In February, after another one court decision delaying much-needed housing construction, Gov. Gavin Newsom stated that California’s environmental law is a landmark broken.

The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, is supposed to protect the environment by requiring governments to study and mitigate any developmental damage before passing it. But as Newsom pointed out, CEQA has been weaponized by wealthy homeowners (among others) to block homes often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least impact on the environment.

And housing is not the only thing at stake. To meet state greenhouse gas emissions targets and secure its share of federal funding for green energy

California must quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, power transmission lines, car charging networks and public transportation. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an infrastructure package of 11 bills to affirm another paradigm. We would no longer screw it up with paralysis and trial. In the future, the state would commit to results.

Newsom’s bold rhetoric suggested that major reforms lay ahead. But the package included only two incremental CEQA reforms, neither of which focused on housing.

One allows the governor to designate more environmental leadership projects for which the courts are expected to finalize any legal challenge within 270 days. However, if a case takes longer to resolve and gets stuck in legal limbo, the governor’s bill offers no legal remedy.

The other measure aims to reduce the administrative burden in CEQA cases.

Often, compiling the administrative record of all the information involved in an environmental assessment that was available to the government and related to the litigation can lead to major delays because it takes a long time to compile all the required documents.

Newsom suggested

soften

this problem by omitting internal communication within an agency that is not submitted to the final decision makers from the records. This was a baby step.

And yet, even this small change sparked outrage from more than 100 organizations that call themselves environmentalists. Confusingly, they argued that the governor’s reform would make it prohibitively expensive and difficult to put together an administrative file, making legal remedies something only the wealthy could afford.

This is ridiculous! Newsom vented. Then he collapsed.

The language about agency internal communications was dropped from his bill before he signed it last week, replaced with a token exception for meeting invitations and scheduling communications that are never relevant to a CEQA case.

In short, Newsom’s grand attempt to reform a broken law earned him the legal right to beg judges to speed up a few more cases and little else.

If you want to see what real reform looks like, look north. Washington state lawmakers voted overwhelmingly this year to abolish the environmental assessment for everyone

urban housing project that conforms to a city’s master plan and zoning regulations. Deep Green Oregon, meanwhile, never saw the need for a CEQA-like law. Instead, it took the limits of urban growth, preserving the countryside while allowing cities to approve new housing without the paralysis Newsom complained about.

In other words, Oregon and Washington opted for results.

Oddly enough, in the midst of all the Sturm und Drang caused by the governor’s infrastructure package, Newsom has

using its regulatory authority over CEQA.

The law says the state’s Governors Office of Planning and Research and the Natural Resources Agency can refine and clarify CEQA’s often vague requirements by issuing guidelines. New guidelines could strengthen exemptions for urban and suburban housing, create new exemptions for electricity transmission or create a statewide environmental zoning map and calibrate the intensity of assessments based on the sensitivity of a particular zone.

Yes, Team Paralysis would plot conspiracies and file lawsuits. And many moons ago, a court rejected an attempt to streamline CEQA through the guidelines. But the California Supreme Court later overturned that decision.

The field belongs to the governor. If nothing else, a revision of the guidelines would set the agenda for the legislature and the courts. If CEQA is really broken, it is well worth taking some legal and political risks to fix it.

Chris Elmendorf is a professor of law at the UC Davis School of Law.