Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) and UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment are releasing today a new policy report: Branching Out: Waste Biomass Policies To Promote Wildfire Resilience and Emission Reduction. The report offers solutions to develop a sustainable market for the residual waste material generated by wildfire treatments on forested and other high fire risk lands.
In response to California’s devastating wildfires over the past several years, government and private landowners are removing excess material at risk of burning, such as dead trees and other vegetation, to create fire breaks that protect lives and buildings. Once cut and stacked, this material risks burning in the next fire, creating additional carbon emissions and air pollution.
Yet rather than leave the waste debris on the forest floor, property owners could potentially use it to create wood products, chips and mulch, or other end uses, which can help defray the costs of wildfire treatments and offset emissions from the production of these products.
To advance this conversation, CLEE and the Emmett Institute convened a small group of experts to discuss opportunities to improve the market for debris material. Several key solutions emerged from the conversation, including for the governor and state legislature to:
- Create a role for the state to serve as a broker for woody feedstock supply, potentially alongside local governments, facilitated through the California Natural Resources Agency.
- Direct the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research to support data mapping and brokerage initiatives for regional supply chain management.
- Dedicate resources towards forest resilience workforce and economic development at local and regional levels.
State agencies are already tackling this issue from several different angles. The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research oversees five pilot projects intended to improve feedstock aggregation mechanisms. The pilot projects are spread throughout the state, and local leaders jointly manage the entities under combined local land use authorities delegated by local government partners. Meanwhile, CAL FIRE’s Business and Workforce Development Grant program offers up to $24 million to projects that advance the wood products market and workforce.
To avoid the risk of unintended negative consequences, such as clearing of healthy forest material that does not promote wildfire resilience, state leaders could deploy the solutions presented in the report over a limited time period, focused narrowly on debris material, in regions with the greatest need for state support (due to material accumulation or potential for community benefits, or a combination of both). They could also ensure they integrate these practices into the broader forest management and wildfire resilience context.
Ultimately, these vegetation management practices are one component of a broader forest and wildfire management strategy that should include prescribed burn and more intentional siting of population centers outside of high fire risk areas. However, by following these recommendations, the state can ensure that when land managers complete vegetation management actions, they have the option to remove and dispose of the residual waste material in a responsible manner, offsetting emissions and reducing demand for new wood products.
For a full list of solutions and more detailed discussion, view the policy report.
CLEE & UCLA Law will host a public webinar on Monday, May 9 from 4:00pm to 5:00pm Pacific Time to discuss report findings and hear from a panel of experts who will share their insights on the problem and potential solutions. Speakers include:
- Jessica Morse, Deputy Secretary, California Natural Resources Agency
- Phil Saksa, Ph.D., Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Blue Forest
Register to join!
I’m guest hosting Your Call’s Media Roundtable this morning at 10am PT, where we’ll first discuss the state of emergency in El Salvador, following a rise in gang violence. The measure restricts the freedom of the press and suspends civil liberties including the right to assembly and access to a lawyer. More than 17,000 have been arrested since the state of emergency was declared a month ago.
According to El Faro, a leading investigative digital news outlet, earlier this month, President Bukele also ordered changes to the Penal Code that press advocates warn censor journalism about gangs and would impede news outlets from questioning the official narrative on issues such as security policy and the government’s secret negotiations with the gangs.
Joining us will be Anna-Cat Brigida, a freelance journalist in Latin America.
Then we’ll talk about why California continues to approve new oil and gas wells. The state approved more new wells in March and April than in any two-month period since last October. We also discuss the power and influence of fossil fuel lobbyists on regulators and lawmakers in California. According to a new analysis by Capital & Main, between 2018 and 2021, lobbying organizations representing oil and gas companies spent almost $77.5 million advocating for the industry’s interests in Sacramento.
Joining us will be Aaron Cantu, award winning investigative journalist covering gas and oil in California for the Capital and Main.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for these guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter with plans to take the company private, what are the potential consequences for the fight against climate change, the crucial issue of our time? Like him or not, the Tesla CEO has arguably been the most impactful private industry actor revolutionizing clean technology. Will the purchase affect his work on clean technology?
