Veronica Catlin
Mon, September 18, 2023
(FOX40.COM) — California Governor Gavin Newsom announced at the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC that he intends to sign Senate Bill 253, a greenhouse gas emissions disclosure requirement authored by Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).
“In announcing he will sign SB 253, Governor Newsom is reaffirming California’s global climate leadership. These carbon disclosures are a simple but intensely powerful driver of decarbonization,” Senator Wiener said in a statement issued after the announcement.
“When business leaders, investors, consumers, and analysts have full visibility into large corporations’ carbon emissions, they have the tools and incentives to turbocharge their decarbonization efforts. This legislation will support those companies doing their part to tackle the climate crisis and create accountability for those that aren’t,” he added.
SB 253 is reported to require any public or private company earning over a billion dollars in annual revenue that operates in California to publicly disclose the greenhouse gas emissions released from their operations and supply chain. Officials say the goal is to “unlock new approaches and drive action to reduce emissions.
California looks toward renewable future amid contentious power plant decisions
Sharon Udasin
Sun, September 17, 2023
California officials have garnered criticism in recent months over their decisions to prolong the lifespans of natural gas and nuclear facilities despite the state’s pledges to shift to cleaner energy.
Lawmakers have argued the moves are part of a critical balancing act between California’s ambitious renewable energy goals and the need to keep homes heated and powered.
But many scientists and environmental advocates believe this step is unnecessary — and that the state would succeed in providing ample power and attaining its goals without keeping such plants open.
“We have abundant renewable clean energy resources,” Laura Deehan, state director for Environment California, told The Hill. “And in fact, with the current technology, we have the ability to build a much more resilient electricity grid.”
Controversial power plant extensions
Earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted unanimously in favor of increasing the capacity of the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility — a site that was also home to the nation’s biggest methane leak in 2015. The CPUC maintained that doing so served “to guard ratepayers from the type of natural gas price spikes that occurred last winter.”
And about a year before that, state lawmakers — with the governor’s support — passed legislation seeking to extend the shelf life of the decades-old Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. While nuclear power plants do not generate greenhouse gases, they produce a small amount of radioactive waste.
Keeping the Diablo site open, officials contended, could help tide the state over as it transitions to an entirely renewable energy economy.
The decisions appeared to run counter to climate goals the state has set over the past five years.
California committed in 2018 to achieving a 100 percent renewable energy-powered grid by 2045, per legislation signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D).
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) followed up last year with interim targets that aim for 90 percent renewable energy by 2035 and 95 percent by 2040. Separate legislation, meanwhile, urged carbon neutrality no later than 2045, while also setting an 85 percent emissions reduction target for that year, in comparison to 1990 levels.
The move to expand the Aliso Canyon facility’s capacity was also perceived as an about-face from Newsom’s campaign promises in 2018 — at which time the then-lieutenant governor told a reporter he was “fully committed” to shutting down the site entirely.
The main ingredient of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more potent than carbon dioxide. The October 2015 leak at the Aliso Canyon facility, which was only controlled in February 2016, forced more than 8,000 households to temporarily relocate.
Responding to the CPUC’s decision, Newsom’s deputy press secretary at the time stressed that although the governor appreciates the agency’s efforts to preserve energy reliability, he continues to advocate for the facility’s permanent closure.
Deehan expressed her disappointment in seeing these gas plants getting extensions, even more so because they are located “in places that have a history of environmental disasters.”
“To me, that just underscores the urgency of moving even faster towards our clean energy goals,” she said.
Another recent and contentious energy-related move involved the passage of legislation last fall seeking to extend operations until 2030 of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, located along California’s Central Coast.
Licenses for the site’s two reactors were set to expire in November 2024 and August 2025, respectively, and Pacific Gas and Electric previously announced plans to decommission them at that point.
About six months after the legislation’s passage, however, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted an exemption allowing the facility to operate under its current licenses while the agency considers a renewal that could last up to 20 years.
While Newsom and state legislators have backed the extension as a reliable bridge to support California’s clean energy transition, environmental groups have been vocal in their opposition to the plans.
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering, attributed the decision to the “lobbying power of the nuclear industry and their advocates.”
The potential of renewables
Experts like Jacobson maintain keeping the power plants online is unneeded and could be counterproductive.
“There are a lot of renewable energy projects in the queue in California,” Jacobson told The Hill.
“Many of them are just slowed by either transmission barriers or red tape,” he said. “They’re just backed up in terms of permitting approvals.”
