I’ve spoken to many people who are having trouble focusing after last week’s election. A Trump victory, with a multi-month transition process before he actually takes office, provides plenty of mental fodder for imagining disaster scenarios. Certainly on environmental issues, with a compliant congress, there’s virtually no limit to what he can do to unravel environmental protections.
But fear not — all that mind-wandering may actually be good for you, as a recent UC Berkeley/University of British Columbia study found:
“Everyone’s mind has a natural ebb and flow of thought, but our framework reconceptualizes disorders like ADHD, depression and anxiety as extensions of that normal variation in thinking,” said [study co-author and postdoctoral scholar Zachary] Irving. “This framework suggests, in a sense, that we all have someone with anxiety and ADHD in our minds. The anxious mind helps us focus on what’s personally important; the ADHD mind allows us to think freely and creatively.”
In the months and years to come, we will likely need that creative thinking as we figure out how to protect the environment and stabilize planetary temperatures in the face of this new political order.
This might sound crazy, but Donald Trump’s presidency could actually have a temporarily positive impact on climate change. How? Nothing reduces emissions like a recession, and according to economists, Trump’s stated policies are likely to cause one.
Specifically, if Trump follows through on his promise to start a trade war with countries like China, he could end up reducing the U.S. carbon footprint significantly. Imagine higher tariffs on goods from China, U.S. cars manufactured in Mexico, and stuff from the myriad other places that export items we buy. The result will be higher prices on those goods, which will mean less consumption. Less consumption means fewer carbon emissions.
Then think of the result on those producing countries. We could see a slowdown in the economy of places like China, where growth is in large part due to sales of cheap stuff to the U.S. market. Because China itself is now a major emitter of greenhouse gases, a slowdown there will also reduce global emissions.
This isn’t just theoretical: we have experience on this issue from the Great Recession. That slowdown caused a dip in the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a UC Irvine study. The recession also made it easier for California to meet its 2020 emissions goals, as E&E News reported:
“California had a pretty soft economy for many years after its goal was set,” said Severin Borenstein, an economics professor at UC Berkeley and a member of a committee that the California Air Resources Board (ARB) set up in 2012-13 to advise it on the design of its cap-and-trade market. “Although it’s heating up now, we will easily make the 2020 goal, and that will in large part be due to the weak economy for many years.”
Now to be clear, an economic downturn is not something to root for, and it would cause all sorts of hardship and potentially more political instability. To avoid that outcome, California regulators have been meticulous and careful about making the transition to a clean economy without shocking the economy. Indeed, the state is instead focused on ways to benefit economically from clean technology, contrary to the usual conservative complaints about environmental action costing jobs and economic growth.
But Trump’s policies on trade, immigration and other economic issues may lead us to a recession regardless of what California does. And if that happens, the one silver lining for those concerned about climate change is that it will likely offer a temporary pause to the emission of heat-trapping gases. And that could buy the world more time to emerge from a post-Trump era with still a fighting chance to limit climate change.
After last night’s presidential election results, it’s easy to despair that we’ve lost the fight against climate change. Trump will likely kill the federal Clean Power Plan and pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement. He’ll also probably pull back regulations that make it harder to permit coal-fired power plants and conduct other business activity that furthers a fossil fuel-powered economy.
Yes, California’s climate program will continue, as a bright spot. But the state relies on the federal government in crucial ways to lessen the economic burdens to Californians of the transition to a clean economy. The immediate examples that come to mind are the federal tax credits and research on solar and wind energy, tax credits for electric vehicles and associated charging infrastructure, and general support for and research on energy storage technologies. Without that support, California’s climate policies will likely become more expensive and potentially politically unpopular.
So where do climate advocates go from here? My colleague Dan Farber’s post on Legal Planet is right on: use political leverage, the courts, and continued state action. But I fear the first two options will be made more difficult given the potential for a coming breakdown in our governance system, as the full weight of “11/8” is felt in our institutions, from the courts to congress to the media.
That leaves state action. And in this respect, as Dan described, there may be cause for hope. In fact, given the hostile national politics during even the Obama years with a Democratic congress, this election may be an important wake-up call about the most viable path forward, politically speaking — even had Clinton won. Especially since the federal Clean Power Plan, which represents the high-water mark for federal action given congressional resistance, has pretty weak targets that won’t set in for years.
California is the obvious state leader here, but so are other west coast and northeast states. We’re long past the time when those states should join together for unified policies to boost clean technologies and price carbon. Those coalitions are happening fitfully but need to be accelerated. That means unified carbon markets, incentives for renewables, and a common market for electric vehicles, among other policies.
