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Emissions disclosure bill is testing the state’s climate resolve in the face of industry misinformation.

Capital & Main, by Aaron Cantù, August , 2023

It’s been more than two years since a California lawmaker first introduced a bill requiring big corporations to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The information could be criticalin the fight against climate change, with global temperatures smashing records this summer — yet it died in the Legislature last year after failing by one vote.

Now, the bill could fail anew thanks to a handful of Democrats.

The Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, carried by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), would force big companies to report their emissions to the California Air Resources Board.

Altogether, the lack of information on supply-chain emissions means we know only a fraction of the global economy’s climate impacts, undermining the public’s knowledge of the crisis. Some companies already report these figures, or disclose select information on their own.

But under SB 253, thousands of public and private companies — about 5,300 — would report the full scope of their climate pollution, many for the first time. That includes recognizable brands like Walmart and Costco and any other company that generates at least a billion dollars in revenue and operates in the state.

And if SB 253 becomes law in California, reportedly the largest sub-national economy in the world, it could contribute to a wave of transparency regulations requiring more corporate climate disclosures, among them the European Union’s new policy. Bill supporters say this information helps put pressure on companies to reduce their emissions.

But business interests, including the oil and gas lobby, are aligned to sink the California legislation. To pull that off, they would need the help of Democrats.

Fence-Sitting Democrats Receive Millions From Corporate Interests

Swing-vote Democrats in the State Assembly — where similar legislation failed by one vote in 2022 — may determine whether the opposition succeeds.

As Democrats have secured a supermajority in the California Legislature, business associations have increasingly targeted so-called moderate Democrats with their giving and lobbying.

Many of the same assemblymembers who helped kill the bill previously may have a chance to vote on it again. But a review of campaign contributions suggests that opposed industries have lawmakers’ ears.

Seventeen Assembly Democrats who registered no vote or voted against the bill in 2022 are still in the chamber. They have collectively taken nearly $1.16 million from oil and gas throughout their careers, including the months after last year’s session. (A full list of figures can be viewed here, with more detail here.) Thirteen lawmakers collected oil and gas money in 2023.

Over the course of their careers, Assemblymember Mike Gipson (D-South Bay) collected the most from oil and gas, at $244,380; Blanca Rubio (D-South Bay) and Brian Maienschein (D-Escondido) came in second and third, at $212,399 and $114,950.

Staff for Rubio and Maienschein didn’t return a request for comment. In an email to Capital & Main, Gipson chief of staff Emmanuel Aguayo noted Gipson’s affirmative votes on several climate bills signed last year by Gov. Newsom.

The lawmakers also took $4.6 million from business groups, many of which, such as the California Chamber of Commerce (recently rebranded as CalChamber) and regional agricultural associations, are opposed to SB 253. Forty percent of that total went to just three lawmakers: Gipson, Rubio and Maienschein. But 10 others have collected more than $100,000 each from business groups over their careers.

The governor’s rush to pass a climate package last year may have led to fatigue among some lawmakers, claimed Sen. Wiener.

“I suspect if our bill had come up a day or two before, my prediction is we would have gotten it off the floor,” Wiener said in an interview. “We just have a stronger, more diverse coalition this year.”

Wiener said he’s also planning outreach to 15 freshmen assemblymembers who would be voting for the first time. Of them, three — Esmeralda Soria (D-Merced), Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey) and Jasmeet Bains (D-Delano) — received thousands of dollars from oil and gas this year. And seven, including Soria, Pacheco and Bains, collected contributions from CalChamber (view figures here).

“We have a lot of new members, so we have a lot of work to do on that front,” Wiener said, “but I’m optimistic.”

Supply Chain Emissions a Missing Piece of Climate Puzzle

A handful of companies are supporting the bill, including Microsoft, IKEA, Patagonia and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

In a letter to the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee, they wrote that the bill “would level the playing field by ensuring that all major public and private companies disclose their full emissions inventory, creating a pathway for collective reduction strategies.” The committee has to approve the bill before it can go to the Assembly floor.

CalChamber has reiterated the same concerns over two years. A letter boils it down to difficulties tracking supply chain emissions, which it has described as “impossible” and something that would “necessarily require that large businesses stop doing business with small and medium businesses” that act as subcontractors.

Such claims are “not true,” said Simon Fischweicher, head of corporations and supply chains for CDP North America. The nonprofit supports companies’ efforts to account for their emissions, and connects them to climate-conscious investors; CDP’s member companies represent trillions in global market capital.

“A significant portion of companies disclosing emissions are small or medium sized,” Fischweicher said. “It’s already happening.”