Jacobson cited a variety of solar, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric and battery storage projects in the pipeline, stressing that “there’s really no reason California can’t get to like 80 percent renewables by 2030 or even 2027.”
From a technical perspective, he expressed confidence that California would have no problem meeting its renewable energy targets.
He pointed to the state putting 5 gigawatts of batteries on the grid in the past few years as an example of its ability to fulfill these goals, adding that aside from during summer, California’s peak energy demand is about 25 gigawatts.
Currently, solar energy fulfills almost all the state’s daytime electricity needs, aside from in the summer, when natural gas is also used, according to Jacobson.
“At night, so when the solar goes down, then you have hydro, wind, geothermal, which is pretty constant,” he said, noting that batteries are also “kicking in” after sunset and before sunrise.
While Diablo Canyon is still open, it is providing a peak supply of only 2.3 gigawatts — half the amount that batteries are supplying, Jacobson added.
“So Diablo Canyon’s not necessary really,” he said.
Jacobson took that notion one step further by asserting Diablo Canyon’s continued operation is blocking further offshore wind development.
“Diablo Canyon has this huge transmission line that’s going to the coast right there,” he said. “Basically, Diablo Canyon is hogging that line — slowing the ability of offshore wind to be built off the coast of central California.”
The California coastal environment, Deehan added, is among “the places in the world where the wind blows harder and faster than anywhere else — really high potential for clean energy production there.”
A 2021 study co-authored by Jacobson suggested that deploying more offshore wind turbines could help avoid summer blackouts because wind speeds are the fastest during this season.
Acknowledging that offshore wind costs have recently spiked due to high interest rates, Jacobson expressed some concern about a possible slowdown in infrastructure deployment if the situation doesn’t resolve itself soon.
But on Thursday night, the California state Legislature passed Assembly Bill 1373, which would authorize the CPUC and the Department of Water Resources to purchase energy from offshore wind developers if it is signed into law by Newsom.
“It’s about giving the state the power to buy that clean energy,” Deehan said. “And that way, they can order it up, which will then provide so much certainty for all the market forces, for the investors and the developers.”
As far as solar energy is concerned, Jacobson said this resource remains “pretty cheap” and that the cost of batteries — which can be installed quickly — has dropped significantly.
But the professor accused major utilities of “fighting tooth and nail to prevent people from putting solar on their roofs,” referring to a recent decision to weaken incentives for new installations.
“The fact that they’re pushing this nuclear while reducing residential solar benefits is just ridiculous,” he said.
‘Ahead of benchmarks’
While Jacobson reiterated his belief that California would have no trouble keeping houses powered and heated without the Aliso or Diablo extensions, he also highlighted the potential of citizen demand-response in emergency situations.
One day last year when there was a chance the grid could have failed, Newsom made an announcement asking people to stop using energy, Jacobson recalled.
“And amazingly, everybody did,” he said. “This was actually a case of demand-response where they didn’t even need financial incentives.”
Jacobson touted the ability of the demand side to “control the grid,” while deeming the idea that the grid would fail with more renewables “complete nonsense.”
Lobbying action against the deployment of renewables, he recognized, could slow down the state’s charge to meet its clean energy targets.
“But it’s not stopping it, it’s not reversing it,” he said. “If anything, it’s just slowing it down a little bit from reaching the goal.”
There’s no technical reason the state can’t achieve its ambitions even earlier, with all the renewable energy projects that are waiting in the queue, Jacobson argued.
“If everything was just approved today, you could reach the goal much faster,” he added.
Deehan echoed these sentiments, emphasizing that California is not at all off track in terms of its climate commitments.
“We’re ahead of benchmarks every single time in reaching all of our clean energy goals,” she said. “And the challenge is, can we just speed up those goals?”
California sues five major oil companies for 'decades-long campaign of deception' about climate change
Louis Sahagún
Sat, September 16, 2023
California is suing five of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, alleging that they engaged in a "decades-long campaign of deception" about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuels that has forced the state to spend tens of billions of dollars to address environmental-related damages.
State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit Friday in San Francisco County Superior Court alleging that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute have known since the 1950s that the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet but instead of alerting the public about the dangers posed to the environment they chose to deny or downplay the effects.
“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change,” Bonta said in a statement, “but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.”
Several other states and dozens of municipalities, including cities and counties in California, have filed similar lawsuits in recent years.
“With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court,” Bonta said. “From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.”
