From pioneering air-pollution control programs in Los Angeles County in

So when Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León introduced Senate Bill 100 in January, the expectations were high. The measure committed California to generating 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2026 – four years earlier than the present goal – and to 60 percent by 2030 and to 100 percent by 2045. No government remotely as large as California’s had made such a commitment.

In spring interviews with reporters at an energy conference in Orange County, the Los Angeles Democrat depicted his bill as a common-sense measure to goad investor-owned utilities into making long-term shifts in their infrastructure to prepare for an all-renewable future. He said progress had been so quick that he expected the state to meet the 50 percent renewable standard “in the early 2020s without breaking a sweat.” But he also depicted SB100 as setting up “the most ambitious program in the world.”

When it passed the California Senate on a mostly party-line vote in May, the world took notice. The New York Times set the tone: In a 2,100-word analysis headlined “Fighting Trump on Climate, California Becomes a Global Force,” it depicted the bill as a key part of California’s determination to take over the global lead in environmentalism from Washington.

But earlier this month, SB100 failed to even get a floor vote in the Assembly as lawmakers wrapped up business for the year. A Desert Sun report depicted the decision as “unexpected.”

That’s not how it looked to some insiders. Business groups spent months hammering home the argument that it was risky to commit to 100 percent renewable energy use when it was not clear that was either feasible or safe for a modern economy. In a June interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Ackerman, executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum, depicted SB100 as “reckless” and with a huge downside. The arguments echoed those made by Pacific Gas & Electric, Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s three giant investor-owner utilities, which quietly have established strong ties with Democratic lawmakers in poor districts buffeted by high energy costs.

IBEW adopted, modified utilities’ argument

Meanwhile, de León didn’t enjoy unified support on the Democratic front. An argument the utilities had been making – that SB100 was potentially a hugely disruptive force – was adopted and modified by some labor leaders. They worried what a 100 percent commitment to renewable energy might mean for thousands of union members. According to an NBC News report, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1245, began opposing the bill in late summer because the local union alleged de León had gone back on his promise to protect union jobs.

But a third factor may also have been at play. De León has never enjoyed the broad goodwill accorded his predecessor, Darrell Steinberg, now the mayor of Sacramento. Soon after taking over as Senate leader in late 2014, de León was the target of a scathing column by then-Sacramento Bee pundit Dan Walters for mistakes, power plays and a lack of humility. He faced similar criticism from the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board.

De León has since emerged as a legislative powerhouse, at least according to the conventional wisdom that holds that the 2017 session was one of the most productive in recent history. But his clout couldn’t overcome the late-emerging opposition to SB100.

The lobbying will begin all over again for the measure in January, the Greentech website reported.

“We’re going to be back next year,” said Peter Miller, Western energy project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the website. “I don’t want to underestimate the challenges to moving to a fully zero-carbon grid, but we can get there, and we will.”

But we haven’t seen some crucial context about Brown’s latest energy policy and about how the state has done in meeting the primary original goal of AB 32, the landmark 2006 state law that dictates the use of a cap-and-trade system in which emission credits are bought and sold to try to limit the gases that are believed to contribute to global warming.

The first is that business groups listened to the governor’s speech last week and came away believing that as with fracking, he is signalling he’s not necessarily in sync with the National Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. This is from a new story in the trade publication “Inside Cal EPA,” which is not available free online:

As the debate has begun, many industry groups are seeking to ensure that any new “second generation” climate and energy programs emphasize “affordable” energy, “achievable” goals, accountability for regulators and other similar approaches.

In his inaugural address, Brown appeared to acknowledge the industry concerns. “How we achieve these goals and at what pace will take great thought and imagination mixed with pragmatic caution. It will require enormous innovation, research and investment. And we will need active collaboration at every stage with our scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, businesses and officials at all levels,” he said.

‘Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution’

“Inside Cal EPA” reported that the governor’s green-energy speech was seen as reassuring in what may seem as some unlikely corners.

Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution, with California Manufacturers & Technology Association President Dorothy Rothrock underscoring Brown’s remarks by saying “our efforts to inspire technologies to reduce climate change emissions must do so without harming the vibrancy of our economy, so we must ensure that we control costs for manufacturers and not further increase the already highest electricity rates of any industrial state.”

 That’s not how the governor’s speech was described in newspaper accounts.

Meanwhile, the coverage of the speech outlining a policy billed as a follow-up to AB 32 didn’t provide much historical context for the original measure. It imposes the cap-and-trade system as part of a requirement that the state get one-third of its electricity from cleaner-but-costlier sources by 2020. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former state Senate President Darrell Steinberg, among many others, now consistently depict the law as having a primary intention of helping California develop green jobs and green industries.

But the first four “findings and declarations” in the text of the law don’t mention economic development as a goal at all. Sections 38501(a) and (b) outline the threat that global warming poses to California’s environment and core components of its economy.

AB 32 text: It will have ‘far-reaching effects’ on world

And the next two sections make explicit AB 32’s primary goal.