Most company’s supply chain emissions (which are referred to as Scope 3 emissions by the World Resources Institute) account for the vast majority of their climate pollution. For oil refiners, this includes emissions generated when people fuel up their cars and drive using gasoline refined from company petroleum.

To take another example, Coca-Cola can track the emissions generated when its executives drive or fly (Scope 1), or when its office buildings use fossil fuels for electricity (Scope 2). But far more pollution happens indirectly, across the lifecycle of each Coke bottle or can. Understanding it requires gathering data points from subcontractors involved in bottling and distribution, as well as estimated climate pollution from all the trashed Cokes in landfills.

The bill directs companies to use the GHG Protocol, which determines supply chain emissions by multiplying “emissions factors” by weight or cost of products. The figures are imprecise, an ongoing concern as the need for accurate information grows. Advocates say standards will improve.

“That level of granularity involves different assumptions that can be made, so we’re not always going to end up on the same exact number, even from a Coke to a Pepsi,” Fischweicher said. “But what’s critical is that companies go through those steps, understand where their impacts lie, explain those figures, and understand the methodology to know how they got there.”

Industries “Fighting, Delaying” Disclosure Rules

Companies have railed against Scope 3 emissions requirements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is working on rules requiring public companies to disclose their emissions and exposure to climate change.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that the costs of compliance to businesses would be far higher than the government’s estimates — and that investors just don’t care much about emissions.

Separately, the American Petroleum Institute, the organization that once served as the fossil fuel industry’s main disseminator of climate change denial, said the information would be unreliable and hard to gather.

Yet API’s comments contradict its endorsement of emissions-gathering in other venues. In 2020, API and two other oil associations released a guide that encourages companies to report emissions across their value chains using various frameworks, among them the GHG Protocol.

And both the state chamber and oil lobby have cited the SEC’s rulemaking to argue that California’s climate disclosure bill would be redundant — even as their national counterparts oppose that same rulemaking at the SEC.

Wiener called these actions “shocking.”

“They’re fighting, delaying and trying to kill the SEC rule, but then saying we shouldn’t legislate because the SEC will handle it,” he said. “It’s so cynical.”

Flannery Associates, Rep. John Garamendi, Solano County CA, Travis Air Force Base

The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want to Build a City From Scratch

August 25, 2023 BenIndy

A mysterious company has spent $800 million in an effort to buy thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay Area land. The people behind the deals are said to be a who’s who of the tech industry.

From left, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, four prominent Silicon Valley investors, have backed Flannery Associates.Credit…Bloomberg; The New York Times; Clara Mokri for The New York Times; Getty Images; Reuters

The New York Times, by Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith, August 25, 2023

In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city.

The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.

He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Let me know if this tickles your fancy,” he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Michael Moritz, a well-known investor, wrote in a 2017 pitch, “If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment. | Alex Flynn / Bloomberg.

Since then, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying large plots of land in a largely agricultural region 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not.

The purchases by a company that no one in the area had heard of and whose business was a mystery have become the subject of heavy speculation and developing news stories, rattling landowners, local supervisors, the nearby Air Force base and members of Congress. Was Disney buying it for a new theme park? Could the purchases be linked to China? A deepwater port?

Flannery is the brainchild of Jan Sramek, 36, a former Goldman Sachs trader who has quietly courted some of the tech industry’s biggest names as investors, according to the pitch and people familiar with the matter. The company’s ambitions expand on the 2017 pitch: Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert into it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.

The company’s investors, whose identities have not been previously reported, are a who’s who of Silicon Valley, according to three people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

They include Mr. Moritz; Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor; Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, entrepreneurs turned investors. Andreessen Horowitz is also a backer. It was unclear how much each had invested.

It is unclear how much the investors, who include Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe, have each invested in Flannery. | David Paul Morris / Bloomberg.

Brian Brokaw, a representative for the investor group, said in a statement that the group was made up of “Californians who believe that Solano County’s and California’s best days are ahead.” He said the group planned to start working with Solano County residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base, next week.

In California, housing has long been an intractable problem, and Silicon Valley’s moguls have long been frustrated with the Bay Area’s real estate shortage, and the difficulty of building in California generally, as their work forces have exploded. Companies like Google have clashed with cities like Palo Alto and Mountain View over expanding their headquarters, while their executives have funded pro-development politicians and the “Yes in my backyard” activists who have pushed for looser development and zoning laws in hopes of making it easier to build faster and taller.

The practical need for more space has at times morphed into lofty visions of building entire cities from scratch. Several years ago, Y Combinator, the start-up incubator, announced an initiative with dreams of turning empty land into a new economy and society. Years before that, Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and billionaire Facebook investor, invested in the Seasteading Institute, an attempt to build a new society on lily pad-like structures in the law-and-tax-free open ocean.

