“Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” one Republican state senator warned police.
By Umair Irfan, VOX, Jun 21, 2019, 3:58pm EDT
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown lamented that Republicans fled the state to avoid voting on a historic climate change bill during a press conference on June 20, 2019. KATU News
Twelve Oregon Republican lawmakers are on the run from the law, having fled the state Senate in Salem on Thursday to deny quorum for a vote on a major climate change bill. The legislation would establish a statewide cap-and-trade scheme for carbon dioxide.
Democratic Gov. Kate Brown authorized state police to find the lawmakers and bring them back. They are each being fined $500 for every day there aren’t enough senators for a vote. (So far, it’s been two days.) Oregon State Police said they are also coordinating with law enforcement agencies in nearby states to find the Republicans.
Brown lamented the stunt to avoid passing the bill. “It would have been historic for Oregon, historic for the country, and frankly historic for the world,” she said during a press conference Thursday. “Unfortunately, Senate Republicans have failed to show up and failed to do their jobs.”
Republicans were defiant, however. Oregon Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr. said in a statement that Republicans were being “bullied by the majority party.”
Another state senator in hiding, Brian Boquist, went further, threatening the police who are trying to round up the wayward lawmakers. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” he said. “I’m not going to be a political prisoner.”
As Vox’s David Roberts explained, Oregon’s climate proposal, House Bill 2020, is truly significant:
Oregon would be only the second US state to mandate not just greenhouse gas emission reductions in the electricity sector, as so many other states and cities have done, but economy-wide emission reductions. Across every sector — electricity, transportation, and industry — emissions would decline 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050.
The bill would also bring Oregon into a regional carbon trading system, the Western Climate Initiative. Ted Sickinger at The Oregonian/OregonLive has a good, thorough rundown of why Republicans oppose it. But in a nutshell, they’re arguing it will hurt industry and rural residents.
Fleeing the state to thwart the bill is an unusual tactic, but it’s not the first time Oregon lawmakers have walked out on the job. In May, they left the Oregon Senate for four days to extract concessions in a school funding bill.
Democrats currently have supermajorities in both chambers of Oregon’s legislature, but they need Republicans to hold a quorum to conduct business.
Repost from the Los Angeles Times [Editor: Significant quote, Benicia in final paragraph – “In the absence of action at the state level, it has fallen to localities to prevent refineries from at least increasing crude oil imports to their facilities. Over the last decade elected officials in half-a-dozen communities from Benicia to San Luis Obispo County have blocked refinery infrastructure projects that would allow more crude oil imports. They’re the real heroes of California’s climate saga — too bad they won’t be the ones in the spotlight at the summit.” – RS]
Until California curbs its oil refineries, it won’t meet its climate goals
By Jacques Leslie, Sep 11, 2018 | 4:15 AM
The Phillips 66 refinery in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)
While Gov. Jerry Brown and other California leaders bask under an international spotlight at this week’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, there is one highly relevant topic they’re not likely to bring up: oil refineries.
That’s because refineries are crucially absent from California’s climate change strategy. The state has justifiably gotten credit for addressing climate change issues that the nation won’t — promoting renewable energy, cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission limits, and electric vehicles — but it has backed off from challenging refineries, the centerpieces of California’s oil supply infrastructure.
Concentrated in Los Angeles’ South Bay and the San Francisco Bay Area, the state’s 17 refineries comprise the largest oil processing center in western North America. Unless emissions from those refineries are curbed, the state has no chance of meeting its long-range climate change goals.
Greg Karras, a senior scientist at Huntington Park-based Communities for a Better Environment, calculates that without restraints on refineries, even if emission reductions from all other sources hit their targets, oil sector pollution through 2050 would cause the state to exceed its overall climate goals by roughly 40%.
“Refineries have been largely exempted from the state’s cap and trade program, which charges fees for emissions.”
That’s primarily because refineries have been largely exempted from the state’s cap and trade program, which charges fees for emissions. Last year, the legislature extended the program for another decade, from 2020 to 2030, but only after bowing to the oil industry’s wishes. To win a needed two-thirds majority, cap and trade supporters exempted the industry from fees for all but a tenth of refinery emissions through 2030. The legislation also prohibited regional air districts from imposing their own limits on refinery carbon dioxide emissions, a severe blow to communities suffering from pollution from nearby operations. Instead of curbing refineries, these provisions gave them a decade-long free pass.
