UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian is running an op-ed from me that cites a new UC Berkeley study on how businesses have been crying wolf over environmental regulations that aim to limit pollution:
But new research from UC Berkeley professors Joseph Shapiro and Reed Walker provides comprehensive data to call out many businesses on these bluffs. The study shows how businesses in fact respond to environmental regulation with innovation and cleaner production practices — as well as increased productivity. They found that between 1990 and 2008, pollution from U.S. manufacturing fell a remarkable 60 percent, while at the same time manufacturing output actually increased.
As I describe in the piece, the lesson from the study is that smart policy that gives industry a clear and predictable signal can yield both environmental and public health gains, as well as continued economic output.
As states and countries around the world ramp up efforts to combat climate change, that less is worth heeding.
California continues to show its climate leadership, as the state legislature yesterday passed the groundbreaking Senate Bill 100 (De León) to bump its renewable portfolio standard from 50% to 60% by 2030, while pledging to achieve a 100% carbon-free grid by 2045. The state joins Hawaii, which had set a similar 2045 goal back in 2015.
California is now the leader within the U.S. at deploying renewables like solar and wind (excluding hydropower). Even Hawaii’s 2017 deployment of 27% renewables lags California’s at 35% in 2016, the latest years that figures are available.
The success of SB 100 (though Governor Brown has yet to sign it) is due in large part to the astounding decrease in the price of solar PV over the past decade. Despite utility objections, the state set the aggressive goal just three years ago of achieving 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Now just three years later, due to the speed and low cost of deployment, the legislature feels confident enough to boost that target an additional 10%.
And with the new “carbon-free” grid goal by 2045, California will have to ensure that its electricity mix includes only greenhouse-gas free sources like hydro, solar, wind, biomass, and perhaps nuclear. No longer will the state be able to rely on natural gas power plants to fill in the gaps in solar and wind production. And crucially, the legislation requires that achieving this target does not increase emissions elsewhere across the west. Otherwise, California has seen “resource shuffling” occur, where out-of-state renewables serve Californians instead of another state, causing the original state to replace the lost clean power with dirty energy.
Overall, the success of renewables deployment in the electricity sector is one of the primary reasons that California achieved its 2020 greenhouse goal four years early. And as the state moves to electrify more of its vehicles to reduce emissions from this growing sector, powering those vehicles from clean electricity will become even more critical.
Once again, while the federal government backslides, California is showing the country and the world what real leadership on clean technology and climate change looks like.
UCLA and UC Berkeley Schools of Law have released a new policy brief that describes the top challenges and solutions for deploying zero-emission freight technologies at Southern California’s ports. Policy Solutions to Boost Zero-Emission Freight at Southern California’s Ports summarizes the key findings from a conference on the topic at UCLA on June 8th.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach bring more goods into the U.S. than any other port in the country. Yet together they represent the single largest source of air pollution in Southern California. While harbor commissioners have adopted an ambitious plan to transition to cleaner fuels for port-based freight in the next two decades, achieving the vision will require hard work.
The brief summarizes the top three challenges to deploying zero-emission technology at the ports, such as battery-powered trucks, as discussed by speakers at the conference:
- Lack of charging and fueling infrastructure deployment
- Uncertainty regarding technological and economic feasibility of zero-emission technology
It then describes the top solutions (more detail in the policy brief) that speakers raised:
More infrastructure funding and community engagement
More pilot project funding to address technology needs and costs
Strategic roll-out of new technologies with greater stakeholder engagement
The conference that informed the brief was organized by UCLA Law and UC Berkeley Law, with sponsorship from Bank of America. Speakers included a keynote by California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols, as well as the CEOs of ProTerra, Total Transportation Services, Inc. (TTSI) and the Coalition for Clean Air. Also included were representatives from:
- Bank of America
- California Trucking Association
- Earthjustice
- Port of Long Beach
- Southern California Edison
- Tesla Motors
- Union of Concerned Scientists
And for more information on sustainable freight, please see Berkeley Law’s Delivering the Goods: How California Can Create the Sustainable Freight System of the Future (March 2018). You can also read my colleague Ted Lamm’s Capitol Weekly op-ed on the subject, as well as view the webinar on the Delivering the Goods report release:
California has essentially been “going it alone” on comprehensive climate policy in the United States for the last decade or so. But starting in 2019, that might just change. Oregon’s legislature is seriously considering adopting a cap-and-trade program next year, which would signify a major in-country expansion of California’s approach and provide more momentum for multi-state action to address climate change.