But while these ideas have garnered lots of attention and curiosity — lauded in some corners for vision and derided in others for hubris — they have been little more than talk.

The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state), delivered weekday mornings. Get it sent to your inbox.

As Flannery began seeking property, it bought so much land, so fast, that it spooked locals who had no idea who the buyer was or the plans it had in mind. Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, Calif., started posting about the project on Facebook several years ago after she got a call from a farmer about some mystery buyer making offers throughout the county. In an interview, Ms. Moy said she had gone to the county assessor’s office and found that Flannery had purchased tens of thousands of acres.

John Garamendi, a Democrat who along with Mike Thompson, another Democrat, represents the surrounding region in Congress, said he had been trying to figure out the company’s identity for four years.

“I couldn’t find out anything,” he said.

Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, said he had been trying to figure out Flannery’s identity for four years. | Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press.

On Friday, he said that had suddenly changed. This week representatives for Flannery reached out to him and other elected officials requesting meetings about their plans. That meeting is now being scheduled, he said.

“This is their first effort, ever, to talk to any of the local representatives, myself included,” he said.

The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Mr. Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could “clearly be challenging” — a nod to California’s notoriously difficult and litigious development process.

To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it. The hope is that voters will be enticed by promises of thousands of local jobs, increased tax revenue and investments in infrastructure like parks, a performing arts center, shopping, dining and a trade school.

The financial gains could be huge, Mr. Moritz said in the 2017 pitch. He estimated the return could be many times the initial investment just from the rezoning, and far more if and when they started building.

“If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment,” Mr. Moritz wrote.

The Bay Area is among the country’s most expensive regions, even after rent and home prices fell after the pandemic. Economists and housing experts have for decades blamed a longstanding housing shortage and California’s inability to build enough to meet demand.

Mr. Moritz nodded to this in the email to the investor, arguing that “this effort should relieve some of the Silicon Valley pressures we all feel — rising home prices, homelessness, congestion etc.” He added that his group had secured some 1,400 acres for less than $5,000 per acre. The price per acre has since escalated, and the company’s most recent purchases have neared $20,000 per acre, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.

The group focused on Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills, an agricultural patch of eastern Solano County between the cities of Fairfield and Rio Vista, according to the lawsuit. This area is mostly unpopulated and covered with ranches, windmills and power lines.

ravis Air Force Base’s proximity to the land deals prompted speculation about the motives of the people behind Flannery. | Jim Wilson / The New York Times.

In November 2018, the company sent offers to “most landowners in this area,” the lawsuit said, and included incentives such as allowing sellers to retain income from wind turbines, as well as stay on the properties rent-free under long-term lease-back agreements. Over the five years, the company purchased some 140 properties from 400 owners, the lawsuit said.

This month, a lawyer representing landowners jointly filed a motion to dismiss the case. In July, three landowners said they had reached a potential settlement with Flannery. Other owners could not be reached for comment this week, or had declined to do so.

As the offers continued and prices escalated, landowners in Solano County started buzzing about who was buying so much land for so much money.

“They would come with an offer of four and five times over the market at the time,” Ms. Moy said. “They were deals that they couldn’t pass up.”

Flannery’s offers were creating multimillionaires across the county, but no one seemed to know what the mysterious company intended to do with land that now amounted to a large chunk of the entire county.

That changed last week, when residents started receiving texts and emails with a poll gauging their opinions on a number of questions. One asked them to rate the favorability of several names including “Joe Biden,” “Donald Trump” and “Flannery Associates.” Another question began with a description of a possible ballot initiative for a project that “would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.”

Ms. Moy cited poor infrastructure, including the two-lane highway bisecting the region that she said was already clogged by super-commuters driving to the edges of the Bay Area and beyond. The area is also prone to regular droughts and is at high risk for wildfires.

“It seems very pie in the sky,” she said.

Progressive Democrats of Benicia

Statement from Progressive Democrats of Benicia

August 17, 2023 BenIndy

The following is a statement from the Progressive Democrats of Benicia regarding recent untrue allegations made against them:

An individual’s allegations that the Progressive Democrats as an organization had anything to do with their firing are untrue. As an organization, we did not write any letters or contact their employer. The letter that was written to a local paper was not written by a member. A letter to their employer was written by a member, but under the member’s own name. We do not require our members to seek club approval before exercising their free speech rights and we do not control our members’ activities.

This club was not consulted and did not approve of any letters regarding the person in question. In short, the Progressive Democrats of Benicia had nothing to do with their being fired.

