Evan George
@evanlgeorge
Writer, editor, strategist on climate policy & environmental law. Communications Director at the UCLA Emmett Institute. I write The Drain column, a weekly roundup of climate and environmental news.
Got my mind blown by @gaslitdoc.bsky.social, which shows IRL effects of the US becoming the world’s LNG producer. Jane Fonda tours oil fields, gas terminals and plastics plants to meet heroic folks fighting back and takes friends Maggie Rogers & Connie Britton along. Worth dragging friends & fam to.
“Pride in the past, Faith in the future,” is the official motto of the city of Monterey Park. That future will not include data centers. Residents have so far voted more than 86% in favor of Measure NDC to permanently ban data centers.
Waymo driverless cars, which are all over my LA neighborhood, have become pretty good at following the rules of the roads. But they’re still clueless to the school rules of not blocking the bus dropoff zone. Not clear who the bus drivers can yell at.
Chevron launched a podcast called The Energy Tailgate. Race car driver Tanner Foust sits on the back of a pickup and extols the virtues of fossil fuels and supposed drawbacks of wind + solar. Ep 1: CEO Mike Wirth says you need gas after hurricanes w/out any irony of climate-fueled disasters.
Trump basically endorsed Spencer Pratt for LA Mayor (an albatross in LA) but Mayor Karen Bass was more interested in talking about Nithya Raman at Politico’s event today. “I question her ability to lead the city when she struggles being a member of the city council,” Bass said. oof
I was channeling Ed Begley Jr. by taking the E line and the 8 bus to get to the Sustainability in Entertainment awards… just ran into and shook Begley’s hand. Success.
“Fossil fuel companies are much better at capturing politicians than their emissions” Gore says. Then Josh Lyman—I mean Bradley Whitford asks if he’s surprised by the continued partisanship on climate. “I did not think it would last as long as it has,” Gore says.
Bradley Whitford is interviewing Al Gore (“the president our grandchildren deserved” he joked) at the @thr.com Sustainability in Entertainment awards event, as the 20th anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth” nears. “Political power is a renewable resource,” Gore says.
The two contrasting images I'm holding in my mind today for #EarthDay
Happy #HeatPumpWeekCA to those who celebrate! We love ours but getting it installed was a ridiculously complex and burdensome process that most Californians won’t do or can’t afford. Let’s make it easier already!
I just sent out en email reminder to register for our upcoming April 3 symposium “Can Abundance Be Sustainable?” @uclalawemmett.bsky.social Here’s why you should join us for the conference. #LosAngeles #UCLA #grid #housing #energy
The BYD Lancaster factory is massive. It opened in 2013 and has expanded over the years to occupy 550,000 square feet. It’s the size of several football fields, with (union) employees working on different stations devoted to trucks, transit buses, and school buses. We saw no robots.
For now, we’re just talking about a March heat wave. But even those are records we do not want to be breaking. I had multiple Zooms this week with folks in Vermont and New York who were enjoying the 70 to 80-degree weather, as they should. But there is something ominous in the coming weather too.
I reported last week that the Washington Post had laid off at least 13 journalists who work on climate and the environment. The good news: there is still a climate desk. The bad news is that 4 reporters can’t adequately tell the story of global climate change. legal-planet.org/2026/02/11/t...
Lively scene of LA teenagers and us older folks rallying outside Amazon offices in Santa Monica calling out Big Tech for powering state violence. Bonus sighting of @bcmerchant.bsky.social out reporting in the crowd.
MAGA tries to paint caring helpers as losers or even domestic insurrectionists. We can reclaim the virtue of caring for the planet and people. There are connections between ICE attacks and the Trump administration’s assault on U.S. environmental protections. legal-planet.org/2026/01/27/a...
Join UCLA's LENS and the @uclalawemmett.bsky.social for a conversation with climate journalist @sammyroth.bsky.social about why narrative matters in the fight against climate change. The Jan 9 event is a live taping of the LENS podcast. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
UCLA’s STOP Methane Project just released our Spotlight on the Top 25 in ’25: Oil and Gas Sector. Top 25 sites are mostly in Turkmenistan — but also Venezuela, Iran, Pakistan, and the U.S. Why is a Texas gas well on this list of extreme methane emissions? stopmethane.substack.com/p/spotlight-...
LA looks like it will record its wettest November in 40 years, and register one-fifth of its annual average rainfall by the end of the weekend. Blessing and a curse like always.
For all the advice about touching grass— touching dirt , and digging a bunch of holes and planting little shrubs like California sagebrush and Mountain Mahogany, is a lot more satisfying. Thanks @treepeople-org.bsky.social for letting UCLA get dirty volunteering.
The editor in me loves seeing a publication push out a story where an edit didn't get resolved correctly, like here where one word was inserted to replace the other. Which do you think was the reporter's? "Threatened" or "told"?
Unusual, prolonged periods of both drought and rain are confusing coffee plants on this Brazil farm I toured. This means some of the plants start flowering at the wrong time of year — twice a year sometimes instead of just once — which drains the energy of the plant and the fruit goes to waste.
Your coffee is more expensive thanks to the dangerous duo of climate change and Donald Trump. But Trump tariffs — at SCOTUS this week — are tame compared to the climate crisis. I saw firsthand why this is happening on a trip to Acre, Brazil where I met coffee farmers legal-planet.org/2025/11/04/c...
Our 2-year-old cattle dog rescue, Deanie, finds all sorts of ways to cuddle.
Lots of media moves this week including: Ex-LAT climate columnist @sammyroth.bsky.social launched “Climate-Colored Goggles” a new Substack newsletter about “climate and culture: to encourage America’s most influential storytellers to get in the game.” legal-planet.org/2025/10/22/i...
Looks like the federal government has literally folded up its tent and gone home, here at Yosemite. But talk with a park ranger here and there and they’ll tell you, “We are working.”
I see hawks in LA all the time, but rarely foraging on the ground, like here at Stoneview Nature Center.