It would be hard to overstate Musk’s value to the global decarbonization effort. His company Tesla Motors, guided by his relentless and innovative vision, has helped revolutionize the automobile industry, completely transforming it in the face of legacy automakers who made only a token effort on electric vehicles at best for decades. Now they face extinction from their inability to embrace change. Given the transportation’s sector outsized role in contributing to climate change, Musk’s role in reshaping this industry has helped give the world a fighting to chance to avoid the worst of climate impacts.
As if that’s not enough, Tesla’s work on electric vehicles has also vastly accelerated energy storage deployment of lithium ion batteries, which are central to decarbonizing the electric grid along with intermittent renewables. What’s more, Tesla now has the promise to dramatically scale up heat pumps, an important all-electric means of heating and cooling spaces. The company has improved upon them for use in vehicles, with enormous upside for expansion to buildings.
And not to mention Tesla also has a solar division. Though it has admittedly languished since Musk purchased Solar City from his cousin a few years ago, in the long run solar panels pair perfectly with home battery storage and electric vehicles for consumers.
But all of that progress could be undermined going forward by Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The specific risk for the climate change fight is that Musk might become “distracted” running Twitter (i.e. absent at critical times, with his mental energy no longer devoted to providing critical vision and direction for the company, especially since he already runs a space rocket and tunneling company). If that happens, could Tesla lose its competitive edge?
Perhaps worse, Musk’s deal to take Twitter private is heavily leveraged, and his Tesla stock provides much of the collateral. If Twitter starts to sputter (the company lost $493 million last year, and Musk himself has acknowledged that this purchase is not about making money) and Musk defaults or has to sell, will that devalue Tesla stock, depriving that company of capital for its much-needed global expansion?
On the upside, given his track record, we could assume that Musk has the potential to work some magic for a social media site plagued by controversies over free speech and how it handles misinformation. If Musk can instill more confidence among social media users across the political spectrum in Twitter, while improving debates that counter climate misinformation, perhaps Twitter can be a force for positive climate education. But given the partisan entrenchment of views on both climate policy and science, this seems unlikely to occur.
If by some miracle Musk can turn Twitter into a cash cow, then another upside is that his additional resulting wealth could help bolster not only his proven companies like Tesla but potentially provide him extra funds to invest in new clean tech start-ups that could help reduce emissions in other industries. You never know.
On balance, a better Twitter could be a positive force for society. But given Musk’s key role in the climate fight, it’s hard to see the upside for the critical clean technology we need to reduce emissions and stave off the worst of climate change.
Of course, Musk is free to do what he wants with his billions. And he’s already arguably contributed more to the climate fight than any other company leader. But in the long run, a fight over social media won’t matter much if the world doesn’t get a handle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Building the mineral supply chain needed to deploy electric vehicles (including cars, buses, bicycles, and scooters) on a massive scale, if done without planning and engagement, could exacerbate environmental and social harms to communities in countries and regions where minerals are mined and processed (and, to a lesser extent, manufactured and later recycled) into usable batteries. A typical electric vehicle battery requires an array of minerals, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel, among others. Many of the locations with the richest supply of these resources are in countries or near communities with histories of governance challenges and exploitation of local and indigenous communities for resource extraction.
Governments, companies, communities, and civil society organizations face a daunting challenge: increase electric vehicle adoption and battery production, while ensuring the highest level of protection for human rights, community consent and input, and the environment.
To address this challenge, UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) convened experts in December 2021 to discuss opportunities for increased advocacy and collaboration and to identify policy challenges and opportunities. Our new policy brief highlights key solutions including battery labeling standards, mining law reform, and increased technical assistance. Convening participants identified opportunities for advocates and industry leaders to improve international coordination, advocacy efforts, community engagement, and circular economy practices.
Key barriers and solutions include:
- Barrier 1: Poor supply chain governance. Policymakers lack comprehensive and targeted governance strategies to minimize harm at each stage of battery material’s lifecycle.