Internationally, the Paris agreement was always just a paper commitment. Action to achieve the ambitious international targets will still require courageous policies at the state and subregional level. And now that the Paris agreement is called into question under a Trump administration, we can see the wisdom of California’s approach to sign up subnational entities to commit to this fight. The “Under 2 Coalition,” as it’s now called, represents 136 cities and states with 832 million people and $22 trillion in GDP. It’s the brainchild of Governor Jerry Brown’s senior advisor Ken Alex, and it may represent the world’s best hope to achieve the goals spelled out in the Paris accord.
So while many climate advocates will be playing defense at the federal level for the foreseeable future, the offensive play, to my mind, is through state coalitions and bolstering of the Under 2 Coalition. It’s not going to be easy, but it was always an uphill battle anyway. And while the climb is now steeper, we still have a way forward.
California’s housing affordability crisis gets worse by the day. The lower and middle classes are squeezed, due to decades of under-building as a result of restrictive local zoning and permitting. Since at least the 1970s, local communities up-and-down the state have simultaneously decided they don’t want newcomers to live anywhere near them.
Now two new studies are out to chronicle the problem and offer solutions.
The first up is from McKinsey & Company, in a study called “A Tool Kit to Close California’s Hoursing Gap: 3.5 million Homes By 2025.” They describe the problem in a few snapshots:
In Anaheim, Long Beach, and Los Angeles, households earning up to 115 percent of area median income, or $69,800 per year, are unable to afford local housing costs. In the city of San Francisco, a household earning $140,000 per year, or 179 percent of area median income, is squeezed.
They then went about figuring where new homes could go, with an eye toward more low-carbon infill homes:
We identified physical capacity to add more than five million units in “housing hot spots.” This is more than enough to close the state’s housing gap. More than a quarter million of these units could be built on urban land that is already zoned for multifamily development and is sitting vacant. Up to 3 million units could be built within a half-mile of high-frequency public-transit stations. More than 600,000 could be added by homeowners to existing single-family homes.
But of course identifying sites is not the same as getting the homes built. To that end, the study authors recommend a bunch of solutions, such as more funding for affordable housing and cheaper construction through modular units. But here are the main ones:
To unlock these units, California needs both public and private sector innovations. Shortening the land use approval process in California could reduce the cost of housing by more than $12 billion through 2025 and accelerate project approval times by four months on average. Reducing construction permitting times could cut another $1.6 billion, and raising construction productivity and deploying modular construction techniques up to another $100 billion. Governments could reallocate $10 billion a year in developer impact fees to other forms of revenue generation in order to lower housing costs. California could also incentivize local governments to approve already-planned-for housing to achieve 40,000 more units annually.
This study is helpful in shedding light on just how many units we need and where they could go to minimize environmental impact. But notably, the study lacks a financial feasibility analysis, and the solutions are, per usual, much easier said than done. Still, it’s a great addition to the housing conversation in California.
Meanwhile, the Bay Area Council conducted a similar study, “Solving the Housing Affordability Crisis: How Policies Change the Number of San Francisco Households Burdened by Housing Costs.”
Their bottom line? As with McKinsey, policy makers need to streamline and shorten the housing permitting process. Here’s the handy chart on high-impact local policies (for better and for worse):
Both studies should lend support for speeding up local approval processes, such as the governor’s failed “by-right” approval process for any project consistent with local zoning. Expect local representatives and their homeowners to put up a big fight. But if we continue to defer to them, the problem will only get worse, putting our economy and environment in continued jeopardy.
To meet the challenge of climate change, California and other governments will need to adopt a suite of policies affecting multiple sectors. Reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions will take reforms in energy, land use, transportation, and agriculture, to name just a few.
Since 2009, UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law, with the generous support of Bank of America, have been developing policy recommendations for California and other jurisdictions to meet ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets. In California and increasingly in other jurisdictions, these targets are legally mandated and based on what climate scientists tell us is needed to reduce the threat of catastrophic climate change.
Please join us for a free webinar on Wednesday, November 9th, from 2-3pm, to launch the two law schools’ new climate policy website. The site contains all the recommendations from our work since 2009 on reducing carbon emissions in multiple sectors of the economy. It features easy-to-navigate pages organized by issue topic (renewables, fuels, etc.). It also groups solutions around the specific challenges they address and lists them by the actors who can implement them (state officials, local representatives, businesses, etc.)
All of the policy recommendations result from a series of workshops the law schools have convened since 2009. They included key stakeholders from the business, academic, and policy sectors of the affected industries. The recommendations are also contained in reports accessible via CLEE or the UCLA Emmett Institute.
The webinar will feature:
- Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board
- Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner, DBL Investors
- Amanda Eaken, transportation & climate director, Natural Resources Defense Council
We will also include a demonstration of the website, now available at www.climatepolicysolutions.org
Register today at this link and to receive instructions about how to participate. Note that attendance will be capped. Hope you can join!
