating by 2025, and magnets in its devices will be made completely of recycled rare earth materials.
Pilot programs are ongoing in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, and Hawai’i are already seeing promising results.
Fusion energy just cleared a barrier scientists have been chasing since the 1950s — producing more energy from a reaction than was needed to trigger it. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved this by blasting tiny hydrogen fuel capsules with lasers until they released roughly 20 percent more energy than the lasers delivered. The result doesn’t mean fusion power plants are imminent; enormous engineering challenges remain between this laboratory milestone and a working grid. But it does confirm that fusion’s central promise is physically real — and that gives scientists, investors, and policymakers something genuinely new to build on.
Removing four dams on California’s Klamath River will reopen more than 300 miles of salmon habitat, making it the largest river restoration project ever attempted. Federal regulators approved the $500 million plan unanimously, capping decades of advocacy led by the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa Valley tribes, whose cultures and food systems have been bound to these fish since long before the first dam went up. “The Klamath salmon are coming home,” Yurok Chairman Joseph James said after the vote. As drought reshapes the American West, letting a major river run free again offers a powerful template for healing watersheds, honoring Indigenous leadership, and rethinking what aging infrastructure owes the living world.
Governor Newsom signed a new bill into law that will ban single-use plastic produce bags starting in 2025. The law requires that all such bags be replaced by recycled paper bags or compostable ones.
California has just become the fifth state in the US to legalize the composting of human bodies, a planet-friendly alternative to the toxic process of cremation.
Spina bifida causes nerve damage that accumulates in the womb, and until now, medicine could only respond after that damage was done. A clinical trial at UC Davis Health is changing that window, applying a stem cell patch directly to a fetus’s spine during pregnancy to support repair before birth. The first baby treated was expected to arrive with leg paralysis — instead, she was kicking and wiggling her toes. If results hold across all 35 enrolled patients, this could establish a genuinely new standard of care for a condition that currently offers families very little hope.
When classrooms in California reopen for the fall term, all 6.2 million public school students will have the option to eat school meals for free, regardless of their family’s income.
98% of the company’s total shares are now owned by a new organization a 501(c)(4) that Patagonia says will use every dollar not reinvested into the company to “fight the environmental crisis.”