- Example solution: Strengthen binding measures. Enhancing binding legal and regulatory measures would support enforcement while promoting global consistency around supply chain sustainability expectations.
- Barrier 2: Lack of attention to community needs and human rights. Current mineral supply chain systems too often fail to incorporate the rights, priorities, and needs of vulnerable groups and communities impacted by mining and processing activities, as well as the transportation activities that support movement of minerals (such as additional pollution from construction and transportation vehicles, or noise from new roads).
- Example solution: Bolster technical assistance and funding. Advocacy organizations, philanthropic organizations, research institutions, and governments could allocate more resources towards supporting human rights and community priorities through funding and technical assistance.
- Barrier 3: Lack of incentives for circular economy practices and demand reduction. A lack of emphasis on circularity, and on strategies to minimize the projected demand for new battery materials while still achieving transportation decarbonization, poses a barrier to a sustainable supply chain that promotes human rights and environmental protection.
- Example solution: Set recycled content targets. Implementing targets for incorporating recycled materials into new battery cells could promote market demand for recycled materials over newly extracted materials.
For a full set of solutions and to learn more, see the policy brief here.
Cross-posted and adapted from co-author Katie Segal’s blog on Legal Planet.
Tonight on State of the Bay, we’ll talk about why fighting crime in San Francisco is more challenging than ever. Joining us will be Deepak Premkumar, Research Fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).
We’ll also learn about the latest UN report on climate change impacts and what it means for the Bay Area, with Dr. Patrick Gonzalez, forest ecologist and climate change scientist at UC Berkeley.
Finally, we’ll hear from an underwater portrait photographer Erena Shimoda and find out how she’s helping trauma survivors.
What would you like to ask our guests? Post a comment here, tweet us @StateofBay, send an email to stateofthebay@kalw.org or leave a voicemail at (415) 580-0718.
Tune in tonight at 6pm PT on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live. You can also call 866-798-TALK with questions during the show.
Last week, leaders from the Biden Administration announced they would start awarding $5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law for a nationwide electric vehicle charging deployment.
I appeared on KTVU News in the San Francisco Bay Area to discuss this investment, which promises to be among the more consequential climate provisions that the administration has passed so far. You can watch the clip here:
I was also interviewed on NPR Marketplace about the spending, and I described why consumer perceptions about the ability to take a long road trip in an EV can loom large in purchasing decisions. You can listen here:
The administration still has another $2.5 billion to spend on EV charging from the law, and this next allotment will go to local communities, including rural and disadvantaged ones that too-often lack sufficient EV charging stations.
PBS recently featured San Francisco-based filmmaker Mark Decena and his documentary Not Without Us, which covered grassroots mobilizing for climate action around the 2015 Paris climate accord.
This enjoyable and informative short piece, produced by my friend Joshua Mellars, highlights Decena’s approach to climate action, along with snippets from the documentary:
I’m pleased to co-author a new study released today by the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley Law that identifies the primary factors underlying cost and schedule overruns for rail transit construction and presents policy recommendations to overcome key barriers.
Improving rail transit delivery is critical for meeting climate and equity goals, given that the transportation sector contributes the majority of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Since the bulk of these emissions come from private automobile travel, rail transit—from heavy-rail subways to overhead-powered trolleys—offers low-emission and low-cost commuting and travel options across income levels.
However, in California and throughout the United States, rail transit infrastructure projects have long suffered from cost overruns and deployment delays that reduce the value of investment and erode public trust. These state and nation-wide projects lag international peers.
For example, completed U.S. heavy rail projects (with trains powered from below via an electric “third rail”) cost more than twice as much on average than their European, Canadian, and Australian counterparts, while U.S. light rail projects (powered by overhead electric lines) cost around 15 percent more than similar projects in Europe, Canada, and Australia. In the United States, different governance authorities hold veto power over multiple decision points, and lack of alignment between these authorities can derail regionally-crucial projects.
