Note: This article was co-authored with Fan Dai, Aimee Barnes (California-China Climate Institute, University of California, Berkeley [CCCI]), Yunshi Wang (University of California, Davis) and Angela Luh (University of California, Berkeley) and cross-posted at CCCI. In addition, Mary Nichols and Candace Vahlsing (California Air Resources Board); Patty Monahan and Ben De Alba (California Energy Commission); Lauren Sanchez (California Environmental Protection Agency); Prof. Ouyang Minggao and Prof. Wang Hewu (Tsinghua University); Gong Huiming (Energy Foundation China) and Evan Westrup (California-China Climate Institute) contributed to this piece.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the globe, now is the time for us to reflect not only on our shared vulnerability, but also on what’s possible through collective action. California and China, which have both confronted this virus with great force, are also uniquely positioned to tackle the climate crisis head-on – together. One of the most effective steps we can take is to get more zero-emission vehicles on our roads.
Why focus on transportation? The answer is simple: it’s one of the greatest sources of carbon emissions and major sources of air pollution. In China, analysts estimate that transportation emissions constitute more than 9 percent of the country’s overall carbon footprint – and that share is expanding rapidly. In cities, for example, transportation accounts for as much as 65 percent of carbon emissions in Shenzhen, and vehicle emissions are responsible for 45 percent of the total particulate matter concentrations in Beijing. Meanwhile in California, 41 percent of overall emissions come from transportation, due mostly to passenger vehicles. The share rises to nearly 50 percent when carbon emissions from producing gasoline and diesel are factored in. Notably, transportation emissions have continued to increase in California, while emissions in nearly every other sector have declined steadily in recent years.
The good news is that we know what we need to do – and California and China have set world-leading zero-emission vehicle goals to get us there. In China, the goal is for zero-emission vehicles to account for 25 percent of total vehicle sales by 2025, increasing to 40-50 percent of total sales by 2030. Meanwhile, California aims to have 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025 and 5 million by 2030. California also established a voluntary framework with five vehicle manufactures to reduce emissions that can serve as a path forward – alternative to the one which the federal government has now chosen – for clean vehicle standards nationwide. To help achieve these goals, both California and China have offered numerous incentives to consumers and manufacturers and aggressively invested in research and development.
As a result, in part, of these policies, California and China are dominating the global zero-emission vehicle market and have put a significant share of these vehicles on our roads. In fact, China, the number one market in the world for plug-in electric vehicles, accounted for 54 percent of the world’s 2.26 million vehicles sold last year. And by the end of 2019, 3.8 million plug-in vehicles were on China’s roads. Similarly, California accounted for nearly half of America’s plug-in vehicle sales in 2019 with 156,101 vehicles sold and approximately 700,000 vehicles on the state’s roads.
While these figures are encouraging, the road ahead is long and winding. In 2019, plug-in vehicles represented just 8.26 percent of California’s annual new vehicle sales and overall sales of these vehicles declined year-over-year by 12 percent. And after years of zero-emission vehicle sales growth, China saw a similar trend in 2019, recording a 4 percent decline in sales year-over-year. In China, experts attribute this drop primarily to demand-side subsidy cuts and in California, the expiration of federal tax credits for purchases from many of the major manufacturers was a contributing factor.
So where do we go from here? What can California and China do to reverse recent trends and encourage much faster adoption of zero-emission vehicles? We start by accelerating our cooperation. This means taking steps to align California and China’s zero-emission vehicle goals, policies, research and investment. Possible actions include:
- Internal Combustion Engines: Studying options to phase out the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by a specific date.
- Zero-Emission Vehicle Goals: Harmonizing zero-emission vehicle goals for 2030 – and beyond, with shared targets for new vehicles sales (as the ZEV Alliance has done) and/or zero-emission vehicle market share.
- Charging Infrastructure: Agreeing to mutual charging infrastructure targets, while also expanding and sharing research on market opportunities and technological innovation, from the battery to the charger.
- Procurement: Accelerating and aligning procurement requirements – in both the public and private sectors.
