SHOBE: Families and farmers deserve priority in California’s climate future

Climate change is not a distant threat. It’s a daily reality affecting the health, food supply, and livelihoods of all Californians.

The farmers and ranchers I work with are acutely facing the worsening effects of climate change. In recent years, floods have washed away farms, extreme heat waves have decimated harvests, and wildfires have damaged crops and killed livestock. These climate impacts are driving up the cost of food for everyone.

That’s why every Californian has a stake in how the next 20 years of climate policy will be decided this month when lawmakers finalize the terms for extending the state’s Cap-and-Trade program.

Created in 2006 and operating since 2012, Cap-and-Trade was intended to help Californians cope with the rising costs of climate change by requiring the state’s largest polluters to pay for their emissions as an incentive to reduce their pollution. The resulting funds have financed $12.8 billion in projects supporting safe and affordable drinking water access, utility bill credits, help with home energy efficiency upgrade costs, and more. They have also helped farmers and ranchers adopt practices that reduce emissions and decrease their vulnerability to future disasters.

By investing in agriculture, we protect our access to affordable, nutritious food. We also ensure a viable future for the stewards of our working lands – a vital step to protect our water supply, restore our soils and biodiversity, and improve the livelihoods of farmworkers and rural Californians.

So, it’s alarming to see state leaders consider reauthorizing Cap-and-Trade in a way that prioritizes the oil and gas industry – California’s largest source of pollution – at the expense of hardworking families and farmers struggling with the climate crisis. 

History provides cause for concern about where this is headed. When Cap-and-Trade was last extended, in 2017, lawmakers created pollution freebies worth billions of dollars for oil and gas giants – nearly $890 million last year alone. These handouts undermine the program’s power to reduce pollution and to support projects that help communities struggling with climate challenges today.

Governor Newsom’s current Cap-and-Trade proposal includes more handouts to Big Oil without a requirement to provide us with more affordable gas prices. This is an alarming starting point for negotiations, considering lawmakers have yet to release their own proposals.

By subsidizing polluters, all we get in return are higher rates of asthma, heart disease, and cancer, missed work and school days, and mounting medical bills. Each year, polluted air in California’s farmbelt in the San Joaquin Valley costs $700 million in emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

Californians deserve better. With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now moving to revoke the legal foundation of federal climate policy, we don’t need state leaders piling on. Our elected leaders must reform Cap-and-Trade in the following ways:

• Eliminate pollution giveaways for the oil and gas industry 
• Fix pollution offsets that enable polluters to avoid reducing their own pollution by sending $140 million out of state each year for projects with little to no climate benefits 
• Invest in programs that benefit communities, families, and farmers, including a new commitment to direct 15 percent of funds to scale up agricultural climate solutions and ensure food affordability.

Absent these reforms, California’s farming future remains bleak. Each year, nearly 1,500 farms are lost. As climate change accelerates, this trend will worsen and the costs of putting food on the table will continue growing.

It’s promising to see state leaders rally around “affordability” in response to Californians struggling with high costs of living. But the Governor’s proposal and closed door Cap-and-Trade negotiations beg uncomfortable questions about why some leaders are prioritizing affordability for the industry that caused the climate crisis over vulnerable communities and hardworking families. 

Cap-and-Trade is the largest source of funding to finance the transition to a more affordable and equitable climate future. It can’t be compromised with handouts to polluters when there’s so much at stake for the rest of us.