For roughly a century, a combination of local drive and federal resources built up L.A. County’s infrastructure, helping to transform the region into a global powerhouse.

Federal funds helped link the region to the transcontinental railroad 150 years ago. Water and power projects, such as Hoover Dam, and flood control efforts also boosted the local economy. Then the Federal Highway Act led to the construction of L.A.’s iconic freeways, which turned the region into the world’s car capital.

“All of this federal infrastructure investment greatly accelerated the development of Southern California,” said William Deverell, divisional dean for social sciences at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences and one of the leading local historians. “Development would have happened anyway, but these innovations and projects accelerated those developments.”

Still, in recent years, local companies in
Los Angeles County have been leading the way in combatting two of the most harmful byproducts of all this growth: pollution and climate change.

Three companies – Rosemead-based electric utility giant Edison International, oil and gas producer California Resources Corp. and Sawtelle-based electric charging infrastructure company Evgo Inc. – have been especially conspicuous in developing strategies and technologies to combat climate change.

These local companies – and scores like them – are addressing the consequences of the policies of the past 150 years that have led to the harmful impacts of climate change, paving the way for the Los Angeles region to thrive over the next century and beyond.

Creating an economic powerhouse

In 1870, Los Angeles County was little more than an outpost, with a total population of about 15,000, according to the U.S. Census. But starting in 1876, that changed rapidly due to one key development: a link to the recently completed transcontinental railroad. While the Central Pacific (later merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad) rail line spur to present-day Santa Clarita was privately funded, USC’s Deverell said it wouldn’t have happened without the benefits provided by the federal Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 and subsequent amendments. The act granted public lands to the railroad development companies, as well as government bonds.

Around the same time, other rail lines sprouted across the region, helping ease the flow of goods and people.

With this new, easy access, thousands of people came to the county over the next decade, driven by rail companies’ marketing campaigns that portrayed the region as a paradise with plenty of land and citrus crops.

“This line arrived at just the right moment for commerce and tourism to take off,” Deverell said.

By 1880, the county’s population had more than doubled to 33,000, and by 1890, it had swelled to 101,000, according to U.S. Census figures.

Becoming the world’s largest oil producer

In the 1890s, two key developments started that would completely transform the county’s economy.

First, in 1892, Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield struck an oil deposit near current-day Dodger Stadium. It was the first of many oil field discoveries – including Long Beach and what would become Signal Hill – that drove local fortunes and made the county the largest oil producer in the nation, and later in the world. In 1930, nearly one in four barrels of oil produced globally came from Los Angeles County, according to the American Oil and Gas Historical Society.

In the mid-1890s, after a fierce lobbying battle over two locations for a deep-water port to serve the growing region, Congress chose to fund the dredging of San Pedro Bay for a port. (For more on this, please click here.)

Drives growth through water

Water was at the center of another key infrastructure development in 1913: the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which would siphon Sierra Nevada runoff from the Owens Valley into the Los Angeles region.

By the 1930s, the federal government made its giant contribution to L.A.’s water (and power) infrastructure with the construction of the Hoover Dam along the Colorado River.

“This was a huge development for L.A., allowing the region to tap into another water supply via the Colorado River Aqueduct and also get hydroelectricity,” Deverell said.

The federal government made one more contribution to the region’s water infrastructure: several rounds of flood-control dams
and related projects. The largest of these took place in the 1940s following a disastrous flood in 1938.

In all, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers encased more than 100 miles of L.A. waterways in concrete, including the Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers. Besides the intended purpose of flood control, these concrete-covered channels have also become a cultural touchstone for the region.

Highway building boom

Just a few years later, the federal government would spur the creation of another great concrete wonder of the county: the freeway network.

In 1956, then-President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, creating the Interstate Highway System.

Over the next 20 years, through a combination of federal and local funds, hundreds of miles of interstate highways were built throughout the county, turning the region into the world’s car capital. Although its construction predated the Federal Highway Act, the most iconic stretch of freeway that showed the complexity of the network was the “four-level interchange” just northwest of downtown
Los Angeles.

While hailed as an engineering marvel at the time, the social cost of the freeway system has drawn increasing attention in the decades since, as dozens of longstanding communities – including Boyle Heights – have been irreparably split apart. Growing opposition in the 1970s brought freeway building in the county largely to a halt.

The explosion of vehicles on L.A. roads and highways in the mid-century helped fuel episodes of choking smog that frequently blanketed the county. The link between vehicle exhaust and smog was identified in the early 1950s by Arie Haagen-Smit, professor of bio-organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He found that unburned hydrocarbons from car exhaust, when combined with nitrogen oxides in the air and sunlight, created ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog.

Haagen-Smit teamed up with local elected officials and activists to launch a 20-year crusade to force automakers to make cars that pollute less. Their efforts helped enable the passage of the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, which established the nation’s first clean air standards. As a result of that law and continued pressure, automakers in the mid-1970s began installing catalytic converters on vehicles, which dramatically reduced unburned hydrocarbon emissions. This was the first big step toward zero-emission vehicles on the roads today.

Fighting climate change on multiple fronts

In the decades since, the smog situation has improved. These days, the top environmental issue is climate change.

Perhaps no other local company has been impacted on so many fronts by climate change and efforts to combat it than Rosemead-based Edison International, parent of the Southern California Edison electric utility. SCE serves 5 million customers and an estimated 15 million people across a 50,000-square-mile territory on the Southern and Central Coasts of California. It delivers power over more than 125,000 miles of bulk transmission and smaller distribution power lines.