- Credit-Based Requirements: Encouraging China to adopt and adapt California’s credit-based zero-emission vehicle mandate, which requires auto manufacturers to produce a specific number of zero-emission vehicles each year, based on the total number of vehicles sold by the manufacturer in the state.
- Market Demand: Collaborating on innovative ways to drive zero-emission vehicle market demand, including sharing best practices, expanding public-private-nonprofit partnerships (e.g. Veloz, Go Ultra Low models) and supporting demonstration projects to deploy hydrogen fuel cell technologies.
- Innovation and Investment: Allowing and encouraging both zero-emission heavy-duty and passenger vehicle manufacturers to compete in California and Chinese markets, while continuing to expand government and business-to-business investment, loans and grants focused on research and development of new technologies, as well as workforce development.
Current geopolitical tensions and the COVID-19 crisis complicate this partnership between California and China, but this uncertainty should remind us that we have no time to waste. The University of California-wide California-China Climate Institute, working in partnership with the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, stands ready to drive this collaboration forward. And as California and China work ever more closely together, we have to bring in other players like the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico. All of this, with the goal of getting more zero-emission vehicles on the road before the next United Nations climate talks. By doing this, we send a clear message to the world: zero-emission vehicles are the future.
California is the seventh-largest oil producing state in the country, with a fossil fuel industry that is responsible for billions of dollars in state and local revenue and other economic activity each year. Yet continued oil and gas production contrasts with the state’s aggressive climate mitigation policies, while creating significant air and water pollution, particularly for disadvantaged communities in areas where much of the state’s drilling occurs.
As a result of these risks, many advocates and policymakers seek ways to enhance regulation of and eventually phase out oil and gas production in California. Recent global price wars and declining demand from the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the need to conduct this phase-out in a just and orderly fashion.
To provide legal options for policy makers to facilitate this transition, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) is today releasing the new report “Legal Grounds: Law and Policy Options to Facilitate a Phase-Out of Fossil Fuel Production in California,” co-authored with CLEE climate law and policy fellow Ted Lamm.
The report analyzes steps California leaders could pursue on state- and privately-owned lands to achieve this reduction. Among the options discussed, state leaders could:
- Enhance regulatory authority over drilling by clarifying the need for the California Geologic Energy Management Division (the state’s primary oil and gas regulator) to prioritize environmental and climate impacts over production;
- Heighten scrutiny on permitting via comprehensive environmental review with mandatory, site-specific mitigation measures under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA);
- Institute minimum statewide drilling setbacks of at least 2,500 feet or more from sensitive sites, such as schools, parks, and houses;
- Implement a per-barrel or per-well severance tax and dedicate the revenue to projects that further the goal of transitioning away from fossil fuel; and
- Task the California Air Resources Board with devising and implementing a comprehensive plan for a phase-out of all in-state oil and gas production by a date that tracks with overall climate goals.
To learn more about the report findings, please join our free webinar on Tuesday, May 12th, from 11am to noon, with Sean Hecht of UCLA Law and Ingrid Brostrom of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. Registration is here.
This report ultimately comes at a unique moment in the history of in-state oil and gas production. The industry is struggling economically due to a global collapse in oil prices and a decrease in demand from COVID-19-related shutdowns. As sheltering Americans temporarily buy less gas and many drilling companies are approaching or entering bankruptcy with record-low oil prices, an intelligently structured phase-out could result in less harm to jobs and local economies. And California’s actions could demonstrate to other states and countries how to successfully sunset their fossil fuel production.
We hope the menu of law and policy options presented in Legal Grounds will assist state leaders in addressing these challenges and charting a new course for California’s in-state fossil fuel production.
California (and the nation as a whole) is getting worse in our efforts to reduce emissions from transportation (i.e. driving). Last week, I gave a talk in the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies lecture series on what we can do about it. You can view the recording here:
In brief, we’re failing because driving miles are up while transit usage is down, in part due to poor land use policies that pushing housing farther from jobs. We need to encourage housing near transit and encourage electric vehicle usage for all other driving.
