Losing customers

Part of the challenge to the status quo has been posed by so-called community choice aggregations, or CCAs – local power agencies that more municipalities have embraced or considered switching to, away from legacy power utility companies. PG&E and other established players have begun to worry that too many switchers could leave remaining customers saddled with costs they can’t or won’t bear, leading to a potential death spiral for the big utilities.

“The state is ambitiously pursuing a fundamental transformation of the electric system to achieve historic greenhouse-gas reduction goals,” PG&E wrote to the California Public Utilities Commission in conjunction with two other leading companies, asking in effect for new rules that would prevent a rush to the exits, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “At the same time, the move toward customer choice through community choice aggregation, as well as other retail choice options, is accelerating.” 

Heightening the sense of urgency around appeasing customers as the hot summer months approach, PG&E suffered a frustrating mass outage event in San Francisco last Friday. “The power failure affected almost 90,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. business and residential customers, leaving Union Square, the Financial District, the outskirts of Chinatown and several other neighborhoods without electricity just after 9 a.m.,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. 

Tire pressure

Seeking to amp up energy supplies without running afoul of Sacramento’s tightening environmental restrictions, state officials have meanwhile focused renewed attention around an unprecedented technology that would harness the weight of tires in motion to produce electricity. They agreed, the Chronicle reported separately, “to fund an initiative to generate electrical power from traffic, a plan that involves harnessing road vibrations with the intent of turning the automobile, like the sun and wind, into a viable source of renewable energy.”

“The technology is peculiar but proven. Devices that convert mechanical force into electricity are used in watches and lighters and are being tested for power generation on sidewalks and runways. A San Francisco nightclub has even leveraged the pulses of a dance floor to power its lights and music,” the paper added. “Gravely helped draft the proposal approved [April 12] by the Energy Commission’s governing board, which will direct $2.3 million to two independent road projects designed to test the viability of scaling up piezoelectricity. ‘Piezo’ is Greek for ‘squeeze’ or ‘press’ and refers to using pressure to create power.”

The several-million-dollar budget will be split between “a 200-foot stretch of pavement on the UC-Merced campus” and “a half-mile of highway to potentially harvest enough power for 5,000 homes,” Jalopnik observed, with the latter effort to be spearheaded by the Pyro-E company. To capture the energy, the lengths of road “will be filled with tiny piezo arrays stacked ‘like quarters’ in the road surface,” the site noted. “Some estimates suggest that as little as 400 cars per hour would be needed to make the system economically viable.”

Uncertain reach

Despite years of success in doing what it was supposed to do — cut emission levels — California’s controversial cap-and-trade system has run up against opposition that could be strong enough to sink it. But with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Gov. Jerry Brown has shifted into political overdrive to save it instead.

Big plans

Through the California Air Resources Board, Brown’s administration has tried to restore confidence among big California businesses that the state’s carbon-trading regime is here to stay. Amendments to the cap-and-trade rules proposed by CARB “envision a carbon market through 2050 with increasing allowance prices,” according to Scientific American. But legal uncertainty has clouded CARB’s ability to promulgate such regulations beyond the year 2020, “thanks to a combination of potentially limiting language in the original climate law, AB32, and a lawsuit challenging the legality of cap-and-trade auctions under a law requiring a two-thirds legislative majority to approve taxes,” the magazine added.

“The amendments released [last month] would establish decreasing emissions caps for covered entities through 2031, to reach 40 percent below 1990 levels, and would include preliminary caps through 2050 ‘to signal the long-term trajectory of the program to inform investment decisions.’ Other proposed amendments would provide for compliance with U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan for existing power plants, allocate allowances to businesses in order to prevent emissions from escaping state borders, and streamline how emitters register and participate in auctions.”

Backrooms to ballots

Despite broad support for an extended cap-and-trade system among influential Democrats, whose grip on Sacramento is virtually unchallenged, California’s legislative counsel has sided against CARB on the extension plan. “Meanwhile, a lawsuit from the California Chamber of Commerce charges that the permit fees are a tax and should have required a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to take effect,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Although the suit has dragged on for nearly four years, questions raised by an appeals court judge in April suggested that he might side with the chamber.”

