Prop. 45 mounts Trump-style assault on California’s environment. Will it work?

By Aruna Prabhalah

Posted 10.29.2026

OPINION — California’s environment is being attacked from all sides.

The Trump administration has waged war on our endangered wildlife and is poised to legalize most killings of imperiled animals even when they’re on the brink of extinction. Federal protections for our climate, air and water are circling the drain. 

In Sacramento, meanwhile, lawmakers passed a bill to protect wildlife habitat from manufacturing projects, only to see Gov. Gavin Newsom veto it.

Now the California Chamber of Commerce is asking voters to support a drastic weakening of the state’s bedrock environmental protection law. Backed by business interests and investor-owned utilities, Proposition 45 on the November ballot would give a fast pass to polluting projects like gas pipelines, freeway expansions and forest clear-cutting.

Under Prop. 45, California’s communities and the environment would lose while developers’ profits grow. The measure takes a sledgehammer to the California Environmental Quality Act, the law that prevents development from poisoning our drinking water, polluting our air and paving over endangered species habitat. 

We rely on CEQA for informing communities about potentially dangerous projects. The law requires developers to publicize how much water they plan to use and how much climate-heating emissions their project will spew. Without such requirements, the public would be kept in the dark, powerless against those who have the money and political connections to freely build.

In Contra Costa County, a CEQA challenge from my organization against a Pittsburg data center pushed the developers to add rooftop solar, use recycled water and build electric vehicle infrastructure. The developer also agreed to monitor wildlife so that construction activity doesn’t further harm Western burrowing owls and Western pond turtles.

Had the Pittsburg data center been fast tracked and environmental review requirements curtailed, as Prop. 45 proponents would prefer, the public’s opportunities to learn about the project and push for community and wildlife benefits would have been even less.

The corporations and developers funding Prop. 45 say factoring in wildlife is costly and takes too much time. But scientific surveys before construction starts can be the difference between survival and extinction for vulnerable wildlife like the endangered California tiger salamander, which lives mostly underground and away from view. We can’t protect our state’s most imperiled animals if we don’t know where they live. 

Last year sweeping developer concessions were hurriedly signed into state law, exempting a wide variety of projects, including nearly all manufacturing facilities, from environmental review. When lawmakers worked on a clean-up bill to restore protections for endangered species, Newsom rejected it.

This callous attitude toward the natural world comes straight from Trump’s anti-environment playbook. 

The Trump administration in July finalized a rule that removed nearly all habitat protections for endangered species. Months later it issued a directive stripping endangered species protections against most activities that kill or injure them. That means the homes of spotted owls, kit foxes and sea turtles can be wiped out and folks have a free pass to kill those vulnerable creatures if there was no intent.  

Our most imperiled animals have never been as close to the brink of extinction as they are in Trump’s America. Prop. 45 could very well seal the deal. 

Fortunately, the fate of this ballot initiatives rests in the hands of California voters and I don’t think they’re as willing to trade away our environmental protections.

A recent survey by Thinks Insight & Strategy found that while Southern Californians support more housing and infrastructure, they oppose weakening CEQA and other environmental regulations by a more than two-to-one margin.

That’s because we know the state can grow responsibly without sacrificing our open space and biodiversity. 

California continues to have the fourth-largest economy in the world while granting endangered species protections to imperiled mountain lions, as the state Fish and Game Commission did this year. And in the mountains of Contra Costa County, California condors soared overhead for the first time in more than 100 years. Their global population has now surpassed 600.

These success stories are a reminder that growth and conservation can work in tandem.

I’m hopeful that California voters will support environmental protection at the ballot box. It’s the best way to tell politicians that California’s environment is not for sale, not to polluters, not to the highest bidders, not to anyone.

Aruna Prabhala is a senior attorney and the urban wildlands director at the Center for Biological Diversity.