And on the subject of how we’re failing to build enough housing near transit, you can view a recording of a January 30th symposium at UC Hastings School of Law on this topic, featuring two panel discussions (I spoke on the second) and a closing keynote from State Senator Scott Wiener. You can also read a summary of the symposium from Hastings student Leigha Beckman, who helped organize the event.
Happy viewing!
Some media appearances from me this week on a range of energy, housing and rail topics:
- “Greater LA” on KCRW radio in Los Angeles covered the conspiracy theory that auto companies dismantled the vast Los Angeles streetcar network in favor of freeways, interviewing me for the segment based on my Railtown book.
- CalMatters reported on a new state legislative analysis of California’s renewable energy program, finding significant emission reductions and many research gaps, which helps deflate a Republican proposal to pause the program (with some quotes from me).
- KPCC’s AirTalk radio program featured a live discussion on Wednesday on the proposed “California Green New Deal” legislation, which in part seeks to boost affordable housing and a just transition for workers out of fossil fuels. I was joined on the program by Sylvia Chi from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics.
With the legislative session just beginning, I expect the media to continue to focus on the numerous proposals to address our ongoing energy and climate needs. Happy Friday!
I began working on climate change law and policy on January 20, 2009, the day I joined Berkeley Law, which was coincidentally Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. So it’s been a full decade for me focusing exclusively on this subject (I focused on related land use and transit issues prior to 2009), roughly coinciding with the 2010s now coming to a close.
As we mark the end of this decade, two things stand out: remarkable progress reducing the price and deploying critical clean technologies, and dispiriting failure to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions, with more severe climate impacts happening each year.
I noted some of these trends in a foreword to “Climate Change Law in the Asia Pacific” from Berkeley Law, which features articles from scholars in places like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as California.
To summarize the good news on clean technology:
- From 2009 to 2017, the levelized costs for utility-scale solar photovoltaic dropped 86 percent;
- Wind power levelized costs dropped 67 percent from 2009-2017; and
- Lithium ion battery prices (central to electric vehicles and grid energy storage) have dropped 85 percent from 2010 to 2018.
This progress is the key reason for optimism on climate change. With the price decreases, support for deployment has increased across the political spectrum and allowed for some remarkable success stories on emissions reductions, such as California’s ability to achieve its 2020 carbon goals four years earlier, due primarily to renewable energy deployment.
But despite the progress, we have this sobering data:
- Carbon parts per million have increased from 385 in 2009 to 411 (and counting).
And unsurprisingly, the bill is now coming due. This decade has brought some of the predicted severe climate impacts, such as unprecedented wildfires, droughts, extreme rain events and hurricanes, and warming oceans.
On the positive side, the extreme weather has helped shift public opinion in favor of climate action. But it’s come at a significant cost to human life, happiness, and ecosystems.
Hopefully in the 2020s we’ll see the widespread deployment of clean technologies and other climate-smart practices that we need to stabilize and reduce emissions. And while climate impacts will inevitably worsen, perhaps our ability to withstand them will improve, such as through electricity grid resilience in the face of wildfires and using natural infrastructure to lessen storm surges and flooding.
And to make any of these positives happen, we will need smart policies and public support and political leaders to enact them. I’ve had the good fortune to work on climate policy now for over a decade, and as the 2020s dawn, much work remains.
On this morning’s 10am edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, I’ll interview Ben Ehrenreich, a columnist at The Nation magazine, about the coverage of the just-concluded UN climate conference in Madrid. The high-profile failure of the event was punctuated by thousands of young activists protesting the lack of action by big polluters.
Then, later in the program, we will talk about the Trump impeachment vote in the U.S. House of Representatives and what comes next. I’ll interview:
- Michael Winship, a senior Writing Fellow at the website Common Dreams and longtime Bill Moyers writing partner; and
- Dan Froomkin, founder of Press Watch, a media project that monitors political reporting and encourages more responsible, informed and informative campaign and government coverage.
You can stream it live at 10am today or listen to 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area. Call 866-798-TALK with questions or comments!
Note: this post is co-authored with Fan Dai, director of the University of California’s California-China Climate Institute.
