JUICE: Clashing Colors

Continued efforts by the Trump Administration to brown green federal protections are being met head on by this Blue State’s considerable political, legal and market clout.

In his latest move, President Trump, along with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, said the administration is repealing the prohibition on coastal oil and gas drilling. Zinke said it would promote the country’s “energy dominance.”

That move follows other actions aimed at jettisoning, or at least loosening controls on stationary and vehicular greenhouse gas emissions.

However, Trump’s stance on offshore drilling and environmental protection is not strictly a Red v. Blue issue. Both Republicans and Democrats are raising red flags.

Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA)—who announced he was retiring from Congress in the face of a tight re-election race in 2018—noted that the nation’s oil and gas supplies are ample, negating the need for offshore drilling.

“Secretary Zinke has said that the ‘states and local communities’ will have a voice, but Californians have made themselves clear: they do not want new drilling off our coasts,” Issa stated.

Meanwhile, while Trump and company seek to counter the decline of coal-fueled power, Democrat-dominated California continues to be bullish on renewable electricity resources. A 50 percent renewable level is expected to be reached before the 2030 state deadline. In addition, Gov. Jerry Brown is now pushing to have the state’s electricity resources, which account for less than 20 percent of state greenhouse gas emissions, be fossil-fuel-free by 2040.

State alternative energy mandates and the decline in the cost of solar, wind and energy storage resources are bolstering those efforts.

On the legal front, Democratic Attorney General Becerra is using his power to counter polluting federal efforts. He said Jan. 5 that he and other blue state attorneys general will sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency if it undoes EPA’s emission limits on newly refurbished heavy-duty trucks. Eliminating EPA’s “2016 Glider Rule” would allow these trucks to spew 20 to 40 times more emissions of hazardous pollutants.

Last month, Becerra filed a lawsuit to stop the Bureau of Land Management from suspending its 11 month-old rule to control avoidable methane leaks from oil and gas facilities on federal lands. He and his counterpart in New Mexico argue that the suspension clashes with BLM’s “mandate to prevent waste and ensure the safe and responsible development of oil and gas resources on public lands.”

BLM-managed land in California had 6,854 producing gas and oil wells in 2015, covering more than 200,000 acres, mostly in Kern County. A BLM spokesperson said that oil and gas producers on federal land in California flared 71 million cubic feet of methane. It’s not known how much methane was vented by these operators, but based upon the proportion of wells in California on federal land it could be more than 2 billion cubic feet a year.

On the international stage, Brown continues to promote the joint pledge with other states, countries and local governments to uphold the Paris Accord to ratchet down the rise in the average global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

“We in America are operating from the grassroots–from the cities, from the states, from corporate leaders, from universities and from civil society,” Brown said on the second anniversary of the Paris climate accord in mid-December.

To date, California and 204 other jurisdictions across the world are signatories to the Under 2 MOU, representing 40 percent of the global economy.

State politicians also continue to push against the Trump Administration’s effort to gut energy efficiency programs and standards by zeroing out their budgets or failing to implement rules.

Like its proposal to allow offshore drilling, the plan to eliminate the Energy Star program faces opposition from members of both political parties in and outside California, as highlighted during a hearing by the House Energy & Commerce Energy Subcommittee last November. The 25 year-old program has saved consumers $430 billion and cut 3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases.

In other action, Becerra sued the Department of Energy in 2017 for delaying the implementation of numerous energy efficiency regulations, including for uninterruptible power supplies, ceiling fans, air compressors and walk-in coolers and freezers.

The Trump Administration also has threatened to roll back emission standards for new cars in 2022-25. However, California has been able to set its own emissions limits even after its authority to do so was challenged earlier by the Bush 2 administration.

In addition, state leaders have striven to dramatically increase the number of zero emission vehicles, including via subsidized charging stations and state rebates. Those are on top of the federal rebate, which survived under newly passed tax law.

The political clashes will continue, but hopefully each effort to weaken California’s climate protection work will turn the Golden state bright green. — Elizabeth McCarthy

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JUICE: Clashing Colors

William J. Kelly

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