29-01-2025
States can't save us now
With help from Jordan Wolman, Camille von Kaenel and Annie Snider
DOUBLE TROUBLE: It isn't just California — state leaders across the country have been double-clutching on more ambitious climate policy in fears of voter backlash over high electricity and gas prices.
And that was before President Donald Trump started dismantling the regulations and incentives that were meant to cut planet-warming pollution, further threatening the ability of Democratic officials to save their own climate goals.
'We should not surrender because of the change in Washington,' said New York Assemblymember John McDonald, a Democrat from the Albany area. 'But we have to be realistic that we're not going to have a federal partner.'
It's a marked shift in tone from eight years ago, when Democratic governors and mayors asserted themselves as bulwarks of climate progress, set or strengthened ambitious emissions targets and launched coalitions to keep up climate action in the face of the wrecking ball Trump took to Obama-era rules.
This time around, officials aren't so out in front, citing a wariness of public reaction to the high consumer costs associated with certain types of climate policies.
Maryland is delaying action on its cap-and-trade system. Vermont looks poised to jettison an effort to fund home electrification by charging more for heating fuels after bruising losses for Democrats in the Legislature. And as readers of this newsletter know, California has repeatedly delayed plans to strengthen its emissions trading program that officials have cited as essential for meeting the climate goals that the state is already behind on.
'The election rattled everybody,' said Kim Coble, co-chair of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change and executive director of the state's League of Conservation Voters chapter. 'I think everybody kind of stopped and said, 'Wait a minute. Wow. What's this really mean?''
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced this month she would no longer finalize a landmark cap-and-trade style program this year as originally promised. She also temporarily delayed a toll on traffic coming into Manhattan and acknowledged the state isn't on track to meet its 2030 target of getting 70 percent of its electricity from renewable energy.
'The goals are still worthy — but we have to think about the collateral damage,' she said over the summer about New York's efforts to transition to clean energy.
It's not all doom and gloom.
Hochul and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, co-chairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, claimed earlier this week that the group of 22 states and two territories would still reach its target of cutting emissions at least 26 percent from 2005 levels by this year to support the Paris Agreement that Trump is pulling out of.
Hochul signed a sweeping 'Climate Superfund' measure last month to attempt to extract billions of dollars from fossil fuel companies to compensate for past extreme weather damages. And Washington state handily defeated a ballot measure seeking to repeal its landmark carbon pricing program in the face of conservative attacks that it has raised gas prices.
Other Democrats are citing the costs of inaction and trying to highlight how their renewable energy policies and other climate programs can help control costs. In hearing on California's cap-and-trade program last year, lawmakers floated boosting consumer rebates with proceeds from pollution allowance auctions.
But as the Legislature, set to reauthorize the program this year, demands more oversight of its cost and climate impacts, cap and trade is in a holding pattern.
'We're deciding how we want to proceed,' California Air Resource Board Chair Liane Randolph said last week when asked if the update would happen before lawmakers pass a reauthorization bill. — BB
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THE REPUBLICAN CLIMATE PITCH: Assembly Republicans are taking aim at some of California's environmental mainstays, from the California Environmental Quality Act to the Coastal Commission — and they're calling it climate action.
They unveiled a package of legislation today waiving environmental rules to fast-track the clearing of flammable vegetation around vulnerable communities and facilitate controlled burns.
Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher said climate change is exacerbating California's wildfires by making forests drier but that California's policies to reduce emissions aren't enough to fix the problem.
'If you went and did all the things that some of these folks think we should do, like banning all fossil fuels, it doesn't change the underlying conditions on the ground right now that are causing these fires,' Gallagher said. 'Often I'll say to some of my colleagues, 'How long till the climate changes back? In the meantime, what should we do?''
'There's a better way to reduce emissions in a way that is much more affordable and cost effective, and that thing is vegetation management,' Gallagher added.