With the high-profile failure of last week’s UN climate conference in Madrid, the focus of international action on climate change will need to shift to political leaders of key global economies. We attended the conference in Madrid on behalf of the UC California-China Climate Institute and the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley Law and saw firsthand how California and China may now be well positioned to lead in this global leadership vacuum. Both jurisdictions have dominant economies and official commitments on climate action, as well as strong willingness to act at the local levels.
An alliance of the “willing” among these leading economies, however, will not be easy. China and California both face headwinds to strong climate action. First, China is facing internal leadership changes on climate amid fears of a slowing economy, which is pushing the national government to scale back climate commitments. Most prominently, longtime government climate policy maker Xie Zhenhua is stepping down, while Ministry of Ecology and Environment vice minister Zhao Yingmin takes over. Xie’s departure coincides with a shift in China’s climate policy away from its economic-focused National Development and Reform Commission towards its traditional environmental protection ministry, with unknown consequences for future climate action.
These bureaucratic changes are happening at the same time that China is delaying introduction of its new national emissions trading system and returning to support more coal development to boost its economy. The numbers bear this reality out: China has raised its coal-fired power capacity by about 4.5% in 2018-2019, while oil consumption increased by an average 5.5% in 2018 and over the previous decade. Meanwhile, sales of electric vehicles dropped 34.2% in September 2019 compared to the previous year, as the country phased out subsidies.
Meanwhile, California’s aggressive climate agenda proved successful in this past decade, with the state meeting its 2020 climate goals four years early in 2016. But headwinds from the federal government, including a proposed rollback of federal vehicle fuel economy standards, means the state faces uncertainty reducing emissions from its now-dominant transportation sector. That sector now constitutes approximately 50% of the state’s carbon emissions, when factoring in oil refinery emissions. Worse, vehicle driving miles in the state are increasing, due to inefficient local government land use policies encouraging sprawl over transit-oriented growth.
To meet the 1.5-degree goal under Paris agreement, both California and China need to decarbonize their economies and be on a path to carbon neutrality by mid-century, with China needing to achieve a decline in emissions by the 2030s. Given the absence of US national leadership and now international discord as seen in Madrid, both California and China will need new partnerships to advance their climate programs. Specifically, the two climate leaders could lead collaborative efforts on:
- Cap-and-trade program: Given California’s success rolling out a functioning cap-and-trade program, the state is well positioned to provide technical assistance for China’s nascent carbon trading program, especially around monitoring, reporting and verification of emission data, consignment auction, and exploring potential market alignment under scenarios where the programs are linked by degrees.
- Zero-emission vehicles and low-carbon transportation: California leads the U.S. in adoption of zero-emission vehicles, particularly battery electric models, while China is now a dominant manufacturer of both the vehicles and their batteries. The two jurisdictions could share knowledge regarding smart policies for deployment as well as how to better integrate their markets to reduce costs for consumers while boosting local jobs. Collaboration over electrification of heavy-duty vehicles and ports in particular could be mutually beneficial.
- Clean energy innovation and grid modernization: California and China are both deploying significant renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, and now face challenges integrating this variable renewable energy into their grids. Both jurisdictions can benefit from technology and policy exchanges to boost deployment of solutions like energy storage and technologies that can match electricity demand to intermittent supply.
- Nature-based climate solutions: Facing common challenges posed by climate change to their ecosystems, California and China can learn from each other how to deploy nature-based solutions to manage our forests, farmlands and natural lands to sequester carbon and be more resilient to increasingly severe impacts of climate change.
The UC California-China Climate Institute can help advance this coordination and assist China and California in partnering with other climate leaders in the US and around the globe, through its policy research, dialogue and training programs. As the federal government in the U.S. retreats from climate leadership, and as international gatherings like in Madrid fracture due to parochial disagreements, leaders from China and California now have an opportunity to fill the void and marshal other like-minded jurisdictions to join their climate and energy initiatives. Now is the time to move beyond international coalitions and toward coalitions of the willing – and the doing.
