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.
Tonight on State of the Bay at 6pm PT, we’ll learn more about San Francisco’s proposed vacancy tax on empty residential units that lawmakers and advocates hope will put more housing stock into the market. Joining us will be Lauren Hepler, housing reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Then we will talk to self-professed comedy nerds and stand-up comedians Nina G and OJ Patterson, co-author of Bay Area Standup: A Humorous History. Did you know that Phyllis Diller, Mort Sahl and Father Guido Sarducci all got their start in the Bay Area?
Finally, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll hear from Lucie Ebernova, the Dating Coach, who has ideas of how to navigate the wild world of meeting your true love.
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.
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:
Tonight on State of the Bay at 6pm PT on KALW, we ask if it is time to roll back school mask mandates? Joining us on this question will be Dr. Jeanne Noble, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine; Director of COVID-19 Response for the UCSF Parnassus Emergency Department; and co-founder of “Children, COVID and the Urgency of Normal” advocacy toolkit and webinar.
Plus we’ll discuss local and statewide efforts to regulate the manufacture and sale of ghost guns, which are untraceable firearms that are bought online and assembled in the home. Our guests will be:
- Abené Clayton, reporter with The Guardian’s Guns and Lies in America project; and
- David Pucino, senior staff attorney at Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence
And finally, we’ll hear from artist Eric Staller, creator of the Bubbleboat, a mobile dome of lights that you may have seen cruising around the Bay.
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.
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.
Tonight on State of the Bay, we’ll talk to Jeff Kositsky, founding director of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. He’ll share his insights into the city’s growing homelessness problem that has garnered national attention and triggered a strong response by Mayor Breed.
We’ll also get an update on the struggling Oakland Public School system from Ashley McBride of The Oaklandside.
Finally, we will hear from Berkeley chef Bryant Terry about his new book Black Food.
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!
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!
Nothing beats getting kids into the outdoors, particularly those from families with limited means or lack of interest in nature. Once children experience nature, they’re more likely to appreciate it and maybe even develop a lifelong passion or career.
That’s where NatureBridge comes in. A nonprofit organization dedicated to outdoor education, NatureBridge runs educational programs in national parks and other settings of natural beauty for students across America, including those from disadvantaged areas.
I participated in NatureBridge (then called Yosemite Institute) as a high school senior, when my biology class took a weeklong trip to Yosemite National Park. It was a transformational experience of snow camping, granite hikes, and sequoias that impacted both my career and personal life to this day.
I spoke to NatureBridge about my experience with the organization and subsequent career working on climate law and policy for their “Stories from the Field” series. You can read it here.
And if you’re looking for an organization to make a charitable contribution to before the tax year ends this month, please consider supporting NatureBridge!
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.
It’s a double-shot of shows on KALW 91.7 FM today, my last two of the year. First, this morning on Your Call’s One Planet Series at 10am PT, we’ll discuss how climate science is being politicized in schools with investigative journalist Katie Worth, author of the riveting new book, Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America.
In the second half of the show, we’ll cover the mental health impacts of air pollution with reporter Kristina Marusic.
Then tonight at 6pm PT, I’ll be co-hosting State of the Bay to assess recent decisions rejecting or delaying housing projects by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. UC Davis Professor of Law Chris Elmendorf will help us understand the statewide legal implications of these anti-housing decisions, in particular the recent delay of a 500-unit housing development near BART.
Then we’ll discuss the state of the Bay Area’s “slow streets” movement, which close streets to most traffic for improved pedestrian and bike safety. What do you think about these measures? Ask our guests Eillie Anzilotti of the SFMTA and community planner Leah Chambers.
Finally, you’ll hear my interview with with Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, who will discuss some of the holiday festivities available in the city’s public spaces.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT for Your Call and then again at 6pm PT for State of the Bay. What comments or questions do you have for these guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