The ordeal has presented Gov. Jerry Brown with a potentially devastating threat to one of his keystone policies. Although the governor “has been trying to muster support from at least two-thirds of the Legislature, in case the Chamber of Commerce wins its suit, […] convincing Republicans and business-friendly Democrats hasn’t been easy,” the paper added. “And the current legislative session ends Aug. 31.” Beyond the obvious challenge of securing Republican support, Brown must contend with members of his own party, who have split awkwardly on cap-and-trade since before its inception.

 “When the law enabling cap and trade was being argued over, the whole progressive left-of-the-left were pretty suspicious of carbon trading,” as Stanford Law energy expert Michael Wara told Wired. “So the law’s authors offered a compromise: the state Legislature would re-evaluate cap and trade in 2020,” the magazine noted. “It didn’t seem like a big gamble at the time.” But Brown’s determination to use revenues from the program to fund his cherished high-speed rail project — according to environmentalists, not the greenest expenditure to choose from — added another political wrinkle.

Now, the prospect of a drawn-out loss in the Legislature has raised speculation that Brown will respond, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, by taking his plans directly to the voters. Preparing for a showdown, Brown has launched — perhaps for the last time as governor — back into campaign mode. “Mr. Brown last week created a PAC, Californians for a Clean Environment, signaling he may turn to voters for support to extend cap and trade and the state’s emissions-reduction goals through a ballot initiative,” the Wall Street Journal recalled. “The program is particularly important to Mr. Brown, as profits help fund the state’s planned bullet train, among other goals by the state’s Democrats.”

Within the Brown camp, however, the official line has remained more optimistic than the ballot preparations might suggest. “There is no state or nation in the Western Hemisphere doing more to curb carbon pollution and our dangerous addiction to oil than California,” said Brown’s executive secretary, Nancy McFadden, in a statement noted by the Journal. “The governor will continue working with the legislature to get this done this year, next year or on the ballot in 2018.”

Cap-and-trade critics had always warned that as soon as programs were introduced, there would be aggressive efforts to game and/or cheat the rules to make money. With these warnings reinforced by the EU scandal, California officials in early 2013 said they’d learned their lesson. Greenbiz.com reported that …

California, with the advantage of advanced warning, has taken the EU market’s lessons to heart. It has recognized the crucial need to tightly control — and extensively oversee — who can participate in the carbon market and how. With the help of the state Attorney General’s office, California has adopted more stringent rules than the EU ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme].

State tax credits for payments to indigenous communities?

Now, however, the Brown administration is pondering relaxing these rules by allowing companies to get pollution credits by paying for preservation of forest lands in Brazil.

The idea has been discussed for years but has picked up momentum of late. According to recent reports, state regulators are closer than ever to formally expanding the cap-and-trade program by allowing polluting industries to offset their carbon emissions by paying indigenous communities in the Amazon to preserve the rain forests in their region. 

This idea has won praise from environmental groups, who have long depicted preservation of the rain forests in the Amazon delta as a global priority. They call it a great way for Brown to burnish his environmental legacy.

The Western States Petroleum Association has also been supportive, saying industries need options to meet their commitments under AB32 and related laws.

Brazil’s huge corruption scandal bodes poorly for CA program

But the initial coverage of Brown’s trial balloon omitted mention of two key issues: Gaming and cheating of cap-and-trade programs remains a huge problem around the world, and Brazil has both a long history of corruption and a lack of transparency.

In early 2015, Foreign Policy magazine reported how the European Union’s program had become a “playground for gangsters, international crime syndicates, and even two-bit crooks — who stole hundreds of millions of dollars in pollution credits.”

In October, Forbes magazine reported on a slew of new scandals, starting with schemers in Russia and Ukraine being accused of using the EU cap-and-trade market to sells counterfeit credits for 600 million tons worth of carbon dioxide emissions. The account noted that the less sophisticated a nation’s law-enforcement system, the more likely cap-and-trade scams were to be — and that some of the world’s richest people and companies were taking advantage.

