Incoming: California Climate - POLITICO - POLITICO

Incoming: California Climate - POLITICO

Incoming: California Climate

Presented by American Clean Power - California

It’s showtime, folks! Our daily California climate newsletter has finally landed.

If you’re interested in the policy and politics around climate change, you’ll want to tune in to what’s happening in California.

For better or for worse, what happens here often sets the agenda for the rest of the country, and gives leaders a glimpse of what’s coming down the pike.

California is a state whose ambitious clean-energy goals inspired copycat laws across the globe and forced the automotive industry to accelerate its transition to electric vehicles.

It’s also where raging wildfires and housing sprawl threaten to create the costliest natural disaster in American history, where the effort to expand renewable power generation is running head-on into capacity issues, and where access to water has swiftly become an existential political and financial question for many businesses.

We’ll use this newsletter to explain how California’s response to climate change is shaping the future, across industry and government.

Our five-person team has you covered on everything from late-night air board meetings to dramatic water district divorces. Check in each evening at 6 p.m. Pacific for a rundown of the day’s most pressing climate debates. We look forward to having you along for the ride! If someone forwarded this to you, thank them. And then sign up.

THE ART OF DIPLOMACY — Our inaugural climate scoop is today’s exclusive: a climate and energy MOU that Gov. Gavin Newsom will be inking tomorrow with Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd.

The original plan was to sign at the University of California, Davis, but the location was moved to Sacramento because of extreme heat. The area is expected to hit 106 degrees on Tuesday, which makes the memorandum’s emphasis on bolstering responses to wildfire, heat and drought feel particularly urgent.

The agreement will encourage cross-pollination on “clean transportation, clean energy, nature-based solutions, research and development, and climate-friendly business,” according to a statement from Rudd.

Australia is by no means the only place where Newsom is making international moves. He’s working with China on zero-emission vehicle deployment, even as President Joe Biden is trying to limit investment in Chinese tech companies. And he’s working with Mexico on cross-border truck pollution and recycling, even as as pro-oil President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has pumped the brakes on climate action.

As geopolitical tensions rise and Congress remains divided over China’s role in the green transition, officials say California’s role as a de facto shadow government on climate diplomacy is only becoming more important.

Case in point: U.S. climate envoy John Kerry emerged empty-handed from climate talks in Beijing last month. A few weeks later, California State Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin signed an agreement with the Chinese province of Hainan to work together on phasing out fossil fuel vehicles and improving energy efficiency in buildings, among other areas.

“We recognize that our federal leaders are balancing a lot of factors and priorities, and we want to support them,” said California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, who just got back from a flood-focused trip to Brisbane. “California is a strong cornerstone of climate leadership that’s stable and driving forward.”

Part of California’s secret sauce is that it’s not bound by the same political calculus as Washington. Another part is state officials’ longstanding personal relationships with their international counterparts, and connections through universities and businesses that last beyond a single administration.

“We’ve, on a continuing basis, been working on various kinds of papers with Chinese scholars that get into the specifics about various climate policies,” said Mary Nichols, former chair of the California Air Resources Board who now serves as vice chair of Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute. “That’s not something that the State Department can do right now or is doing.”

DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE — Our California politics editor, Ben Fox, was vacationing in West Maui last week when hurricane-force winds turned parts of the island into a blackened moonscape.

He shared these immediate impressions of the tragedy that’s claimed more than 90 lives:

I’ve had more experience with natural disasters than many. I spent more than a decade reporting on the Caribbean for the Associated Press, covering Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, among other catastrophes.

Both of those episodes share at least one similarity to the firestorm in Lahaina last week: The systems we rely on for our day-to-day existence no longer functioned. Cell service and power were out for hours, and there were no firefighters or police in sight.

As we waited in traffic en route to the airport we saw people with soot-streaked faces, dragging suitcases and pets, fleeing in the other direction. All we had to go on was our own judgment.

We opted to turn around and return to our hotel, watching from a few miles away as the flames consumed the town. Some even decided that was too close, including one man from Philadelphia who evacuated the hotel and spent the night in a parking lot further from the flames. Was that the right decision? Who knows? At times like this, we’re on our own.

CLASSICAL GAS — Three creaky natural gas plants in Southern California have come to epitomize the tensions in California’s push to decarbonize its energy supply while keeping the lights on.

That tension will be on display tomorrow at a meeting of the State Water Resources Control Board, which is considering the Newsom administration’s plan to keep the plants in Ormond Beach, Long Beach and Huntington Beach online for another three years as a safety net when temperatures spike.

The water board — which has jurisdiction because the projects use ocean water for cooling, which harms marine life — is the second and final stop for the proposal, after it cleared the California Energy Commission last week.

Enviros are pretty sure the decision won’t go their way: They’re planning a post-vote march to the Capitol and a press conference, featuring state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Malibu) and Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo (D-Chatsworth). — Wes Venteicher

CARBON CAPTURE KICK OFF — Another EJ/industry flashpoint on Tuesday: State agencies are launching their implementation of SB 905, a law promoting and regulating carbon capture and storage and direct air capture, with two public workshops.

Expect to hear from environmental justice groups that have blasted the Air Resources Board for its plan to use CCS and DAC — neither of which currently exists in California — to reduce whatever emissions it doesn’t manage to cut directly from polluters.

CARB envisions carbon capture will get California 15 percent of the way to its 2030 and 2045 greenhouse gas targets. Community groups will be pushing to limit its use to hard-to-decarbonize industries and to prevent other pollutants from rising at facilities where it’s installed.

LIU TO ENERGY FOUNDATION — One of former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon’s top environmental advisers is moving to the Energy Foundation, the deep-pocketed San Francisco-based think tank that funds a bevy of other environmental groups. Marie Liu started as California program director on Aug. 7.

BELNAP CHANGES TRACKS — Newsom on Friday appointed Ben Belnap to serve as the High-Speed Rail Authority’s inspector general. Belnap, a veteran of the State Auditor’s Office, will now be inspecting the nation’s largest infrastructure project, the budget and timeline for which have been ballooning in recent years.

LUD PASSES ON — Forestry icon Frank “Lud” McCrary, co-founder of Big Creek Lumber, died on Aug. 6. Big Creek, which McCrary founded alongside his brother, father and uncle in 1946, was one of the first logging companies to selectively fell trees instead of clear-cutting the forest. That the timber company, which also operates a mill, a wholesale lumber division, and six retail stores, has thrived in left-leaning Santa Cruz is a testament to his environmental ethos.

- California instituted sweeping changes to early warning systems and power line operations after wildfires revealed deadly weaknesses in emergency response — these could carry some lessons for Hawaii.
- Tribes and environmental justice groups accused the California State Water Resources Control Board of failing to protect their water quality; now the EPA has launched an investigation into racial discrimination.
- Valley fever, a respiratory infection long concentrated in the lower San Joaquin Valley and the Arizona desert, is moving north, driven by hotter temperatures and precipitation extremes.

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