Some of the largest and highest-profile California projects, such as the second phase of the Silicon Valley Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) extension into San José, are particularly slow and expensive. How can California deliver high-quality rail transit projects while keeping on budget and on schedule? Although transit ridership has fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic, ridership is beginning to rebound and transit agencies are committing billions to new infrastructure.
With funding from California SB 1 research dollars through the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies, CLEE analyzed national and international construction trends and assessed five California rail case studies that offer examples of delivery issues and methods to address them. Common challenges included lack of megaproject management capacity and expertise; project design and scope creep; lack of agency coordination; inefficient procurement and contracting methods; and need for excessive stakeholder outreach.
The five case studies included rail transit projects in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San José, as well as California’s statewide high-speed rail project (which is not a traditional intracity rail line but will be vital to state efforts to reduce vehicle travel). Drawing on the lessons learned from these five cases, CLEE recommends state, regional and local transit leaders consider:
- Forming regional collaboratives to house permanent expertise not tied to any individual local project, with staff available to consult with or contract out to projects when needed. Such a collaborative could benefit projects like the Bay Area Rapid Transit Berryessa Extension, where multi-agency oversight of different project elements required dedicated coordination and communication.
- Creating a statewide office to provide dedicated staff support/ technical assistance to facilitate coordination among local and regional agencies or offer additional funding to agencies that provide detailed plans for addressing any in-house staffing needs, as applicable. For example, the San Francisco Central Subway involved complex construction in a high-density residential and commercial district with significant overruns and delays, in part because agency staff had less megaproject experience than contractor teams. California High-Speed Rail similarly struggled with sufficient in-house capacity, particularly during its early stages.
- Using project procurement and delivery methods that includes early contractor involvement to ensure the total cost of building expensive projects in dense, complex areas is identified before construction begins. For example, the San Diego Mid-Coast Corridor Trolley successfully utilized the construction manager/general contractor or construction manager-at-risk contracting method (CMGC/CMAR), in which the project owner engages a designer and a construction manager separately during the design phase, and the owner and construction manager negotiate a guaranteed maximum price for construction prior to design completion before starting the build phase. This method helped ensure that this relatively pricey project stayed on budget.
- Legislatively granting master permitting authority to transit agencies with priority rail transit projects (including engineering, street closure, and similar project completion-critical permits) to reduce delays and costs imposed by local governments or large or powerful stakeholders along the route. For example, Los Angeles Purple Line Section 1 leaders coordinated with local governments to align expectations about restricted construction times and locations, as local governments held permitting authority over the transit agency.
- Avoiding the addition of significant, non-essential betterments and limiting bespoke design for extraneous station elements (e.g., complex facades), particularly after the design stage. Multiple case study projects suffered from expensive, over-designed project elements to appease stakeholders along the route with effective veto power and other leverage. Determining who will pay for these modifications is a crucial decision point that can push a transit project over budget and behind schedule, if not appropriately managed. State and federal leaders could condition funding on avoiding outcomes that delay a project or place unreasonable cost expectations on the agency and its contractors.
You can read the full report as well as a short policy brief.
Register for a free webinar on Thursday, January 27 at 10:00am Pacific time to learn about the report’s top findings with an expert panel including:
- Hasan Ikhrata, Executive Director of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG)
- Brian Kelly, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority
- Therese McMillan, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Thanks to my report co-authors Katie Segal, Ted Lamm and Michael Maroulis.
As 2021 draws to a close, I wanted to share some climate optimism. Climate and energy writer Dave Roberts interviewed carbon market analyst Kingsmill Bond, who is incredibly bullish on the long-term prospects for clean technology and bearish on fossil fuels.
In fact, he believes the world reached peak demand for fossil fuel, including coal and oil and gas, back in 2019, and that even as demand recovers, it won’t go beyond this peak. Meanwhile, clean technologies are plummeting in price and cost of deployment.
It’s worth reading the transcript of the full interview, but some highlights are below.