“The cap-and-trade system of emissions trading is very difficult to control and its effects are diluted. … It is precisely because I am a market practitioner that I know the flaws in the system,” Forbes quoted financier-investor George Soros as saying.

Meanwhile, in January, Transparency International reported that over the previous year, Brazil’s corruption problems were growing worse at a faster rate than in any nation on the planet. Agence France Presse reported last week that a scandal involving billions of dollars of missing revenue from state oil giant Petrobras continued to grow, with dozens of government and business leaders implicated.

Efforts to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office have been complicated by the fact it is hard to find many credible critics of Rousseff within the Brazilian government, given how many prominent Brazilian politicians are either directly tied to the scandal or indirectly tied through close political alliances.

According to Calmatters, state air board officials said they would look to avoid problems caused by Western nations’ cap-and-trade programs in another tropical nation: Nigeria. But the issues there involved indigenous communities being denied use of forest lands they relied on because of restrictions under new conservation agreements — not necessarily the problems that California could risk if it counts on Brazil as a partner in a cap-and-trade pact. 

In the wake of a big legislative setback, Gov. Jerry Brown’s wish to use regulations to cut fuel emissions is swiftly coming true.

This month, Democratic lawmakers couldn’t muster enough votes to slash gasoline use by half within 15 years. Now, the state Air Resources Board has taken action widely seen as compensatory. “The action, coming two weeks after a stinging defeat for Gov. Jerry Brown’s planned 50 percent cut in petroleum use by 2030, signaled his administration’s determination to press forward with an aggressive environmental agenda through the regulatory process rather than by legislation,” noted the New York Times.

Resurgent regulations

In a unanimous, 9-0 vote, the board chose to reactivate California’s standards on low-carbon fuel, created years ago but recently held in legal limbo. The regime constituted “the first regulation of its kind in the U.S. when it was established in a 2007 executive order by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger,” as the Wall Street Journal reported. “It had been frozen since 2013, as the state made revisions to the law following a court challenge.”

“The California regulation further tightens the state’s emissions regulations, already the most stringent in the U.S. It requires fuel makers to reduce emissions by developing cleaner fuels or adopting greater use of biofuels. It also requires fuel producers to take into account all emissions for delivering gasoline, diesel or biofuels to California customers.”

Tweaks to the rules made in the wake of the court challenge included “streamlining the application process for alternative fuel producers seeking a carbon intensity score,” according to Ethanol Producer Magazine.

The interventions quickly drew howls from the oil and gas industry, which views the rules’ requirements as unattainable. Tiffany Roberts, director for fuels and climate policy at the Western States Petroleum Association, told the Sacramento Business Journal they weren’t feasible, suggesting that “even if oil businesses are able to incorporate those pollution-cutting methods, they still cannot meet the program’s aggressive standards.” Defenders of the plan, meanwhile, focused on its perceived benefits. “It will drive new technologies, not only in transportation fuel but in hybrid cars, electric cars and other means of transportation,” Pacific Ethanol spokesman Paul Koehler told the Business Journal.

Political heat

Industry interests haven’t fueled the only criticism of Brown’s regulatory approach, however. Earlier this month, the administration heard out the complaints of a gaggle of state lawmakers — including Democrats — frustrated by the activism and assertiveness of the Air Resources Board. Their debate with Brown “turns on questions of how the state can meet its environmental goals with the right balance between the executive branch, which prizes the ability to act independently, and state lawmakers, who want their own stamp on government programs,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

That disagreement came to a head amid the collapse of the Senate’s planned 50 percent cut in statewide petroleum use. “If the board made decisions adversely impacting constituents, many of whom have already been struggling economically, the consequences could be dire,” uneasy Democrats feared, as CalWatchdog previously noted. “What’s more, angry voters would have little way to respond but at the ballot box.”

While state Senate pro Tem Kevin de Leon portrayed the cut’s failure as the consequence of a massive industry campaign, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, instead focused on the Air Resources Board’s “tremendous arrogance,” the Times reported, “noting that he’s never taken campaign money from the oil industry but remains skeptical about the measure.”