To make matters worse, the oil that is being processed is bound to get dirtier, resulting in a higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the fuel-production chain. Oil used by the state’s refineries already contains the highest intensity of greenhouse gas pollutants of any refining region in the country. As drillers pump the dregs from the state’s nearly spent fields, that intensity is increasing.
With California oil extraction in decline, its refineries will want to import more crude oil from other states and nations. That could include tapping the Canadian tar sands, notorious for its off-the-charts, climate-busting pollutants. Completion of the stalled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in Canada would facilitate what Greenpeace calls a “tanker superhighway” from Vancouver to California ports. California refineries have tried to win approval for rail terminals and ports that would receive tar sands oil but have so far been blocked by local governments.
The refineries’ contributions to greenhouse gas emissions don’t end with their own production, of course. When the fuel they produce is used, it’s one of the primary contributors to climate change. As California shifts to renewable energy and electric vehicles, less refined fuel will be consumed here and more will be exported to other states and nations.
As a result, the state could become, in Karras’ words, “the gas station of the Pacific Rim.” And as exports grow to countries like India with lax environmental standards, refineries won’t even need to meet California’s more stringent regulations on fuel composition; instead, they will export more pollution.
The main reason state leaders have done little to limit oil supply is obvious: The oil industry remains a formidable adversary, wielding its financial and lobbying might to head off restraints. For virtually all Republican state legislators and a substantial number of Democrats, oil supply is too hot a topic to touch, Karras told me.
Meanwhile, state policy calls for greenhouse gas emissions to drop by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. Given the oil industry’s cap and trade refinery exemptions in place through 2030, the only way to achieve that level is to place drastic limits on refineries as soon as those exemptions expire, which is unlikely to happen. A more realistic approach would remove the oil industry’s exemptions and impose cuts of 5% a year on refinery emissions immediately — an urgent task that state leaders have shown no interest in carrying out.
In the absence of action at the state level, it has fallen to localities to prevent refineries from at least increasing crude oil imports to their facilities. Over the last decade elected officials in half-a-dozen communities from Benicia to San Luis Obispo County have blocked refinery infrastructure projects that would allow more crude oil imports. They’re the real heroes of California’s climate saga — too bad they won’t be the ones in the spotlight at the summit.
Sorting Out Air Quality Regulations After Cap-And-Trade’s Renewal
By Leslie Stewart, October-November edition
Communities for a Better Environment’s Andrés Soto (in red shirt) speaks at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s board of directors meeting on September 20. A large number of stakeholders attended to participate in a lively discussion about emissions regulation. | Photo by Alec MacDonald.
Now that the dust is settling from the legislative tumult surrounding renewal of California’s cap-and-trade program, participants are taking stock of the changed landscape for air quality regulation, both statewide and regionally. Legislation passed this summer sets a more ambitious goal for greenhouse gas reductions through cap-and-trade, while also shifting some duties for regional air districts. Under the new laws, these local agencies will see a reduced role in greenhouse gas regulation, but an added responsibility for implementing a statewide community-focused air quality monitoring and enforcement program.
The cap-and-trade program is a complicated balancing act between protecting the environment — specifically by reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and retaining industries that contribute to the state’s economic base. As the limit on permitted greenhouse gas emissions decreases (the “cap”), businesses which exceed the limit must obtain allowances (the “trade”), either through state auctions or from other businesses which are under the cap and therefore have extra allowances. The state opted to give some allowances away for free, initially to ease adoption by industries and utilities, and now to reduce the financial burden on companies which may otherwise decide to relocate.
Passed in July, Assembly Bill 398 (E. Garcia) extended cap-and-trade to 2030 from the program’s original sunset year of 2020. This created more certainty for industry, which was increasingly reluctant to pay for allowances, fearing these might lose value if the program ended soon. The bill also raised the bar for the state’s Air Resources Board. The agency’s goal for 2020 has been to decrease greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels; AB 398 adds a target for 2030, requiring a 40 percent reduction below 1990 levels. Stanley Young, ARB’s director of communications, noted that “the cap has decreased by two to three percent over the previous years of the program, and will drop by four percent by 2020, but then will need to drop exponentially to achieve this goal.”
Additionally, it is now up to ARB, rather than regional air districts, to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from any source covered by cap-and-trade, whether in industry, agriculture, or elsewhere. Many environmental groups and agencies that were generally supportive of cap-and-trade renewal, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, opposed this aspect of AB 398. Following its passage, the Air District announced it expected to shelve a proposed regional cap on refinery emissions, Rule 12-16, which environmental groups had been working toward for five years.