If you want to hear about rail in Pasadena, come out tonight. I’ll be discussing the past and future of the Gold Line light rail to Pasadena and beyond, at the Downtown Pasadena Neighborhood Association’s annual meeting at 7:00 p.m. I’ll also cover Measure M on the county ballot and what it might do for a proposed Gold Line extension beyond the current terminus in Azusa. More info here.
And if you’re a lawyer in need of some environmental law discussion (and continuing legal education credits), come out tomorrow to the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s (LACBA) 15th Annual Environmental Law Fall Symposium: The Courts, the Climate, and the Deal: The Latest Developments. I’ll be on a panel discussing “Climate Change Regulation in California: 2020 and Beyond,” mainly focusing on the murky future of the state’s cap-and-trade program. That conference will be held tomorrow at the InterContinental Los Angeles Century City, from 11:30 to 4:3pm.
Hope to see you at one or both!
The presidential election next week is making most of the news these days, but while the rest of the country flirts with electing Donald Trump as the next president, California is going its own progressive way. The Republican Party has been all but completely marginalized in this state, mostly due to its anti-Latino rhetoric and policies from the 1990s that created a huge voter backlash from that growing segment of the population. In addition, the state’s more progressive metropolitan areas overwhelm voters in the more-conservative inland areas.
The state legislature briefly had a two-thirds supermajority of Democrats in both houses back in 2012. But scandals erased that margin in 2012 pretty quickly, with a few lost incumbents. In the end, not much came of it, policy wise.
So why does two-thirds matter? The number is significant because with two-thirds votes, the legislature can raise taxes and also put constitutional initiatives on the ballot without having to do an expensive signature-gathering effort. Otherwise, simple majority votes on revenues and constitutional initiatives are not sufficient.
Now Democrats have another chance at the two-thirds prize, if they can topple a few Republican incumbents with the big presidential-year turnout. What to do if they get it? Here’s my wish-list:
- Place a constitutional initiative before the voters to lower the voter-approval threshold for local transportation funding measures to 55%, from the current 2/3 requirement. 2/3 is a high bar for locals to attain. It usually results in overly compromised, watered-down measures that aren’t the most efficient use of funds but are necessary to achieve consensus support. 55% is much more reasonable.
- Replace the gas tax with a vehicle miles traveled fee. The gas tax is declining relative to inflation and as vehicles become more fuel efficient. As a result, California’s automobile infrastructure is crumbling and lacking sufficient funds from drivers. A mileage fee would accurately track how much wear drivers actually cause on the roads, plus it would help rein in incentives for sprawl, which autonomous vehicles could exacerbate.
- Re-authorize AB 32 (Nunez, 2006) and SB 32 (Pavley, 2016), California’s landmark 2020 and 2030 climate change laws. With a two-thirds supermajority re-approving those otherwise-majority approved measures, the Air Resources Board (the agency responsible for implementing the law) would be free to continue with its cap-and-trade program or even develop a carbon tax to rein in carbon pollution. Right now, the cap-and-trade auction is facing litigation because the legislature only approved the authorizing legislation by a majority vote. And a carbon tax is not legally permissible. Two-thirds votes would free the program of these legal challenges, particularly post-2020, and give the board more leeway on other carbon pricing mechanisms.
We’ll see what happens next Tuesday, and even with a super-majority it will be hard to keep the Democratic caucus unified. But if it can work, accomplishing these wish-list items would produce some major environmental wins for the state.
On Friday, Elon Musk unveiled a way to make solar panels as sleek and cool as Tesla has made electric cars. You can watch the video above, but it’s hard not to feel like this is the future of solar panels. The panels are broken down into tiles that (according to the video and photos) look pretty much exactly like real roofing material. According to Musk, they are also supposedly sturdier than everyday roofing material. In short, there’s no negative aesthetic impact from the panels, while you get a better roof in the process.
You can see photos here from Tech Crunch. And here’s the slate tile model, in the photo on the right. As you can see, it’s hard to tell that there’s any solar PV modules in there. It looks “real.”
Musk made a point to say that the cost of the solar roof is less than the cost of a new roof plus electricity. That could be the case, but right now we don’t have any cost figures on the solar roof. We also know that the solar roof panels are not as efficient as regular solar panels (as the Tech Crunch article points out), and presumably any homeowner would be paying for panels in inefficient (i.e. shaded) parts of the roof. Plus, they wouldn’t be sized to the demand on-site, so customers may be paying for too much solar production compared to the retail credit they can get to offset their usage.
And of course, how many people are replacing their roofs in any given year? If the average roof lasts 25 years, that means just 4% of the market, and probably less given that many people are renting or living in multi-unit dwellings without access to their roof.
