11-03-2025
Chucking California's recycling rules
With help from Alex Nieves and Lesley Clark
REFUSE, REDO, RECYCLE: Gov. Gavin Newsom threw his administration's draft plastic recycling rules into the trash late Friday — and his message is already getting reused across the country.
In case you missed it: Newsom hit restart on CalRecycle's rules implementing SB 54, the landmark 2022 bill that overhauled how plastic packaging gets recycled in the state.
The reason, his spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said, was to 'minimiz[e] costs for small businesses and working families as much as possible.'
It's a familiar refrain: Retail, plastics and farming groups had been tapping into the Democrats' reckoning over cost-of-living issues to argue for tweaks to the rules to lower costs to industry. In a statement late Friday, Cal Chamber called the decision to restart 'a prudent one, that provides the necessary time and attention to ensure regulations related to SB 54 are implemented in a thoughtful and cost-effective manner.'
(CalRecycle's former director, Rachel Wagoner, also advocated for more time to tweak the rules in her new role as California executive director for Circular Action Alliance, the organization of producers charged with compliance. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that she is now facing a Fair Political Practices Commission complaint over going to work for the plastics industry. Wagoner declined to comment.)
But the fact that it's coming from Newsom is giving succor to business groups opposing similar policies in other states.
'California's change in course should be taken into account by New York lawmakers, as the mandates in [the New York plastics bill] go beyond the California statute on key areas, including material bans, recyclability mandates and source reduction, indicating that the impacts of New York's proposal would be even more severe,' wrote more than 100 companies and groups, including the American Chemistry Council, Consumer Technology Association and Business Council of New York State, in an open letter POLITICO's Marie J. French obtained Sunday.
It's not yet clear how big of a change Newsom's restart will make, policy-wise. The law still requires that thousands of companies reduce single-use plastic packaging and foodware by 25 percent by 2032 and pay for and ensure that 100 percent of their products are recyclable or compostable.
Sen. Ben Allen, the author of the law and a big defender of the draft rules, said he had been nearing a compromise with CalRecycle, the governor's office, the Legislature and Circular Action Alliance to make minor changes to the rules like extending deadlines, clarifying language around which businesses must participate and exempting certain materials used in medicine and science, if they were finalized by Friday's procedural deadline.
Either way, CalRecycle and the plastics industry are still tied to the statutory timelines laid out in the law, including an interim target of January 2027 to reduce the use of plastic packaging by 10 percent.
But the debate has become a bit of a proxy political showdown over the direction of California's environmental mandates, especially because the negotiations that led to the passage of the law three years ago had already been so heated. Environmental groups were lobbying hard for CalRecycle to finish the rules by Friday's procedural deadline, backed up by at least a dozen Democrats in the state Legislature.
Allen said in an interview that he was disappointed in Newsom's decision to restart the rules. The governor's office did not respond to additional questions in time for publication.
'I made it clear I thought it was important that we stay on track,' Allen said. 'This whole thing has always been about affordability. It's one of the reasons the cities have been with us since the very beginning. They're the ones who have been carrying the costs and passing it on to ratepayers.'
The most immediate result of the delay could be that Californians will start hearing about it more. Environmental groups seeking an end to single-use plastic packaging and foodware are suggesting a possible return to the California ballot, from which they had backed off in 2022 to negotiate SB 54 as a compromise.
'It is time to let the voters have a direct say in regulations that hold plastic producers accountable for their pollution,' said Dianna Cohen, co-founder and CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 'The plastics industry has proven time and again that they are incapable of self-regulation and will only continue business as usual at the expense of current and future generations.' — CvK
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FIRE MAPS, ROUND THREE: The cities of San Luis Obispo and Tehachapi and the unincorporated parts of San Luis Obispo, Ventura and Monterey counties got some bad news from California's rollout of its new local fire hazard zone maps today.
Those jurisdictions saw the number of acres categorized at very high fire hazard and therefore subject to fire-resistant building codes and risk disclosure requirements for home sales jump significantly from the last update in 2011. The reason is Cal Fire's more sophisticated modeling, which gives more weight to the winds that have fueled catastrophic fires up and down the state in the last decade.
Take unincorporated Ventura County, for example, the site of some of California's most devastating wildfires, including the 2017 Thomas Fire and 2018 Woolsey Fire. It had 5,370 acres classified as very high fire hazard in 2011. The new data suggests 31,487 acres are at very high fire hazard.
The data released today, covering the Central Valley and coast, is part three of Cal Fire's four-part roll-out. Eastern and Southern California — including places like Altadena, where the Eaton Fire blew embers far beyond the boundaries of Cal Fire's old fire hazard maps — are scheduled for March 24. The local jurisdictions must still formally adopt the maps, though they can make changes as they see fit. — CvK
NOT SO FAST: The Supreme Court today quashed a Republican effort to block climate liability lawsuits from California and other blue states.
The justices issued an order rejecting a request by 19 Republican state attorneys general to challenge their Democratic counterparts who've sued oil companies for compensation for the costs of rising tides, intensifying storms and other disasters worsened by climate change, Lesley Clark reports for POLITICO's E&E News.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall launched the case last May, arguing that climate liability lawsuits — like the one filed by California in September 2023 — pose 'grave consequences' for the state's residents and would boost gas prices.
Four of the court's conservative justices joined its liberal members in rejecting the request. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
California's lawsuit, filed by Attorney General Rob Bonta, alleges companies like Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute — the industry's trade group — lied to the public about climate change caused by fossil fuels, and seeks payment for damages and the establishment of a climate adaptation fund. — AN, LC
THE OTHER BORDER ISSUE: House Republicans proposed halving the annual federal funding for a wastewater treatment plant in San Diego that cleans up raw sewage and pollutants flowing in from Mexico in their budget blueprint released over the weekend.
The proposal would cut the International Boundary and Water Commission's operations, maintenance and construction funding from $156 million to $78 million. The commission runs the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is undergoing major repairs with previously-appropriated Congressional funding. Rep. Scott Peters, the Democrat who represents San Diego, said in a Monday statement that 'deferring those smaller annual upkeep costs meant we needed to spend a lot more money later on to fix all the damage that was done, not to mention the harm to community health, our local economy, and our national security.'
Meanwhile, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pointed at Mexico in a social media post on Saturday, where he wrote that he was 'just briefed' on the decadesold cross-border sewage pollution. 'This is unacceptable,' wrote Zeldin. 'Mexico must honor its commitments to control this pollution and sewage!' — CvK
D.C. to CA: Newsom appointed Andrew Rakestraw, a climate advisor for the Biden administration, as chair of California's Board of Environmental Safety on Friday. Rakestraw was previously a senior climate negotiator at the U.S. Department of State since 2022, and was a senior adviser for John Kerry, Biden's climate envoy. He served as a climate negotiator in the State Department's Office of Global Change from 2013 to 2019.
HSR HELP: Newsom also named Emily Morrison chief of contract administration at the California High Speed Rail Authority. Morrison similarly comes from the federal ranks, where she was construction branch chief at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She previously worked as a contracting officer for the Air Force.
— Farmers called their work climate-smart to get federal funds from Biden — but those words may cost them under Trump.
— Travel the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta at the center of Trump and Newsom's water wars with photos and words by Ryan Christopher Jones … and pair it with a letter by Reps. Adam Gray and Jim Costa urging Newsom and Trump to work together on water (tl;dr: 'Please don't sue.')
— The United States' energy demand is projected to increase 30 to 40 percent by 2040 because of data centers, electric vehicles and appliances and general economic growth, according to a new report commissioned by most of the major U.S. energy trade groups.