But the board’s recent successes at advancing its agenda suggested its influence was set to grow. Tipped by concerned scientists, it launched the investigation into the Volkswagen Group of America that revealed the auto company’s secret years-long use of “a defeat device to circumvent CARB and […] EPA emission test procedures,” as emissions compliance chief Annette Hebert revealed.

Courtesy Sen. Kevin de León’s office

As many as 7,000 low-income Los Angeles residents could eventually take part in a state-funded electric car sharing program that rolled out last week.

State and city officials celebrated the soft launch of the endeavor — which aims to improve air quality by cutting carbon emissions — at an L.A. affordable housing complex.

City officials hope to establish as many as 100 vehicles as part of the pilot program, which the state is partially funding through a $1.6 million award. The city expects to use an additional $8 million “in in-kind city resources and private operator investment in equipment and operations,” according to L.A.’s  Sustainable City plan.

The state money comes from California’s controversial cap-and-trade program, designed to curb the state’s reliance on fossil fuels. Critics call it a pollution tax that unfairly burdens large industries.

State Senate leader Kevin de León speaks at roll out of electric car sharing program in L.A.
Photo courtesy de León’s office.

“Fighting smog and climate change so that our kids can breathe clean air requires more transportation options that don’t rely on dirty fossil fuels,” state Senate leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, said in a press release. “This electric car-sharing pilot project offers a glimpse of the future, and represents the type of shift in policy, infrastructure, and behavior that we need.”

Officials say the project will educate residents about car sharing and transportation alternatives, install electric vehicle charging stations and introduce an electric car sharing fleet.

Specifically, it will “provide affordable last mile/first mile solutions for low-income families and other residents who do not own a car or need a second car for trips requiring a light duty passenger vehicle,” according to L.A.’s  Sustainable City plan.

“Our EV car sharing pilot is a perfect example of how our state’s cap-and-trade dollars should be put to work: providing transportation options for Angelenos in need, and helping us achieve our clean air goals outlined in my Sustainable City plan,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti added in the news release.

The program is formally called the Car Sharing and Mobility Options in Disadvantaged Communities Pilot Project. It is run by the California Air Resources Board, and originated last year after the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown signed two of de León bills, SB1275 and SB535, according to the Senate leader’s office. Those laws direct CARB to invest the state’s cap-and-trade revenue into programs that bring clean air and jobs to communities heavily impacted by climate change and poor environmental quality.

Contact reporter Chris Nichols at chris@calwatchdog.com or on Twitter @ChrisTheJourno

CAFNR / flickr

Legislators seek to establish a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which would be funded by the cap and trade program adopted by the California Air Resources Board under AB32, and appropriate those dollars to the California Energy Commission to subsidize biomass power generation in the state.

Assembly Bill 590, authored by Assemblymembers Brian Dahle, R-Bieber, and Rudy Salas, D-Bakersfield, passed the Assembly unanimously last month with bipartisan support. The bill aims to add incentives so that agriculture and forest waste can be used to create energy through biomass facilities.

“Biomass” describes multiple sources of fuel, such as trees, waste from construction, wood and agriculture (corn husks, rice hulls, peanut shells, etc.), fuel crops and even sewage sludge and manure. According to the EPA, since biomass deals with energy sources that would otherwise be considered waste, but will “continue to be produced by society,” it is considered a renewable resource.

California is home to some 132 biomass facilities with a total gross capacity of 985 MW. The California Energy Commission reported that, in 2014, “6,572 gigawatt hours of electricity in homes and businesses was produced from biomass” – that translates to 3.33 percent of the total electricity production in California.

In addition to energy conversion, biomass production helps prevent wildfires by removing forest waste and disposing it in a controlled facility.

During a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, Assemblyman Dahle pointed to “catastrophic wildfires” that are “burning up and destroying our watersheds, our wildlife and emitting carbon.” Decayed forests also emit methane, another greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

But biomass plants are struggling to stay operative in California. The bill, according to Dahle, “sets a policy in place that biomass is very important to California and the energy industry” and brings state funding to help offset facility and treatment costs. He emphasized that AB590 is not about “opening up new plants” but “trying to keep the ones that we have available, running.”