The 25th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) in Madrid ended largely in failure on Sunday, with the parties unable to come to agreement on provisions governing a potential international carbon market. How big a deal is that failure?
Like my UCLA Law colleagues, I attended the conference in Madrid and witnessed similar dynamics that they described. I’ve been a skeptic of these UN processes since as long as I’ve worked in the climate field. On one hand, the UN COPs can serve as useful, politically galvanizing events that can offer networking, idea-sharing, and important media coverage to highlight this issue for the public.
But on the other hand, any success at a UN COP may instill a false sense of optimism that international leaders are solving the problem, when in fact, even with successes like the agreement achieved at the Paris COP in 2015, the real action happens among decision makers largely absent from these international discussions. For example, state and provincial leaders typically set rules for electricity grids that determine their carbon emissions, and local officials often are responsible for planning cities that sprawl or not and decide whether to fund transit over automobile infrastructure; they also often permit new factories and industrial facilities in their jurisdictions.
So in that context, any progress at the Madrid COP wasn’t likely to make a significant dent in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, unless it translates effectively and urgently to decision-makers down the chain. In short, a failure at any given COP to reach an agreement is often more of a symbolic blow than an actual policy setback, while the opposite remains true: success is only pyrrhic without follow-up action by decision makers across the globe, at all levels.
But more specific to this year’s COP focus in Madrid (the provisions related to a potential global carbon market under Article 6 of the Paris agreement), carbon markets by themselves are unlikely to be a key solution on emissions. Even in a state like California, which is one of the world’s leaders on decarbonization, the cap-and-trade program is marginal at best in terms of impact. Allowances trade for near the price floor, with no real evidence that the program is the but-for cause of any emission reductions at regulated facilities. Meanwhile, the auction proceeds from the sale of allowances under the program generate upwards of a few billion dollars a year for programs like high speed rail, building weatherization, and transit-oriented development projects.
In short, California’s carbon market functions as a low-level carbon tax that generates funds for some carbon-reducing projects but is not responsible (as best we can tell) for any meaningful emission reductions.
I don’t mean to slam the carbon trading program – it can be a useful tool for government to employ. And it’s partly been a victim of the success of California’s rapid decarbonization in other sectors.
Which leads to the real heart of California’s climate program: its mandates. Specifically, mandates for utilities to procure renewable energy and energy storage, for automakers to produce zero-emission vehicles, and for appliance manufacturers and home-builders to apply energy efficiency standards to their products. Without these and other mandates, as well as the various state incentives that typically accompany them, California would not have seen its great success over the past decade reducing emissions so quickly that the state met its 2020 greenhouse gas goal four years early.
Had any of these other programs failed – specifically the renewable energy program, which was the most responsible for state emission reductions – the cap-and-trade program would have taken on more importance. But the fact that we did not need carbon trading in California means that other nations and states can achieve emission reduction success through a similar recipe: decarbonize electricity and transportation, focus on industrial and agricultural emissions, and do everything possible to reduce short-lived climate pollutants.
Going forward, perhaps following a change in federal leadership in the U.S., the real action at these international gatherings may take place at smaller venues such as the G20 (attended by the leaders of countries responsible for 75% of global emissions). And perhaps one day the COPs can transition to a more sectoral focus. For example, I’d love to see a UN COP focused exclusively on advancing zero-emission vehicle technologies or a decarbonized electricity grid. We could potentially make significant and meaningful global progress by focusing on the technology solutions we know we need to deploy widely right away.
So without success in Madrid this past week, the world is still left where it essentially always was and would have been anyway, with or without carbon markets under Article 6: in dire need of strong national, state and local action to decarbonize key economic sectors as quickly as possible. A global carbon market could potentially help with that effort, but it will not be sufficient by itself.
The real progress on climate change will now once again take place in city halls, state legislatures, and parliaments and other decision-making bodies around the globe.
The dark winter months are a reminder that critical renewable resources like solar PV won’t be available to keep our electricity clean. And if the wind isn’t blowing, wind power is unavailable as well to meet demand. Absent baseload renewables like geothermal power, how do we achieve a 100% carbon-free in the dark, still winter time?