SCE is now dealing with climate change on four fronts:

• Paying out billions of dollars in settlements to victims of climate change-fueled disasters triggered – or believed to have been triggered – by the company’s equipment;

• Spending billions of dollars hardening its power grid to be more resistant to winds and other forces that could trigger fires;

• Upgrading that grid and its distribution nodes to handle more power for data centers and electric vehicle charging; and

• Continually boosting the proportion of renewable power sources in its overall power delivery portfolio.

On the settlement front, through the end of last year, Southern California Edison had paid out nearly $11 billion to victims of a series of destructive wildfires. That includes those impacted by the Thomas Fire and related mudslides in 2017, the Woolsey Fire in 2018 and the Eaton Fire in 2025.

For the Eaton Fire, Edison set up a wildfire recovery compensation fund last fall, one of the first of its kind. According to Edison’s first quarter earnings slide presentation, SCE had received nearly 3,150 claims from Eaton Fire victims as of March 31 and had extended nearly 1,500 offers totaling more than $500 million to nearly 3,700 claimants. The company said more than 735 claimants had been paid a cumulative total of more than $100 million.

“Lawsuits can be uncertain and often take years to resolve,” Edison spokesman David Eisenhauer said. “The Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program was designed to provide eligible claimants with fair offers and faster compensation than lengthy litigation.”

As for hardening the grid, SCE reported that, as of mid-May, it had installed a protective layer on more than 7,100 miles of power lines, about three-fourths of its target of 9,300 miles. Progress on undergrounding wires has been much slower, as that process is much more costly and time-consuming: only about 90 miles out of a target of 7,560 miles had been undergrounded as of mid-May.

Edison executives point to even greater progress in the neighborhoods deemed at greatest risk for fire ignition.

“The planned physical hardening work on the distribution system in high fire risk areas is now about 93% complete, reflecting years of sustained investment in covered conductor and targeted undergrounding,” Edison Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro said in remarks during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

On the power portfolio side, according to Edison International’s 2024 sustainability report, SCE delivered 49% carbon-free power to customers, which is 67% cleaner than the latest available national average greenhouse gas intensity among U.S. utilities. The renewable power mix included solar (19%), wind (11%) and large hydroelectric (5%) as well as clean, firm resources such as nuclear (9%) and geothermal (4%).

Putting carbon back where it came from

Long Beach-based California Resources Corp. (CRC), the state’s largest oil and natural gas producer, is also combating climate change.

Five years ago, CRC established Carbon Terra Vault in a joint venture with Toronto-based Brookfield Renewable Partners, aimed at developing a program to capture and then sequester carbon underground.

In May, Carbon Terra Vault launched carbon injection operations at a facility next to its oil and gas operations at the Elk Hills Oil Field in Kern County. This first-of-its-kind operation in California is collecting carbon dioxide from oil field operations and injecting it into an empty underground reservoir that once held oil.

“We are literally putting carbon dioxide right back to the very space it came from,” said Chris Gould, managing partner of Carbon Terra Vault and chief sustainability officer for CRC.

The first project now in operation aims to inject roughly 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year into the reservoir for 25 years. Gould said the reservoir can handle up to 1.4 million tons of carbon dioxide injected annually.

The next phase, Gould said, is to contract with operators of two of the most intense types of carbon emitters: natural gas power plants and cement-making plants, collect the carbon dioxide they produce and inject it into the underground reservoir.

In order for that to happen, however, Gould said Carbon Terra Vault and/or other parties would have to repurpose underused or idle oil and natural gas pipelines to carry the carbon dioxide to the carbon capture and storage facility at Elk Hills. Exactly how that would be accomplished is still in development.

Gould noted that to begin operations, Carbon Terra Vault had to obtain the first-ever Title VI permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, making the joint venture
a pioneer.

“California has some of the strictest standards anywhere,” he said. “Some might say that makes getting things done too long and too complicated. But we call it the ‘California Way’ of developing projects: embracing the standards from the beginning and working in lockstep with the community. I would invite developers of carbon capture and storage projects in other states to embrace these high standards. The world is watching.”

Another approach is being taken by the city that birthed the oil boom 130 years ago. Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to craft an ordinance banning new oil drilling within city limits and phasing out existing wells over 20 years. It’s the city’s second attempt: it approved a similar ordinance four years ago, but oil companies filed suit and that law was overturned by the courts.

Electric vehicle charging

Another pioneering local company in the ongoing battle against climate change is Sawtelle-based EVgo Inc. When it was launched in 2010, EVgo was one of the first companies seeking to create an electric vehicle charging network across the country, independent of electric vehicle manufacturers such as Tesla Inc., which is now based near Austin, Texas.

In the years since, EVgo has been racing to keep up with the constantly evolving technologies for electric vehicle charging. As of March 31, EVgo had roughly 5,280 fast-charging stalls in operation at 1,200-plus locations in 47 states.

EVgo Chief Executive Badar Khan said in a LinkedIn video posted on the company’s website in May that the company plans to add 1,400 to 1,650 new charging stalls across the nation this year. In a post earlier this year, he said EVgo deployed roughly 100 of the latest-generation fast-charging NACS stalls last year and plans to add another 400 this year. NACS, or North America Charging Standard, is quickly becoming the standard charging technology.

“EVgo is leading the charge as the market evolves, ensuring drivers who choose electric have access to convenient, reliable fast charging,” Khan said in the earlier LinkedIn post. “From Houston to Detroit, Orlando to Phoenix, customers across America will see more NACS connectors on our high-power infrastructure network.”