Julie Malinowski-Ball, a spokeswoman for the California Biomass Energy Alliance, a sponsor of the bill, said it was vital to “ensure these facilities can operate long into the future.” She warned that without the biomass power, Californians “will see an increase in air quality degradation across the areas where these facilities are located.”

Sierra County Supervisor Lee Adams said during the hearing, “Not only is biomass energy a clean form of energy to reduce greenhouse gas, it’s also vital to the completion of forest management projects in California. …Without someone to address the biomass issue, forest management projects cannot move forward.”

Under current law, biomass is not subsidized like other forms of renewable energy. According to the bill’s supporters, the cost of removing woody material from the forest is often too expensive to keep up with the fuel treatment needed, and results in contributing to the recent influx of catastrophic wildfires. Biomass processing is also needed to dispose of uprooted almond and orange trees, often the target of blame in California’s record-setting drought.

But opponents allege that biomass incineration generally “increases rather than decreases GHG emissions when looked at from a life cycle approach.” Ingrid Bostrum, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, said during the hearing, “Using GHG reduction funds is especially inappropriate here,” based on the belief that the biomass industry “actually generally increases GHG emissions.

She also brought up the point that biomass incineration also increases the emissions of copollutants, particulate matter and smog, and exacerbates asthma and other ailments. “Many biomass facilities are located in the Central Valley,” she noted, “which is already incredibly over burdened with its air quality problems, high rates of asthma and high rates of vulnerable populations.”

Further opposition said that the “state should not subsidizing financially unsustainable industries, especially ones that are already receiving federal subsidies.”

But Assemblyman Salas pointed out that without biomass facilities, agricultural waste “would otherwise be burned in an open field that would cause more pollutants” would have a greater “detrimental effect on public health.”

“This is a measure that would help offset some of those air pollution risks, diverting waste to create renewable energy, which is what the state/Leg wants to incentivize,” he stated during the hearing.

Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications, said after public comment that without these facilities, Central Valley residents “would drive around and witness open fires and billowing smoke.” He said it was “unfortunate,” but incineration “goes hand-in-hand with agricultural development.”

In order to appease opposition concerns, an amendment was proposed to award funds only to specific projects that demonstrate a net reduction in greenhouse gases.

AB590 passed the committee unopposed and has since been referred to the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.

On Monday

The premise of Michigan v. EPA was whether the agency could refuse to consider costs to business in its decision to regulate, based on the appropriateness and necessity after studying public health hazards as a result of power-plant emissions.

According to the EPA website, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards – “the first ever national limits on mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants” – would have required power plants to use “widely available, proven pollution control technologies to protect families from pollutants.” The EPA estimated MATS would prevent up to 14 premature deaths in California, “while creating up to $120 million in health benefits in 2016.”

Roughly 70 percent of California’s total electricity production comes from power plants located within the state, as well as outside the state but owned by California utilities. Most of our electricity is generated by natural gas and hydroelectric power stations, both of which produce negligible amounts of mercury compounds.

As written in the majority opinion delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia, the actual quantifiable benefits of the new mercury standards, as initially estimated by the EPA, would only be $4 to $6 million per year throughout the U.S. Compared to the $9.6 billion per year costs that power plants would be forced to carry under the EPA’s regulations, the benefits of imposing such standards were questionable, and petitioners, including 32 states, brought the case to the court. “It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’” Scalia wrote, “to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.”

“When agencies come up with these costly and fickle regulations, they need to consider who will inevitably pay the bill,” Karen Harned said in a prepared statement; she’s the executive director at the Small Business Legal Center for the National Federation of Independent Business. “The EPA does not have the authority to implement hugely expensive new rules without performing the mandatory economic analyses.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., also criticized the EPA’s actions in a press release:

“The mere fact that the EPA wished to ignore the costs of its rules demonstrates how little the agency is concerned about the effects it has on the American people. From its ozone to greenhouse gas to navigable waters rules, the EPA continues to burden the public with more and more costs even as so many are still struggling to get by and improve their lives in this economy.”

The EPA later argued that the range Scalia cited was a low-ball estimate strictly for the mercury-related benefits, not the other ancillary benefits that would have come from reductions in other pollutants, such as particulate matter.