The Progressive Democrats of Benicia do firmly support LGBTQ+ rights and recently had a speaker about the current threats and attacks on that community. The individual’s website promotes the views of the American College of Pediatrics, which has been labeled a fringe anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As a club, we believe people need to know the truth, and the truth is we had nothing to do with their firing. But we wish they would not promote hate groups on their website.

Election deniers, Election interference, MAGA extremists, Trump

Developing story – Trump charged in Georgia 2020 election probe, his fourth indictment

August 14, 2023 BenIndy

Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney hands back indictment papers from a grand jury after reviewing the pages on Wednesday. | Joshua Lott / The Washington Post.

The Washington Post, by Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner, August 14, 2023

ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia on Monday in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night.

Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.

The historic indictment, the latest to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.

Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by him or his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county. Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.”

Among those named in the 98-page indictment, charged under Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, architects of a scheme to create slates of alternate Trump electors.

Also indicted were two Georgia-based lawyers advocating on Trump’s behalf, Ray S. Smith II, and Robert Cheeley; a senior campaign adviser, Mike Roman, who helped plan the elector meeting; and two prominent Georgia Republicans who served as electors: former GOP chairman David Shafer and former GOP finance chairman Shawn Still.

Several lesser known players who participated in efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia were also indicted, including three people accused of harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman. They are Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti. The latter is a former publicist for R. Kelly and associate of Kanye West.

A final group of individuals charged in the indictment allegedly participated in an effort to steal election-equipment data in rural Coffee County, Ga. They are former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton, former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham and Georgia businessman Scott Hall.

Trump was indicted in Washington, D.C., earlier this month in a separate Justice Department probe into his various attempts to keep his grip on power during the chaotic aftermath of his 2020 defeat. Some aspects of that four-count federal case, led by special counsel Jack Smith, overlaps with Willis’s sprawling probe, which accuses Trump and his associates of a broad, criminal enterprise to reverse Joe Biden’s election victory in Georgia.

But the Fulton County indictment, issued by a grand jury and made public Monday night, is far more encompassing and detailed than Smith’s ongoing federal investigation.

Prosecutors brought charges around five separate subject areas, including false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County, Ga.; calls Trump made to state officials including Raffensperger seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger conspiracy to undermine the election

Willis had signaled for months that she planned to use Georgia’s expansive anti-racketeering statutes that allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing but to use activities in other states to prove criminal intent in Georgia. Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute is one of the most expansive in the country and is broader than federal law in how prosecutors can define a criminal enterprise or conspiracy.

In January 2022, Willis requested an unusual special purpose grand jury be convened to continue the probe, citing the reluctance of witnesses who would not speak to prosecutors without a subpoena. The investigative body of 23 jurors and three alternates picked from a pool of residents from Atlanta and its suburbs was given full subpoena power for documents and the ability to call witnesses — though it could not issue indictments, only recommendations in the case.

Over roughly eight months, the panel heard from 75 witnesses — including key Trump advisers including Giuliani, Meadows and U.S. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who waged a failed legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his subpoena before ultimately testifying.

The panel also heard from several key witnesses in the investigation, including Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were on the other end of aggressive lobbying efforts by Trump and his associates to overturn Trump’s loss in the state.

In January, the special grand jury concluded its work and issued a final report on its investigation, which was largely kept under seal by the judge who oversaw the panel.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney cited “due process” concerns for “potential future defendants” as Willis considered charges in the case. But in February, McBurney released a five-page excerpt of the report — including a section in which the panel concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony and recommended that charges be filed.

The panel’s forewoman later confirmed that the special grand jury had recommended multiple indictments — though she declined to say of who.

Trump’s attorneys later sought to disqualify Willis and her office from the case — citing Willis’s public comments about the investigation — and quash the final report and any evidence gathered by the special purpose grand jury. The motions were rejected by McBurney and the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump had no legal standing to stop an investigation before charges were filed.

In the spring, amid security concerns, Willis took the unusual step of telling law enforcement that she planned to announce her charging decision in August. Because the special grand jury could not issue indictments, prosecutors presented their case to a regular grand jury sworn in last month, which began hearing the case Monday.

Trump’s attorneys are likely to immediately seek to have the case thrown out, reviving their complaints about Willis and the use of a special grand jury in the case.

Trump has intensified his attacks on Willis and other prosecutors examining his activities, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” Trump has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has generally declined to respond directly to Trump’s attacks, but in a rare exception, she said in an email last week sent to the entire district attorney’s office that Trump’s ad contained “derogatory and false information about me” and ordered her employees to ignore it.

“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any. This is business, it will never be personal.”

Still, Willis has repeatedly raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Willis is often accompanied by armed guards at public appearances, and security at her office and her residence was increased even more in recent days ahead of the expected charging announcement, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security matters.

This story is developing. It will be updated.