My former Berkeley Law colleague Steve Weissman and his twin boys Alex and Eli have an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that our fire prevention approach has the incentives all wrong:
For more than 100 years, land managers in the United States have treated wildfires as an ignition issue. The logic is: If we prevent wildfires from starting in the first place, the problem is solved.
Such aggressive fire suppression has also driven regulation: The person or entity legally responsible for igniting the fire faces financial consequences. This approach has brought about safer transmission lines and encouraged campers to extinguish their campfires.
Even so, mega-fires not only persist, but are larger and becoming more frequent. This is because ignitions are not the cause of bigger wildfires. Increasingly, destructive wildfires are a consequence of changing climate, mismanagement of flammable vegetation and building in fire-prone areas.
The Weissman trio recommend holding individual property owners to account for how they maintain their property. Policy makers should also plan new communities with fire breaks in mind.
Otherwise, the climate change-induced fires we’re seeing will become more severe, with the financial losses pinned on insurance companies, utilities, and property owners themselves. It certainly behooves all of us to encourage better land management by those who own their properties.
Jazz tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman is bringing a new level of challenge and innovation to his audience. I saw Redman and his quartet perform last week at SF Jazz, where they played songs from their new album Still Dreaming.
The quartet is made up of all-star drummer Brian Blade, cornetist Ron Miles, and bassist Scott Colley and represents a nod to Redman’s father’s quartet Old and New Dreams, a band that played from the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, with Dewey Redman on tenor saxophone like his son.
At the heart of the music is the interplay between Redman on saxophone and Miles on cornet (basically a tiny trumpet). The two alternate among harmonizing, playing together in discordant fashion, taking turns with solo pieces and melodies, and playing simultaneously almost like two people talking past each other.
Filling in the spaces is the incredible percussion of Blade, perhaps most famous for providing the solo drum soundtrack to the Academy Award-winning movie Birdman with Michael Keaton. Colley on bass provides solid grooves, tasteful melodies, and guitar-like solos.
At Friday’s concert, they opened with the contemplative album-concluding track The Rest (video above), then segued into the upbeat New Year opening track. Along the way, they played Redman’s newish song “Facts” (written in January 2017 around the time of Trump’s inauguration) and Last Rites of Rock n’ Roll, a song Redman said he grew to hate performing until this new band played it. He opened that song with a long solo intro featuring circular breathing (continuous playing by breathing in through the nose while simultaneously breathing out into the horn).
The band also covered Ornette Coleman’s Broken Shadows. The music overall is reminiscent of Coleman’s avant garde approach to jazz, with broken melodies and seeming off-notes, a kind of musical deconstruction. They then concluded with an encore performance of the bluesy Turnaround, from Redman’s early 1990s album Wish.
Redman’s new work and accompanying performance is not meant to get the audience toe-tapping or to revel in solo pyrotechnics. Instead, the songs are thoughtful, intellectual, and full of emotional and sonic range (particularly using quiet as a sound). It’s a challenging but enjoyable experience that stays with you long after the show ends.
Next week leaders from around the world will be in San Francisco for the Governor Brown-convened Global Climate Action Summit. The event is designed to showcase climate progress globally and help leaders share best practices and ideas on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
As part of the summit, many nonprofits, businesses and universities are hosting affiliate events (not part of the formal summit programming) on various climate issues. The Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley Law and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law are partnering on an event to discuss how subnational governments can leverage the coming “3 Revolutions” in shared, electric, and automated transportation to meet climate goals:
Transportation technologies are evolving rapidly, and the course of their evolution will determine whether greenhouse gas emissions dramatically increase or drop as a result. Which outcome we see in the future depends on our policy decisions in the present. The driving question of this session will be: What policies will steer the 3 Revolutions toward climate goals? This event will empower states, regions, and cities with policy tools needed to harness these revolutions to reduce climate emission.
The session will run from 2 to 5:30pm at 555 Market St. in San Francisco (+ Google Map) and will be immediately followed by an evening reception through 7:30pm. The agenda is available, and you can register here ($15).
The law centers are co-organizing the event with:
- UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, the Environment, and the Economy & the Institute of Transportation Studies
- Uber
- Metropolitan Transportation Commission
- Georgetown Climate Center
The event is also co-sponsored by Bank of America as part of the grant-funded Climate Change and Business Series. Hope to see you there!
For your holiday weekend, one of the best from the late South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela — “Grazing in the Grass“:
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.
Elon Musk tends to stoke the ire of transit advocates. And now his “Boring Company” proposal to connect L.A. Metro Rail subway stops with Dodger Stadium via a private tunnel has raised some new hackles. As Jenna Chandler at LA Curbed described:
The concept involves transporting passengers in electric-powered, autonomous pods (what the company calls “skates”) that zip through underground tunnels at speeds of 125 to 150 miles per hour.
The “skates” would carry between eight and 16 passengers (far fewer than a subway car) and would be lowered underground from street-level docking stations called “Loop lifts.”
Some transit advocates reacted with skepticism (including me, as I related to KNX Radio yesterday) about the technical feasibility and cost. Alyssa Walker at Curbed also laid out some sensible alternatives, including expanded bus and pedestrian access to the stadium as well as more regional shuttles.
Based on some of the social media commentary around the proposal, it’s clear that there is no love lost among transit advocates and all things Musk. But given that his Dodger Stadium plan would be privately funded and actually bolster the existing rail transit network, why the animosity?
Some theories for this mistrust could be that transit advocates:
- Feel threatened by private forms of transport that they view as actual or perceived competition with public transit.
- Don’t like the opportunity cost of city officials prioritizing private approaches instead of advocating (and spending staff time) on public transit solutions.
- Don’t trust Musk, given his previous bashing of public transit and plans to move private vehicles via an underground tunneling network.
- Generally don’t like automobiles, and Musk’s work to popularize zero-emission vehicles removes a powerful anti-car argument about their air quality impacts.
The conflict is unfortunate from my perspective, because Musk’s proposals at least so far don’t require any public investment and could lead to some interesting innovation that benefits everyone, including transit users. And his work to promote electric vehicles not only has critical climate benefits but has helped public transit by bringing down the costs of battery-powered buses.
Meanwhile, we’ll see how the Dodger Stadium proposal moves forward, if at all. As long as no public dollars are involved, I see no downside.