Bonta is seeking to create a nuisance abatement fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation efforts; injunctive relief to protect California’s natural resources from pollution, impairment and destruction; and to prevent the companies from making any further false or misleading statements about the contribution of fossil fuel combustion to climate change.
Attorneys for the oil companies could not immediately be reached for comment. But Chevron issued this statement early Sunday: "Climate change is a global problem that requires a coordinated international policy response, not piecemeal litigation for the benefit of lawyers and politicians."
A growing number of high-profile cases in state court helped pave the way for Bonta’s 135-page lawsuit to hold oil and gas companies financially responsible for their role in climate change and marketing products they know cause injury.
They include the record $246-billion settlement with Big Tobacco, and a $350-million settlement reached in 2019 that will provide funds to clean up toxic lead paint sold by manufacturers that knew it was poisonous.
“There is some commonality with earlier cases involving other major bad actors who hurt people and threatened their health with lead paint, tobacco and opioids,” Bonta said in an interview with The Times on Saturday. “But every industry is unique.”
The potential size of the mitigation fund he is pursuing remains to be determined.
“These defendants must be held accountable for the truths they shared in private while trying to undermine the science in public,” he said. “They cannot pass those costs onto the public, governments or our future.”
“It is going to be a very, very large number,” he added.
California’s complaint includes several examples of evidence demonstrating that the defendants have long known about the environmental threat posed by the use of fossil fuels.
For instance, in 1968, API and its members received a report from the Stanford Research Institute, which it had hired to assess the state of research on environmental pollutants, including carbon dioxide, according to the lawsuit. The report stated: “Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and . . . there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.”
In 1978, an internal Exxon memo stated that present "thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
California has spent tens of billions of dollars to adapt to climate change and address the environmental damage that has resulted so far, the complaint said, and it will have to spend far more than that in the years to come.
“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday.
“California taxpayers,” he said, “shouldn’t have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damage — wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells.”
In 2019, Newsom began calling for plans to phase out oil production in California, citing the increasingly harmful effects of global warming. His actions raised ire in petroleum company boardrooms, enraged Kern County officials and left small-town governments at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley grappling with shrinking tax rolls.
Climate liability litigation is gaining momentum. Five California cities — San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond, Imperial Beach — and the counties of San Mateo, Marin and Santa Cruz have filed climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, and some of those cases are now proceeding toward trial in state court, according to the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity.
California is the first oil-producing state to pursue such charges. “California’s decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity.
The scale of the “devastating public nuisance created by defendant's egregious misconduct is truly staggering,” according to the state's lawsuit, and its consequences are “felt throughout every part of the state, across all ecosystems and communities.”
Exxon Mobil, Shell and Chevron, which is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., alone market fossil fuel fuel products to California consumers through more than 3,000 petroleum service stations across the state, officials say.
The defendant companies and their trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, “are individually and collectively responsible for the emission of tons of greenhouse gasses,” the lawsuit says.
Greenhouse gases are largely byproducts of human use and combustion of fossil fuels to produce energy and petrochemical products. The primary greenhouse gas emitted as a result of human activities is CO2.
As greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the Earth radiates less energy back to space, warming the average surface temperature. The result has been whiplashing shifts in extreme weather, longer droughts, flooding, sea level rise, ocean acidification and harmful effects to terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
California's lawsuit asserts, however, that since 1988, the 105-year-old petroleum institute has led organizations and campaigns on behalf of its 600 members “that have promoted disinformation about the climate impacts of fossil fuel products to consumers.” They include, it says, the Global Climate Coalition, Partnership for a Better Energy Future and Alliance for Climate Strategies.
In a statement, API Senior Vice President and General Counsel Ryan Meyers dismissed the complaint as “nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of California taxpayer resources.”
“Climate policy is for Congress to debate and decide,” he said, “not the court system.”
Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, welcomed the state's lawsuit as part of a far wider campaign to put pressure on toxic emitters within California’s vast industrial complex— and their executives — to testify about whether they misled the public.
“As the world’s fifth-largest economy, and the nation’s most populous state,” she said, “California is uniquely positioned to hold Big Oil accountable for its endless lies and malicious blocking of climate action.”
Kathy Mulvey, a spokeswoman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, agrees.
“California’s lawsuit reflects the growing body of evidence of what Exxon Mobil, Shell and other major oil and gas companies knew about the dangers of their products,” she said, “and the devastating harms that have resulted from their lies, obstruction and delay tactics.
“It’s past time for these companies to stop their greenwashing and disinformation campaigns and pay their fair share of the costs the climate crisis is imposing on Californians.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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