Gavin Newsom tells California air pollution agency to ‘up our game’ on climate, carbon

For weeks, environmentalists have been grumbling that California’s air-pollution agency has been too timid about charting the next chapter in the state’s ongoing fight against climate change.

Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to agree.

Newsom said Friday he believes the plan being developed by the California Air Resources Board “doesn’t go far enough or fast enough” toward achieving the state’s over-arching goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. He called for an end to new gas-fired power plants, a push for offshore wind generation and the construction of millions of “climate-friendly homes” as a way of curbing carbon emissions.

In a letter to the air board’s chairwoman, Liane Randolph, the governor took aim at the agency’s proposed “scoping plan,” an elaborate blueprint to flesh out a host of laws and other rules that are already on the books. They include a 2016 law that requires dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and an executive order, signed by Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, that sets a goal of making the entire California economy carbon neutral by 2045.

“We need to up our game,” Newsom wrote.

It was a rare rebuke from the governor’s office for the Air Resources Board, which is considered a national leader on climate change and air pollution. Randolph’s predecessor Mary Nichols was on President Joe Biden’s shortlist of candidates to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmentalists critique proposed air-pollution plan

Environmentalists believe the Air Resources Board is in danger of falling short. Danny Cullenward, policy director at a San Francisco nonprofit called Carbon Plan, said the proposed scoping plan, released in May, is filled with “long-term aspirations” but doesn’t seem capable of reducing carbon emissions nearly quickly enough.

For instance, the 2016 law says carbon emissions must be 40 percent below the levels recorded in 1990 — and meet that mandate just eight years from now. Cullenward said achieving such a decline by 2030, as required by law, seems unrealistic given how the air board is implementing it.

Notably, he said the air board is still relying too heavily on its decade-old “cap and trade” program — a market-based system that requires industrial polluters to buy credits as they emit greenhouse gases. Cullenward, who is vice chair of a committee that advises state policymakers on the program, said cap-and-trade credits remain too inexpensive to force smokestack industries to make a sizable dent in emissions.

“We’re not on track for our carbon targets,” he said.

The air board’s proposed plan refers to the blueprint as an “ambitious and aggressive approach to squeezing the carbon out of every sector of the economy” — a soup-to-nuts plan to create pedestrian-friendly cities, ramp up the electrification of cars and trucks and take other measures to reduce emissions.

On Monday, the agency said it will regroup.

“CARB welcomes the Governor’s input, thanks him for his leadership, and recognizing the ever-increasing urgency of addressing the climate emergency, will adjust the plan accordingly,” air board spokesman Stanley Young said in an email.

Flaws noted in Newsom’s approach to carbon emissions

As the Oak Fire in Mariposa County exploded to 16,791 acres over the weekend, Newsom has become increasingly vocal about the need to take dramatic action on climate change. In a letter Saturday to Biden, the governor lamented that the president’s climate ambitions are being “held hostage by uncooperative Republicans and a lone Democrat from a coal-producing state,” a reference to Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Yet critics say Newsom isn’t doing everything he could, either.

Environmentalists recently blasted Newsom for signing AB 205, a budget-trailer bill that streamlines the red tape for renewable-energy projects but also would allow the state to directly purchase electricity from a group of heavily-polluting power plants in Southern California that are supposed to close in late 2023 but could get extended.

That could interfere with another climate-change law, signed by Brown in 2018, which commits California to an all-renewable electricity grid by 2045. As it is, a joint study last year by the air board, Public Utilities Commission and California Energy Commission has warned that California will have to triple the installation of solar, wind and other renewable energy facilities to meet the 2045 target.

As far as the air board’s scoping plan is concerned, Cullenward praised Newsom for telling the air board to set bold targets on wind-energy production and climate-friendly housing. But he said the governor didn’t address weaknesses in the “cap and trade” program.

In addition, Newsom’s letter to the air board endorsed one particularly controversial aspect of the agency’s plan — the promotion of a technology called “carbon capture and storage,” in which carbon dioxide is pulled directly from smokestacks and planted deep underground.

For instance, a Rancho Cordova company called Clean Energy Systems has purchased a shuttered biomass plant in Mendota, a disadvantaged city of 12,000 in western Fresno County. The company says it would reopen the plant, burn farm waste to generate energy and “safely and permanently” bury the carbon dioxide emitted by the facility.

Environmentalists fear that the carbon could leak, contributing to pollution in a region of the state where the air is already among the dirtiest in the nation.

“What would the implications be of a carbon leak out by Mendota?” said Catherine Garoupa White, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. “We’re talking about some of our most overburdened communities in the state.”

This story was originally published July 25, 2022 at 1:40 PM.