“Victory snatched away at the last minute,” was Andrés Soto’s description of the regional air district restrictions in AB 398. Soto is a community organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, a strong proponent of Rule 12-16. However, his organization is refocusing. Soto noted that “local air districts can’t touch CO₂ reductions, but methane and other gases can still be regulated regionally.” CBE is planning a new campaign to pressure the Air District to cap non-CO₂ refinery emissions at current levels before permitting any new refinery infrastructure projects.
Meanwhile, Tom Addison of the Air District’s Legislative Affairs division commented, “Given passage of AB 398 and its restrictions on local air districts, we are considering how best to coordinate with ARB on actions on greenhouse gases moving forward. Our climate problems are so large and pressing that it makes sense for everyone to work together to address them.”
Greenhouse gases are not the only emissions from industry, and often the attempts to curb them get intertwined with grassroots efforts to limit the local impact of other categories of air pollution. However, not everyone agrees with this approach, since greenhouse gases harm the environment on a global level, not a local one. As ARB’s Young asserted, “We have an equally ambitious goal to address toxic air contaminants and criteria air pollutants, but the system works better when you do that separately [from greenhouse gases].”
That separation was the rationale for AB 398’s companion bill, AB 617 (C. Garcia). The bill requires the state to set up a uniform databank, where data gathered from emission monitoring throughout California will be publicly available. The databank will inform a new ARB strategy to reduce toxic air contaminants and criteria air pollutants, including identifying the most environmentally-burdened communities and locations where additional monitoring is needed.
When the state identifies those sites, local air districts will be required to set up new monitoring there, and also create community-specific pollution reduction plans. Districts may also require individual facilities to set up monitoring at their fencelines. As Young pointed out, “there has been a technical revolution in air monitoring, so that viable, accurate, and consistent monitoring can be done at the community level.”
Under AB 617, ARB will coordinate all these efforts through the newly formed Community Air Protection Program. Its director, Karen Magliano, sees the new program as “fundamentally transforming community-based planning, by bringing in the communities themselves at all levels.” She explained that “we want to look at the problem at a granular level — implementation will be a shared responsibility.”
According to Addison, the Air District is concerned about some aspects of that shared responsibility, especially the financial ones. “We are very supportive of the general philosophy behind AB 617, and some pieces we’re enthusiastic about,” he noted. “For example, AB 617 increases the penalties for strict liability violations. However, there is no additional funding [for districts], and a host of new requirements.” Air District staff subsequently noted that a budget trailer bill signed into law on September 17 contains some AB 617 implementation funding, yet it is unclear whether that funding will be adequate.
Not all of the responsibilities in AB 617 are brand-new to the Air District. Some fenceline and community monitors — measures which will be required by AB 617 in any state-identified communities — are already in place around several Bay Area facilities, because of industry-community agreements or as compliance with the Air District’s Rule 12-15, passed in 2015. Addison observed that better coordination of data reporting on emissions sources is already happening as well. “More data is always helpful, but we want to have that without being forced to divert resources from other programs,” he explained.
Designing community emission reduction plans will be a new task for the Air District, and Addison is concerned that the tool is limited. However, he was quick to add, “We are committed to trying to improve public health and working to implement the bill. Cutting emissions for disproportionately impacted communities is something we have long aimed at.”
Bill Magavern, policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, is also focused on making the community plans work. “The community action plans rely a lot on implementation by air districts — it’s important that they yield strong measures to help the communities in the areas most impacted by pollution,” he observed. “The concern is not only identifying the problem, but moving quickly to implement solutions.”
Magavern added another area which may require community watchdogs. AB 617 mandates that regional air districts require facilities to use Best Available Retrofit Technology, starting with those which have gone longest since being permitted. “We need to be sure that districts are actually requiring that equipment be updated, and not just letting them use credits,” Magavern warned. Overall, however, he is “cautiously optimistic that AB 617 will yield significant improvements in air quality — but we need to be actively involved to be sure that actually happens.”
Leslie Stewart covers air quality and energy for the Monitor.