The answer is bulk — or seasonal — energy storage. This means massive energy storage facilities that can capture surplus renewable power like solar PV in the summer months, and store it for months until the winter.
Not many technologies can achieve this mass, seasonal storage, but Utility Dive offers a helpful list, summarized here:
- Pumped Hydro: this relatively common technology involves pumping water uphill with cheap surplus electricity and then releasing it downhill to generate power when needed. It’s been in use since the 1890s, and by the end of 2017, the US had about 22 gigawatts installed.
- Compressed Air Energy Storage: this technology involves pumping air into a confined space, like a container or underground cavern, then releasing the pressure to generate electricity when needed. It’s a capital-intensive system constrained by geography. To date, I only know of two facilities in operation, although more are in the planning stages.
- Lithium-ion battery banks: with falling battery prices, these have been a “go-to” recently for energy storage. But it’s unclear if we can produce and deploy enough batteries to store power for months at grid-scale, particularly since many of these batteries will be needed for electric vehicles.
- Other batteries: By the end of 2017, the U.S. had 708 megawatts of large-scale battery capacity other than lithium, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
- Gravity-based systems: more developers are experimenting with gravity-based systems, such as trains that power uphill and then go back downhill to release energy when needed, as I blogged about a few years ago. As another example, Switzerland-based Energy Vault unveiled a crane mounted on a steel tower 300 feet high, which hoists 35 metric ton concrete “bricks” into stacks. To discharge, the crane lowers the bricks to the ground.
- Hydrogen: liquid hydrogen gas can be a form of energy storage, if it’s produced with surplus renewable power. It can be stored without degrading and used to power a fuel cell or gas turbine (or to power fuel cell vehicles like hydrogen trucks).
Other technologies may exist or be in the planning stages to overcome this seasonal challenge with providing 100% carbon-free power all year. As more jurisdictions seek to meet this clean power goal, these bulk storage technologies will become critical in the near future.
UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) is today releasing a new report on lessons learned to advance electric vehicle (EV) deployment in France and California. Electric Vehicles and Global Urban Adoption: Policy Solutions from France and California is based on a June 2019 international conference at UC Berkeley, co-sponsored by CentraleSupélec and Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in France, featuring speakers from California and French utilities, energy regulators and industry.
Electric vehicles are important to both California and France because transportation accounts for approximately 20 percent of emissions in Europe, 30 percent in the United States, and 40 percent in California (and even more when factoring in emissions from oil refineries). Yet electric vehicles still represent a small share of the overall vehicle market worldwide, at under 10 percent of new car sales in California and under 2 percent in France, despite aggressive policy targets.
Deployment in California and France is more perhaps more complicated than other jurisdictions, given that approximately 40 percent of residents in both places live in multi-unit dwellings, such as apartments, townhouses, and condominiums. Many of these dwellings are in urban areas with little or no access to charging, given the lack of dedicated parking spots and lower vehicle ownership rates. French law requires builders of new apartment buildings to install chargers, but residents of existing buildings don’t receive those benefits.
As leaders in California and France seek to boost EV adoption, speakers at the conference identified the following challenges, also summarized in the report:
- Lack of access to affordable, convenient private electric vehicles;
- Complexity and cost of installing charging in urban settings and existing multifamily buildings;
- Declining federal incentives and insufficient vehicle demand;
- Electricity rate design decreases the financial viability of charging stations;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities; and
- Need for grid infrastructure upgrades to avoid high costs on first-movers.
The conference speakers also discussed priority solutions, as the report details, including:
- National and state governments could require owners of existing multifamily buildings to install charging stations;
- National and state governments could assist transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft in encouraging electric vehicle adoption among their drivers, through support for the deployment of fast-charging hubs, driver education programs, and new pilot projects; and
- Electric utilities and regulators could develop new rate designs to incentivize charging while optimizing grid efficiency.
These and other solutions are discussed in the report, which will hopefully help stakeholders in both jurisdictions achieve an electric future for transportation. Bonne route!