But Musk knows that the incentives around rooftop solar are diminishing across the country. As his PowerWall battery gets cheaper, solar customers are going to want to bundle solar with storage, effectively making any utility credit system pointless. After all, why be dependent on regulators giving you retail credit for any surplus solar you generate, when you can just use all your solar energy on-site as you store it for nighttime and cloudy days in your battery?
So lots of unanswered questions, but one thing is clear: solar panels just became sleek and cool — something you couldn’t necessarily say before Friday.
Ever since California was invaded in the nineteenth century and eventually absorbed by the U.S., our land management practices have been atrocious. Mining and lumber companies went to work clear cutting most of the forests, including even rare giant sequoias, using the wood for mine shafts and other infrastructure.
Then, compounding matters, land managers have actively suppressed forest fires, leading to overgrown forests ripe for catastrophic fires and now intense tree die-offs due to drought and climate change.
Contrast this to Native California land management, which involved regular burns that cleared out the forest understory and left giant, well-spaced trees to thrive.
Now a new UC Berkeley study documents how controlled fires can provide all sorts of benefits for forest health and water supply:
“When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed. And it increases the drought resistance of the remaining trees and also increases the fire resilience because you have created these natural firebreaks,” said Gabrielle Boisramé, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and first author of the study.
You can see more in the video above from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Meanwhile, the forests in the central and southern Sierra Nevada are experiencing an unprecedented pine tree die-off, due to the drought and climate change, as I mentioned above. Had these forests been managed properly, the pine trees would not have been able to grow back in water-competing clumps and might have been better able to withstand the drought.
Below is a photo I took from Yosemite National Park last weekend, where towering dead pines are going to be cleared out soon, leaving the area almost unrecognizable, and perhaps permanently altered. Let’s hope this situation motivates more responsible forest management practices going forward (tree thinning and controlled burns), as well as a stepped up fight against climate change.
California’s high speed rail system has been moving at a low speed since voters approved a bond issue to launch it in 2008. That ballot measure authorized a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles and eventually Anaheim, at speeds of 220 miles per hour and stops in Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield. The total trip time would be no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes between the two big cities, at fares less than airplane travel.
The rationale for the system is that it will provide a cheaper way to move a growing population around the state than expanding airports and highways. It will connect the relatively weak economies of the Central Valley with the prosperous coastal cities, providing an economic boost, all while enabling low-carbon transportation and promoting car-free lifestyles for communities connected to the system.
But since 2008, legal and political battles have slowed the system’s progress, as everyone from farmers in the Central Valley, wealthy homeowners in the San Francisco peninsula, and even equestrians in the hills above Burbank have fought to push the route away from their land. It’s local NIMBY politics on a statewide scale.
Current proposed high speed rail route
These legal and political challenges have in turn created funding headaches for the system. The original price tag of $40 billion ballooned to a projected $118 billion, before a revised business plan reduced it to an estimated $62 billion, as described in the 2016 business plan. Of that amount, the 2008 bond issues provides almost $10 billion, federal funds provide another $3.3 billion, and cap-and-trade funds may provide another few billion. System backers hope the rest come from private sources, but so far none have stepped up.
With strong support from the governor, the state was able to dedicate 25% of cap-and-trade auction proceeds to high speed rail construction. But the auction faces legal uncertainty going forward, due to a pending court case brought by the California Chamber of Commerce. An adverse verdict could mean that the money will halt either immediately or post 2020.
Meanwhile, the federal government has been unusually stingy with this infrastructure project. After Republicans took over Congress in the 2010 midterms, the federal dollars dried up, leaving the state to fund the project on its own. Only the 2009 stimulus provided some federal money for the train, but nowhere close to a match for the state contribution. By comparison, the federal government typically contributes 50% of the money for urban rail systems and between 90 and 100% for highways.
The funding picture has now affected the route design. The initial connections were going to be from the Central Valley to somewhere north of Los Angeles, hooking into the commuter Metrolink train to deliver passengers to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Now there’s not enough money to get the train through the Tehachapi mountains that separate Southern California from the Central Valley. So the initial connection will now go to San Jose from the Central Valley, with a link to the commuter Caltrain to get passengers to San Francisco. High speed rail bond money will then pay for upgrades to Caltrain and Metrolink, to prepare those systems for eventual high speed rail connections.
So with all the controversy and politics for this important project, I look forward to interviewing California High Speed Rail Authority chair Dan Richard tonight on City Visions, on NPR affiliate 91.7 FM KALW radio in San Francisco, from 7-8pm. For those out of the area, you can stream it or listen to the archived broadcast after the show here. I’ll ask Dan for more information on the funding, politics, and current construction status. And listeners are free to call in or email with questions. Hope you can tune in and ask your questions about the system’s future!