By Melody Gutierrez, August 25, 2016
Gov. Jerry Brown said he plans to sign the bills when they reach his desk. Photo: Lenny Ignelzi, Associated Press
SACRAMENTO — The California Legislature passed two bills Wednesday that extend the state’s ambitious goals to reduce the impact of greenhouse gases and provide additional oversight on the agency charged with carrying out climate-change policies.
Gov. Jerry Brown praised lawmakers for passing SB32 and AB197, saying passage was an important milestone after similar efforts failed last year amid intense lobbying by the oil industry. Brown said he plans to sign the bills when they reach his desk.
“Legislation is not like Twitter,” Brown said. “You don’t do it in 140 characters or in a few seconds. It takes months and sometimes years. It takes trying, failing, amending and trying again; negotiation. There are 120 members in the Legislature, and not everyone sees things the same way.”
SB32 calls for the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The bill expands on AB32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which requires the state to reduce greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. The state is expected to reach that target.
“We have discovered, with these policies, our economy continues to go up, but our emissions are going down,” said termed-out state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills (Los Angeles County). “It’s not a choice between a healthy environment and sound economy. In California, we can do it both ways.”
AB197 directs the California Air Resources Board to prioritize disadvantaged communities in its climate-change regulations, and to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the measures it considers. The bill also allows the Legislature to appoint two lawmakers as nonvoting members of the board, a move supporters said will provide more transparency and oversight on the agency.
Lawmakers have criticized the lack of diversity on the board, and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County) said the board has a credibility problem.
“Any exercise of authority has to be reviewed,” Brown said when asked about the criticism of the board that is largely appointed by him. “Any time you have the power to say no or reduce your high-carbon fuel, reduce your pollutants, change the way a carbonized society works, it will be felt with some sting. That’s the reality, but we want to make sure we are doing it in a way that advances our goals of equity and inclusion.”
Brown unsuccessfully lobbied to have the cap-and-trade program included in SB32, but lawmakers balked because the bill already faced an uncertain future in the Assembly. On Tuesday, the Assembly narrowly passed the bill with one vote to spare, although several Democratic lawmakers changed their votes to approve of the legislation after it passed.
The Senate passed SB32 on Wednesday in a 25-13 vote.
The future of cap-and-trade remains uncertain due to a legal challenge from the California Chamber of Commerce. That uncertainty, along with some fearing SB32 would not be signed into law, contributed to poor auction results this year.
EDITORIAL On Senate Bill 32
Step ahead on climate
California is doubling down in the fight against climate change. After teetering on defeat, a state bill that expands efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions is in the final stages of approval.
The measure, SB32, builds on the state’s plan in 2006 to cut greenhouse gases by 30 percent by 2020, a goal that’s already within reach. With both the Senate and now the Assembly in support, the bill pushes the state to trim climate-altering emissions by 40 percent by 2030.
An accompanying bill would give the state Air Resources Board more power to regulate industrial and refinery emissions in a bow to lawmakers from low-income areas who want more out of climate change ideas. That bill, AB197, is hanging, a target for business lobbyists who want to sink the overall effort. Passing this second measure is essential to complete a comprehensive effort.
Still, the success so far is worth notice. California isn’t budging from its course. White House aides and Gov. Jerry Brown called wavering moderate Democrats for their votes, which the same lawmakers had withheld last year. With the nation stalled on climate change steps, California has a chance to move forward and demonstrate the effects, costs and benefits of its aggressive steps. The ability to add pollution controls to a roaring economy is making the state a globally watched experiment.
The rules need attention. One key mechanism is the cap and trade exchange that obliges polluting industries to purchase credits from cleaner operations. The sales aren’t netting the expected amounts with less than $10 million spent in the latest auction. The money is due to go to pollution-limiting programs such as transit and the struggling high speed rail project.
Defenders of the cap and trade plan say that uncertainty over the legislative outcome is to blame for the weak revenue. Now that the state’s direction is emphatically decided, the value of pollution credits should stabilize, they argue. That’s a claim that needs testing.
On balance, Brown has been a good advocate for climate action, though he does have one notable blind spot: his continued silence on a plan to ship major quantities of coal through a new Oakland port facility for overseas combustion. That project just happens to belong to Phil Tagami, a buddy and political donor to the governor. May we remind the governor of his own words from last year: “It doesn’t make sense to be shutting down coal plants (in the U.S.) and then export it for somebody else to burn in a more dirty way,” he said.
Let the record be clear: Brown’s climate commitment is incomplete until he takes a stand, one way or another, on that Oakland coal train.