Oregon Coastal Caucus in the Chinook Casino ballroom in Lincoln City, Oregon
This week I’m at the Oregon Coast Caucus Economic Summit in Lincoln City, Oregon, an annual event organized by the bipartisan coastal delegation in the state’s legislature. A key theme of the event is climate policy. Despite the hyper-partisan poisoning of the climate debate around the country, here Republican legislators seem comfortable discussing carbon policies.
Why the difference? Two reasons: first, the Oregon coast is experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, particularly from ocean acidification and its negative effect on local oyster farms. Second, the Oregon coast is impoverished, yet with significant forest resources, leading many coastal representatives to view a state-level carbon policy as an opportunity to generate revenue that can then be spent locally.
The speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, Tina Kotek, is fully committed to adopting a cap-and-trade (or “cap-and-invest” as they’re calling it) program. But Kotek was rebuffed by Senate President and fellow-Democrat Peter Courtney this year due to the short even-year legislative session and complexity of the issue. However, at their joint lunch panel today, Senator Courtney pledged to bring the issue to a vote in 2019. Insiders I spoke with at the conference believe they will have the votes to pass it. The wildcard, however, is that the current governor, Kate Brown, is up for re-election this year and is facing a tough Republican challenger, funded in part by Nike founder Phil Knight.
But assuming the debate goes forward next year, the contours appeared to reveal themselves at the conference. Some businesses obviously don’t want the program at all, primarily out of fear of higher energy and transportation costs (although Oregon’s grid is already quite green and unlikely to be negatively impacts by any compliance obligations). The trucking industry wants any revenue raised to go to road repair, which would hardly be a way to encourage greenhouse gas reductions. However, this outcome might be unavoidable to some extent, due to a recent Oregon Supreme Court decision that limits funds raised from transportation to highway spending only. But I’m told creative workarounds could be found, such as using any proceeds to fund transit lanes on highways or electric vehicle charging stations along routes. Meanwhile, utilities would like to be exempt entirely from the program, much as they essentially were in the early days of the California program. The list of business concerns goes on from there.
The good news is that all of these issues can likely be resolved with robust discussion, study and debate. And based on what I’ve heard so far at the summit, state leaders are already well on their way. For those who are in favor of multi-state coalitions to address climate change, it’s a welcome sight.
California legislators are currently considering legislation (AB 813) to expand our grid across the western U.S., which would help integrate variable renewable energy more economically across a broader geographic region. However, the bill is hung up on disputes around labor and governance, as well as concerns that a regional grid will lengthen the lifespan of coal-fired power plants across the west.
But in the meantime, California’s grid operator has been operating a successful “energy imbalance market” in western states, as explained in this helpful video overview:
While a regional grid would be more effective, the energy imbalance market is helping to spur renewable production across the west. In turn that deployment means more industry support for renewables, even in conservative states.
The Obama EPA’s proposed “Clean Power Plan” was that administration’s big effort to regulate carbon pollution under the federal Clean Air Act. But now the Trump administration is set to propose an alternative approach this week that is likely to lead to more pollution and ironically less flexibility for the business community (similar to how the auto industry got an unwelcome full-scale rollback of clean car standards with potentially years of litigation and uncertainty to come).
The Obama Clean Power Plan was a response to the U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), in which the court ordered EPA to treat greenhouse gases as a traditional air pollutant under the statute. So when it came to implementing the order for the U.S. power sector, EPA’s Clean Power Plan was an effort to limit carbon emissions from power plants, particularly dirty coal-fired ones.