First, Bond notes that four of the crucial clean technologies (solar PV, wind, batteries, and electrolyzers to convert surplus electricity into hydrogen) are on established learning curves (the amount that their costs drop for every doubling in deployment) at between 16 and 34 percent. In practice, that means this already-cheap energy source is “a) going to get cheaper, b) going to spread globally, and then c) be followed up by these other technologies, also on learning curves, which will then provide us with the energy that we need at much lower cost.”
Second, he describes how fossil fuel incumbents are already pretty much on a death spiral. Specifically, he cites how legacy automakers were unprepared for the increasing shift toward new electric vehicles over old internal combustion engine (ICE) models:
You then look at the cost curves of the new stuff, and you realize that you’re going to have to change. You have to reallocate your capital out of ICE [internal combustion engine] cars and into electric vehicles. Meanwhile, you figure out that you’ve got continuous decline now coming for your ICE car sales, so suddenly, your ICE factory is a liability, not an asset. Furthermore, as your sales of ICE cars start to drop, you’ve got to allocate the same fixed-cost structure over a smaller number of cars, and your cost per unit increases. This is economics 101.
That’s what happens to the old people. What then happens to the new people, Tesla and BYD and the EV makers, is, as they produce more cars, the costs of the batteries fall because of these learning curves. As costs fall, demand increases, and as demand increases, they’re taking more market share, and they can then go to the second feedback loop, which is the financial markets.
Tesla can go to the financial markets and in an afternoon they can raise several billion dollars and build a new factory in Berlin, which increases their capacity to build at the same time the fossil fuel sector is finding it very difficult to raise capital, and is obliged by investors to change their strategic direction — as we saw, famously, with Engine No. 1.
The reason these incumbents struggle to adapt is relatively simple:
The answer is, incumbents, first of all, try and resist change. Then they struggle to put capital into these new technologies, because they’re not sufficiently profitable. You saw lots of examples of the oil center saying that over the last decade: we’re not going to put our money into solar and wind because we can get a 20 percent IRR on oil against a 5 percent IRR on solar. Why would we? The problem, then, is that by the time this stuff does get profitable and starts to eat into their old business, it’s too late, and other people have moved into this area. That’s exactly what’s happening now in the energy system.
Finally, Bond argues that the potential for cheap and abundant clean energy is massive: “If you look at the technical potential of solar and wind, which has been a lot in the last five years, it’s 100 times our global energy demand today.” It’s hard to imagine just how different our world would be if clean energy was essentially cheap and limitless.
Something to ponder as we head into the new year of 2022, with much work to be done to address climate change. May it be a good one for all of you!
Ryan Popple, former CEO and co-founder of electric bus company ProTerra, venture capitalist for transportation electrification, early Tesla employee, Iraq War veteran and father of three, passed away on Wednesday night at the age of 44, for reasons unknown.
I had the good fortune to meet Ryan back in 2012, when UC Berkeley and UCLA Law convened a group of experts (including Ryan) on ways that California could dramatically scale up the sale of battery electric vehicles by 2025, now just a few short years away. The resulting report, Electric Drive by ’25, presented innovative and still-relevant solutions to boosting EVs, which were then in their infancy. Ryan was a major contributor to that report.
While I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds of experts over the years in our Bank of America-supported law school convening series, Ryan immediately stood out as an all-star. At a time when many people doubted that vehicle electrification was viable, he brought clear and convincing evidence that this transition was inevitable. His thoughtfulness and insights were impressive, and I made sure to keep in touch with him afterwards (and also recommended him to friends and policy makers as a valuable resource).
I was thrilled when he helped launch ProTerra and turned that company into a major player in the electric bus space. He recently left the company to return to his venture capital roots, where he was in the midst of identifying and supporting the game-changing companies of the future.
His loss is tragic, untimely, and heart-breaking. For those who work on climate change, he leaves a big hole. Condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.
For a taste of his humor, humility, and wisdom, here’s a recording of a presentation he gave last year, which shows his astuteness at identifying broader societal and environmental trends and the companies that can address them.
Rest in peace, Ryan.
