CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act. It's the law that governs most of the topics under discussion. For example, it's the law (well, one of them) that requires an Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (or something like that....we always call them "EIR/EISs"), which are documents required to do pretty much any construction in CA. They are typically several thousand pages long, published in several volumes, and take a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars to draft.
Most of the issues are in the law itself (some involve regulatory capture, and some involve implementation, which I find rather absurd at times). I'll leave reading it to you; it's $150/hour for me to read it, and after doing so a few times I really don't like doing it pro bono. I'm not a lawyer; you want me to do the legwork, I'm getting paid. In particular, I recommend exploring the visual impacts section. While we can debate the validity of some of the other sections, that one has always struck me as fundamentally and unavoidably arbitrary. I honestly do not think it can be implemented objectively. I've worked on projects where municipalities have tried to halt construction half-way through using that section as a justification (it was pretty obvious that it was a paper-thin justification, but it's also one of those things where providing details would get me fired, so I can't go into it).
And that's just ONE of the regulations that NIMBY folks can use to fight these things.
And again, that's the ones polite enough to fight you in court, and not commit acts of vandalism in an attempt to frighten the construction crews into leaving.
I would also like to politely suggest that anyone who doesn't know what NEPA or CEQA are should Google them before continuing with this discussion. They are the legal framework for environmental regulations in California, and therefore not knowing them is a pretty critical knowledge gap. There are a host of other laws, ordinances, regulations, and standards (LORS in the EIR/EIS documents) that also need to be considered, but most of them are more how those two main laws are to be applied. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act is another that you should probably be familiar with, in as much as large portions of California are owned or managed by federal entities.
There's also a rather massive report on California's groundwater basins,
Bulletin 118 (VERY useful for finding obscure geologic units, so I use it a lot for work). It discusses things like recharge rates, where the recharge area is located (not always where you would expect), and water usage. If you want to talk groundwater in California, you use that report.
Another good reference is the General Plan of pretty much any county or municipality. They all discuss water, including sources of water and how it's used. It would take three lifetimes to sift through them all and produce a coherent and exhaustive report, but if you want to know details they're a good place to look.