EPA’s approach was to regulate the whole system of power within a state, not just the plants themselves. This approach allowed states to come up with their own plans to meet federal targets set by EPA. The key was that these plans could regulate “beyond the fence line” of fossil fueled-power plants, to provide more flexibility to meet these targets. States could use a mix of energy efficiency, renewables, carbon trading, and energy storage to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the power sector as a whole.
The alternative “inside the fence line” approach would have required massive and expensive on-site upgrades to coal-fired power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, most likely through unproven and costly carbon capture and storage approaches, in which the carbon would be captured from the smokestack and pumped underground. Costs would have been passed on to ratepayers.
The upside of the “beyond the fence line” approach was that utilities and states would have significant flexibility to meet these EPA carbon targets in the most cost-effective, technologically proven way. The downside was the legal vulnerability it created, by calling into question just how far EPA’s reach could go in regulating the power sector.
Needless to say, coal industry leaders feared the negative impacts this plan would have on their power plants. And in Trump they’ve found a receptive audience.
According to the New York Times, the Trump EPA will reportedly release a new plan this week that will task states with coming up with their own plans and targets — even deciding not to set carbon targets at all. Furthermore, all of the regulatory action must happen “inside the fence line.”
The result of this weak approach will likely be a new lease on life for many coal plants in the U.S., and ironically much less flexibility for utilities and grid operators to meet any stringent targets set by states that truly want to reduce carbon from the power sector.
As with any Trump regulatory action, the new regulation will be litigated, and so far the Trump administration has been on an epic losing streak in the courts. And the continuing price declines of renewable energy and natural gas has generally made coal non-competitive going forward anyway.
This new move is yet another attempt by Trump’s team to rescue a dirty and dying industry through regulatory favoritism. Meanwhile, the litigation that will result may not be finalized by the time of the next presidential election, giving some hope for a political resolution and better result in the meantime.
Lamoille Canyon, Nevada, June 2018 (photo by author)
One of the big — but often under-the-radar — environmental consequences of electing a Republican to the presidency is giving control over the nation’s vast public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries. And Trump has been no exception.
Since coming into office and appointing people like Ryan Zinke to run the Department of Interior, federal agencies have been working to open up vast public lands — mostly within the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the west — to coal and mineral mining, as well as oil and gas drilling. The Trump Administration is even trying to reverse Obama-era National Monument designations in places like Utah.
Many of these decisions are irreversible — once an area has been drilled, despoiled or mined, it may never come back in the same state, at least in our lifetimes. And the roads that cut through these areas to support these industrial operations in the wilderness usher in more development and destruction over time.
Location of the Ruby Mountains in Nevada
This summer I had an opportunity to visit and camp in one such area now under threat by Trump Administration policies. The Ruby Mountains are a little-known jewel in eastern Nevada near the small town of Elko off Interstate 80 (see map). They feature 11,000 foot peaks and incredible canyons, often aptly called the “Swiss Alps” of Nevada (see my photo above of Lamoille Canyon this June). By all rights these mountains should be a national monument or even a national park, but they’re currently Forest Service lands with BLM governing the subsurface — and therefore vulnerable to industrial exploitation.
And that’s what the Trump Administration is now ready to authorize. The BLM is set to allow oil and gas leasing across the Rubies, as E&E News reported. While the agency claims that well pads and drilling would occur outside the boundaries on adjacent lands, drilling opponents (including local sportsmen and environmentalists) argue that the “no surface occupancy” provision of the leases will not protect water and wildlife in the mountains.
It’s just one more loss for the public with the despoiling of these areas. These policies also have a large cumulative impact on the climate. Research by Peter Erickson and Michael Lazarus of the nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute published in the journal Climatic Change showed that leaving all that oil, gas and coal in the ground in our public lands could save 280 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030, equivalent to about 5 percent of total U.S. emissions.
Hopefully a coalition of opponents and some strategic lawsuits can halt these leases and reverse some of the broader policies. At the very least, they may be able to stall the projects long enough until we get a political change. Because as long as modern-day Republicans hold office, our public lands will continue to face this kind of industrial exploitation.
