California is still the state to beat on corporate emissions

Politico

16-07-2025

With help from Alex Nieves, Nicole Norman, Juliann Ventura and Chelsea Harvey
KEEPING THE TORCH: California is still the only game in town when it comes to corporate climate disclosure — even if it's taking its time on implementation.
After California passed its pair of laws requiring big companies to report their emissions and their climate-related business risks and not only promptly got sued, but started watering down the requirements and timeline for enforcement, other states started stepping up to fill the void.
But bills in Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Colorado and Washington have all stalled this year, leaving California as the de facto leader after the Trump-era Securities and Exchange Commission rolled back its federal rule.
'We didn't make it across the finish line,' said New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose second attempt to compel large businesses in his state to report their pollution failed last month. 'That's disappointing.'
He conceded that there isn't yet the same level of support California saw for SB 253 and SB 261, when tech giants like Apple and Google came on board late in the 2023 session to push them over the finish line.
'I don't think it was a lack of interest or effort,' Hoylman-Sigal said. 'I think it was mostly due to a shorter legislative session. It's a complicated, big, important bill.' He said he thinks it can pass next year — but someone else will have to shepherd it, since he's leaving the Legislature to run for Manhattan borough president.
Other bills have yet to be taken up or were scaled back. Washington's measure was turned into a study bill before failing to advance, while New Jersey's is expected to fall prey to lawmakers' election-year ambitions.
Environmentalists who had been getting impatient with California's pace of implementation have since made their peace.
Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit that counts Amazon, Bank of America and Target among its member companies, had gotten frustrated enough that it started backing copycat legislation in other states — a reversal from when both Ceres and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is suing over the rules, agreed a 'regulatory patchwork' would be counterproductive.
Now, Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, said he feels comfortable enough with CARB Chair Liane Randolph's commitment to finalize rulemaking by the end of the year before companies start making disclosures of scopes 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions in 2026.
'We are responding to inquiries from states all the time,' Rothstein said. 'But we're not going out and beating the bushes.'
The shift in tone is a notable new vote of confidence in CARB after we reported late last year that the agency won't seek corporate penalties for 'incomplete reporting' so long as a company makes a 'good faith effort' to retain data relevant to its carbon footprint, sparking a backlash from disclosure supporters. Gov. Gavin Newsom had also sought to delay corporate climate reporting by two years, and CARB suggested scrapping Scope 3 reporting requirements, which remain in the law and will kick in in 2027.
But Rothstein said he's encouraged by the progress he's seen, which includes a workshop CARB held in May on the issue.
'We're eager to do it, but it's more important that it be done thoughtfully and in a diligent manner than a few months' delay,' he said. — JW
Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here!
SOLAR TRUCE: A controversial proposal to reduce subsidies for a wide swath of rooftop solar customers is no more.
Assemblymember Lisa Calderon agreed Tuesday to remove language from AB 942 that would have lowered payments to homeowners who installed solar panels before 2023 for surplus energy they sell back to the electric grid through a process called net metering.
The amended measure cleared the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee on Tuesday on a 9-4 vote.
The bill would have aligned payments to early adopters of solar with less lucrative subsidies for homeowners who installed solar panels after the California Public Utilities Commission voted in 2022 to end net metering.
That concept sparked a heated debate over who benefits from higher subsidies and whether rolling back net metering has hampered the state's climate goals.
Utilities, labor unions and ratepayer advocates argue that subsidizing solar customers' energy bills means that homes without rooftop solar pay a disproportionate amount to maintain the electric grid. Meanwhile, the solar industry, developers and realtors argued that the proposal to reduce payments would have retroactively broken contracts between home sellers and buyers.
The bill is now narrowly tailored to ding residential customers whose annual electric bills are under $300. They would no longer be eligible to receive a separate credit funded with cap-and-trade auction revenues. — AN
SPEAKING OF AMENDMENTS: Senate Democrats also nixed language from a bill that would have required CPUC appointees to represent different regions of the state.
Committee Chair Josh Becker said during a hearing Tuesday that the decision was made in light of Newsom's veto of a similar bill in 2022. At the time, the governor said mandating that commissioners come from different regions was unnecessary because he was committed to having state boards that 'represent California's diversity.'
Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, author of AB 13, reluctantly accepted the amendment to the current bill, telling the committee that she was 'not excited' about the changes.
Some lawmakers and ratepayer advocates have expressed concern that all five of the CPUC's current commissioners — each of whom was appointed by Newsom — live in the Bay Area or Sacramento region, which is served by one utility: Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
The bill still contains a handful of proposed changes to CPUC's rules, including a requirement that at least one commissioner have a background in consumer protection and new reporting mandates when the commission decides to increase rates. — AN
POINTING FINGERS: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that the federal government has not seen California's 'formal request' for wildfire aid, saying that there is a 'multistep process' that has not been completed.
'For whatever reason, Gavin Newsom seems to enjoy trying to stick his thumb in the eye of the White House and Congress, which seems to be counter purpose if he is requesting relief,' he said.
Newsom's office clarified in a post on X that they have been in contact with the speaker's office.
'It's our understanding that the Speaker was referring specifically to the White House's formal appropriations request,' they clarified.
Newsom took a trip to Washington in February to meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on the issue. That month, he also sent a letter to Johnson and other House leaders asking for almost $40 billion to help with immediate and long-term recovery. — NN
AI OBSTACLE — Looming budget cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could undermine the country's AI-powered weather forecasting capabilities. The funding threat comes as California tech companies have been seizing their moment in Washington in hearings focused on wildfire policy and technology.
The Trump administration wants to slash the agency's budget by $2.2 billion — a move that experts say could stymie the improvement of AI weather models, Chelsea Harvey reports for POLITICO's E&E News.
While AI did not predict the floods in Texas, the technology was showing potential with weather forecasting and new models are 'certainly capable of predicting 'out-of-sample' events — events that they haven't seen before,' said Corey Potvin, a scientist at NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, Kim Doster, NOAA's director of communications, dismissed concerns, saying in an email that cuts would not negatively impact research and forecasting at NOAA. – JV
— The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection put out a new map that shows the severity of all fires over 1,000 acres since 2015.
— A new report on state efforts to reduce plastic pollution ranks California as the nation's leader.
— The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, is going to have an extreme heat problem.