You've probably been hearing a lot about budget bills, environmental reviews, and labor fights out here on the West Coast. It's all adding up to probably the biggest policy change in modern California history. Here's a breakdown for the perplexed.

In 1970, California joined various states in mandating that all public projects undertake an environmental review, disclosing and mitigating impacts. This made sense amid a frenzy of freeways, urban renewal, etc. Thus, CEQA: the California Environmental Quality Act.

The enforcement mechanism was intuitive: if an environmental review should have been conducted and wasn't, or failed to study some relevant impact, or failed to undertake reasonable mitigation, nearly anyone could easily sue and force the issue.