EPA’s proposed rollback of federal clean car mileage standards would be crippling to U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And its unprecedented proposed revocation of California’s ability to set stricter standards would specifically harm our state’s climate efforts.
I’ll be discussing the latest on this proposal this morning at 10am on KALW radio’s “Your Call” at 10am. I’ll be joined on the panel by Dr. Daniel Sperling, professor of civil engineering and environmental science and policy at UC Davis and member of the California Air Resources Board. It will be a follow-up to our recent KQED Forum appearance.
Tune in and call with questions!
A national carbon tax just may have some political life to it, if recent polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication is any indication:
Support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is about 68 percent nationwide, with opposition at around 29 percent, the latest iteration of the Yale Climate Opinion Maps shows. The interactive maps combine large-scale surveys with demographic and election data for a model its creators say can reliably estimate public opinion down to the local level.
These findings probably won’t help the recent plan from a Republican congressman to tax carbon as a climate strategy, which is essentially dead-on-arrival. But it could signal long-term life for this policy goal, as Congress changes.
Of course, public support for a federal cap-and-trade program was also pretty good back in the 2000s (recall Newt Gingrich teaming up with Nancy Pelosi to support similar efforts to address climate change), before the fossil fuel industry launched a major public relations campaign against it.
But there were some interesting additional nuggets from the Yale research:
-
Seventy-seven percent of American adults think carbon dioxide should be regulated as a pollutant, and 70 percent think environmental protection is more important than economic growth.
-
Sixty-two percent of American adults think global warming is affecting the weather. Wyoming and West Virginia are the only states where that view is not held by most people.
Turns out coal-producing areas like Wyoming and West Virginia are the least prone to accept climate science. No surprise there, but still interesting to see how people’s jobs influence their ability to process facts.
In fact, the Salt Lake Tribune noted that the Yale research showed heavy climate denial in one local coal-dominated county:
[E]astern Utah’s Emery County is one of just three counties in the nation where less than half of all adults believe that global warming is happening.
And that is out of 3,142 counties researched by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Joining Emery with less than half of adults believing in climate change are Heard County, Ga., and Grant County, W. Va.
Yet another point in support of Upton Sinclair’s famous observation: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The U.S. federal government has not provided much hope to climate advocates. The Trump administration has launched a full-scale assault on climate policies. But even under Obama, the level of action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions was not on pace with what’s needed to avert catastrophic warming.
But fortunately cities and states can do a lot on their own. America’s Pledge, an initiative co-founded by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently released a report that provides “bottom-up” strategies for cities, states, and businesses to address climate change. As Utility Dive summarized, the ten opportunity areas include the following:
- Expanding renewable energy
- Accelerating retirement of coal power
- Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency
- Electrifying buildings’ energy use
- Accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles
- Phasing out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
- Preventing methane leaks from gas wells
- Reducing methane leaks in cities
- Increasing carbon sequestration on land
- Establishing state and regional carbon markets
All of these areas do not necessarily require federal policy support (although it would be helpful), and many involve limiting emissions from powerful “short-lived climate pollutants” like methane and HFCs (I would also highlight land use and transit policies to promote smart growth as an important area of focus).
Straightforward examples at this level of policy making include developing energy efficiency building codes, steering municipal utilities to procure more renewable energy and energy storage, and providing incentives for electric vehicle adoption, such as through more charging stations and municipal fleet purchases.
But developing these policies at the state and local levels is more than just an effort to salvage climate policy in the face of federal inaction. We should be pursuing these policies anyway, for multiple reasons. Specifically, state and local action:
- Creates a decentralized web of climate policies that can’t be reversed with one bad national election that might deliver Congress or the presidency to climate deniers — producing more policy stability overall.
- Fosters local innovation that might result in successful programs or technologies that can scale nationwide or globally.
- Provides more accountability and flexibility on policy implementation, since decision makers will be in close proximity to those affected by the policies, both good and bad.
So while federal inaction on climate change can be a source of frustration and potential peril, it may also provide us with a good excuse to take action that needed to happen anyway — a silver lining on an otherwise dark storm cloud.