Despite these accusations that the EPA did not consider costs at all during the process of creating the regulation, Justice Kagan argues otherwise in her dissent.

Kagan wrote that the EPA did, in fact, take “costs into account at multiple stages and through multiple means as it set emissions limits for power plants.” Though the EPA declined to analyze costs at the onset of the regulatory process, since the agency “could not have measured costs at the process’s initial stage with any accuracy,” the EPA eventually conducted a cost-benefit study which found quantifiable benefits exceeding the costs up to nine times over – “as much as $80 billion each year.”

The Michigan ruling might also have greater implications on the Obama administration’s overall environmental agenda, which would have included the EPA’s first-ever regulations on greenhouse gases emitted by power plants – expected to roll out later this summer. Politico notes, “Monday’s decision indicates a court skeptical of EPA’s aggressive regulatory agenda, throwing into question how the court will react to the virtually unprecedented climate plan.”

At a high-powered leadership gathering in Los Angeles, Gov. Jerry Brown detailed plans, laid out in a new executive order, aimed at slashing California’s carbon emissions to new lows.

The 18th annual Milken Institute Global Conference gave Brown an intellectual backdrop for the news of an intended 40 percent emissions cut from 1990 levels by 2030.

“Under existing state law,” reported the New York Times, “emissions are supposed to be cut 80 percent from what they were in 1990 by 2050, and Mr. Brown said this tough new interim target was essential to helping the state make investment and regulatory decisions that would assure that goal was reached.”

Channelling the cosmopolitan spiritualism that earned him his reputation when first elected governor, Brown reiterated his view that the impact of emissions amounted to a planetary crisis. According to the Times, he asked: “Can we rise above the parochialisms, the ethno-centric perspectives, the immediacy of I-want-I-need, to a vision, a way of life, that is sustainable?”

Ratcheting up regulations

Brown’s new scheme far exceeded the level of emissions restrictions adopted by California’s neighbors — or those of the United States. As the Washington Post reported, the Golden State’s regulatory framework was now set to become the strictest in North America.

“The order will incorporate planning for the impacts of climate change into California’s long-term infrastructure and financial planning,” noted the Post. “It also orders state agencies with jurisdiction over sources of greenhouse gas emissions to limit those emissions to hit the new targets.”

Brown’s confidence in hitting the new marks appeared to be driven by the state’s position relative to benchmarks set by his predecessor in office. As the Associated Press noted, “California already has been moving toward an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050 under a 2005 executive order by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.” On the way to that number, the Schwarzenegger benchmarks mandated a drop to 1990 emissions levels by 2020. State officials told the Times California “may even exceed” that measure.

Brown pegged California’s planned reductions to levels set this October by policymakers in the European Union, according to the San Francisco Chronicle; by setting a course for an 80 percent reduction below 1990 levels at the century’s halfway mark, Brown said in a statement, California would be put “in line with the scientifically established levels needed in the U.S. to limit global warming below 2 degrees Celsius — the warming threshold at which scientists say there will likely be major climate disruptions such as super droughts and rising sea levels.”

Executive force

Brown’s actions on emissions continued the more proactive style of governance he has adopted of late. Previously this week, Brown announced plans for tough new fines punishing excessive water use. Although he vowed only to hit “the worst offenders” with the highest penalties, the Los Angeles Times reported, Brown proposed raising the upper limit from $500 per day to $10,000.

“The governor’s proposal, which must be negotiated with lawmakers, would also empower cities and counties to issue fines. Local governments would be able to enlist staff members to dish out warnings and citations, expanding the ranks of officials prodding Californians to meet conservation targets.”

Along with the dramatic new emissions goals, Brown’s increasingly unforgiving approach to water issues signaled a new theme for his final term in office as governor. Despite showing an almost zen patience in prior years for the workings of California’s unwieldy bureaucracy — a calming influence sometimes criticized within his own party for lacking urgency — Brown has now shifted into a much more unilateral mode. Whether the severity of the state’s drought is the cause, or some broader set of factors, Brown’s more muscular use of his executive power appears set to continue well into the years ahead.