I'm not sure I was deserving. Certainly I had environmental concerns, but I'd given such concerns only limited thought and attention. Democratic Central Committee In 1966, Warren took on a party leadership role, serving as chairman of California's Democratic Central Committee. He held that position until 1968. Council on Environmental Quality He was the third chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), appointed to the position by President Jimmy Carter, and serving from January 1977 to September 1979. He brought attorney Nicholas Yost from California to Washington, DC, to serve as chief counsel at CEQ. During their leadership at CEQ (Yost was at CEQ from 1977 to 1981), CEQ promulgated legally binding regulations for federal agency compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for "major federal actions." The new regulations, at 40 Code of Federal Regulations 1500–1508, replaced earlier CEQ guidelines. They were published in 1978 and took effect in 1979. The regulations, which were designed to resolve problems that had been identified in the early years of implementing the requirements of NEPA, were well received. They remain in force as of 2012, having had only one amendment to one subsection over the years since their adoption. Warren left CEQ in 1979 to return to California for "personal and family reasons". He joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis. Later career In 1985, State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown appointed Warren to a two-year term on the California Coastal Commission. In January 1986 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Commission's chairmanship, losing to fellow Democrat Michael Wornum by a vote of 8–4. Warren and Wornum were among the minority of Commission members who generally sided with environmentalists by voting to restrict destructive coastal development, while the majority of commissioners who generally opposed limits on development. In 1987 the Los Angeles Times quoted Warren's comments on the political nature of the Coastal Commission's decisionmaking: The citizen interest groups have kind of disappeared, ...so you have ... political appointees with agendas of their own, meeting in the basement of some hotel, deciding multimillion-dollar issues.... It's kind of tempting to think that nobody gives a damn and so you do whatever you want. In 1989, Warren was appointed executive officer of the California State Lands Commission. In 1993, while working as executive director of the Lands Commission, Warren encouraged Mobil to pursue