Some of the Republican proposals, like one to redirect funding for high-speed rail to water infrastructure and wildfire prevention, are unlikely to be taken up by the Democratic supermajority. Others have stalled amid opposition from environmentally minded Democrats in the past but could find traction now because Democrats have also already introduced several measures to chip away at environmental rules to speed forest management and rebuilding. — CvK
BILLS ON BILLS: We know affordability is going to be hot this session. Utility ratepayer advocacy group TURN wants to keep it front of mind with a legislative scorecard it released today.
The group graded lawmakers on their votes on 10 bills, including ones to increase oversight of utilities' wildfire spending, prohibit utilities' spending ratepayer money on advertising and increase the wait period for former California Public Utilities Commission members to take jobs with utilities.
Earning top marks were Sens. Dave Min (who scored 102 percent, getting extra credit for carrying a TURN-sponsored bill), Ben Allen and Scott Wiener, who each scored 100 percent. On the Assembly side, Assemblymembers Jacqui Irwin and Chris Ward received perfect scores. — DK
CLIMATE FOOTPRINT: Climate change made the wildfires in Los Angeles this month about 35 percent more likely, according to an analysis released today by the group World Weather Attribution.
Thirty-two researchers from the United States, Brazil and Europe specialized in studying the role of climate change in extreme events determined that the hot, dry and windy conditions that fueled the Palisades and Eaton fires were about 35 percent more likely under today's climate than they would have been in a preindustrial climate that was 1.3 degrees Celsius cooler.
The high fire-risk conditions will become another 35 percent more likely if warming reaches 2.6 degrees Celsius as expected by 2100 under current policy scenarios modeled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. — BB
BIG APPLE PLAYS COPYCAT: A New York lawmaker reintroduced a bill in Albany on Monday that would require large companies operating in the state to disclose their full carbon footprint, mirroring California's first-in-the-nation law that's set to go into effect next year.
State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat representing parts of Manhattan, is renewing his effort after the measure failed to gain traction last year. But he'll be doing so with some noticeably different dynamics.
The broader corporate climate disclosure push is all but dead at the federal level, with the incoming Trump-appointed chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission likely to pull back on a weaker rule the agency adopted last year. Even in California, regulators have balked at enforcing the measure, deciding not to penalize noncompliant companies next year.
Hoylman-Sigal, an old law-school pal of state Sen. Scott Wiener, the author of California's SB 253, will also have what could be an influential advocacy group at his back that he didn't have last time.
Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit that counts companies like Amazon and Bank of America as members and that pushed for California's laws and the SEC rule, previously told us it would support climate disclosure efforts in other states — a reversal from its previous position. Washington and Illinois, in addition to New York, introduced copycat legislation to require climate disclosure last year, though none of those bills passed. — JW
FAREWELL NOTE FROM THE COLORADO: Anne Castle, one of Biden's top water officials at the Interior Department whom he appointed as his federal representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission in 2022, submitted her resignation this week, as requested.
In a letter obtained and published by independent journalist John Fleck and confirmed by POLITICO, she recapped her tenure participating in the troubled negotiations over the dwindling Colorado River — and took a few swipes at Trump's executive orders on environmental justice, the federal workforce and California water so far.
'Edicts imposed from outside the Basin, such as recent proclamations concerning California water, based on an inadequate understanding of the plumbing and motivated by political retaliation, upend carefully crafted compromises, create winners and losers, and unnecessarily spawn the potential to adversely affect the lives of millions of people as well as the ecosystems on which they depend,' Castle wrote. — CvK
— A judge halted Trump's freeze on federal aid programs, but not before it caused chaos across the country's health, climate and infrastructure sectors.
— Sales of private fire hydrants are booming after public hydrants in the Pacific Palisades temporarily ran dry during the fire earlier this month.
— The Los Angeles Times' Sammy Roth writes that the Ivanpah solar farm in the Mojave Desert was a bad bet for government after Pacific Gas & Electric announced it would no longer buy its power.
— San Francisco State University is the first major public university to require every student to take a course on climate justice to graduate, starting this fall.