(c) California has long been a national and international leader on energy conservation and environmental stewardship efforts, including the areas of air quality protections, energy efficiency requirements, renewable energy standards, natural resource conservation, and greenhouse gas emission standards for passenger vehicles. The program established by this division will continue this tradition of environmental leadership by placing California at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

(d) National and international actions are necessary to fully address the issue of global warming. However, action taken by California to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will have far-reaching effects by encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.

The law did go on to say that AB 32 would help California’s tech economy by positioning the state to benefit from “national and international efforts to control greenhouse gases.”

But that hasn’t happened since 2006. Instead, as former Obama economics adviser Larry Summers wrote recently in The Washington Post, the rest of the world mostly gave up on a cap-and-trade approach as clunky and inefficient in reducing greenhouse gases. A simple carbon tax is viewed as a much smarter approach than the one California adopted with the stated intent of changing the world.

@chrisreed99: Many #Fracking practices are secret including but not limited to chemicals. Covered-UP extensively starting in 70s. @TXsharon

— Andrea Leon Grossman (@AndreaLeon) October 1, 2013

I wrote a straightforward piece on California and its enormous fracking potential over the weekend that mentioned the Obama administration’s support for the energy-exploration process. That led me to a Twitter run-in with some hardcore green cultists who have elaborate theories about an “X-Files”-esque coverup of the truth about the process — allegedly abetted by the president!

Oh, groan. Fracking has been around for decades. Greens didn’t mind it when it was inefficient. When it became so efficient that it threatened the green-energy bandwagon, then it was declared evil.

But it turns out that it’s just not green Golden State cultists on Twitter who are spreading myths about fracking. It’s mainstream environmental groups. If dishonesty were a crime, this account of fracking by Environment California would have its authors on death row.

Want proof it’s been around a long time and has long been a known quantity? Here’s an excerpt of my  Cal Watchdog article on fracking’s history from December.

The truth is fracking has been around since 1947, and according to a University of Texas study, has been used in the drilling of 1 million wells — yes, 1 million. … And not only has it been around for 65 years, five presidents ago, fracking was regularly described as being in “massive” use. This is the first few graphs from an 5,300-word article headlined “Massive frac treatments tapping tight gas sands in Uinta basin” in the Jan. 16, 1978, edition of the Oil & Gas Journal:

“Massive hydraulic fracturing (MHF) is giving favorable results in the low-permeability Wasatch- Mesaverde sands in Utah’s Uinta basin where earlier conventional completions gave marginal gas wells.

“As many as 24 sands over a 3,500-ft gross interval are fractured with up to 1 1/2 million lbs. of sand in one continuous treatment using staged or limited-entry techniques.

“Over 90% of the sands perforated are effectively stimulated. The treatments have given an average sevenfold increase on the nine wells stimulated to date.”

Part of ‘The New Gas Bonanza’ — in 1978

An 1,800-word Newsweek article from Oct. 30, 1978, headlined “The New Gas Bonanza,” places fracking at the center of one of the big energy stories of the late 1970s:

“Deep beneath southeastern Louisiana lies a 125-mile geological formation called the Tuscaloosa Trend. Several monstrous drilling rigs soar above the surface, probing nearly 4 miles into the earth for deposits of natural gas. The cost of drilling so deep is enormous — about $5 million for each well — and many producers have been discouraged from making the gamble by the low price of any gas they might find. But when he signs the new energy bill Jimmy Carter may give new life to the Tuscaloosa Trend project and scores of other potentially vast gas discoveries. ‘The gas industry,’ says American Gas Association president George Lawrence, ‘is entering an entirely new era.’ ….

“Under the new law, Federal price ceilings on newly discovered gas will be lifted by 1985. In anticipation of higher prices, gas men are already drilling at record levels. And the real bonanza may lie in exotic new sources. As gas prices rise, experts say, both independent drillers and major energy companies seem more likely to commit the huge investments required to tap gas trapped in deep basins or in tight sand, rock and coal formations.”

What was used to tap some of these exotic new sources? You guessed it.

“In many parts of the Northwest, large deposits of shale laid down in the Devonian age contain quantities of gas estimated at 10 trillion to 600 trillion cubic feet. The advantage of the Devonian deposits is that their gas is close to the surface of the earth — and also to gas-starved markets. Their big disadvantage is the tight grip the dense shale holds on its gas, frustrating attempts to make it flow fast enough for economical production.

“Experiments are under way to enhance the flow through advanced hydraulic fracturing. Coarse sand, bauxite pellets or glass beads are mixed with fluid pumped into the shale under high pressure to crack the rock and wedge the cracks open to allow the gas to escape.”

A ‘moderate’ risk that turned out not to be

As these articles make obvious, fracking was utterly routine decades ago. And were environmentalists terrified by the practice? No, not at all. A study by the U.S. Energy Department cited in a July 21, 1979, National Journal article found that environmental concerns associated with “massive hydraulic fracturing — using water and various chemical compounds at high pressure — [were] ‘moderate’ … They include the degradation of air quality during site preparation and fracturing activities and the risk of surface water contamination.”

These “moderate” concerns never turned into a major issue. Fracking has been common for more than 30 years. So why all of sudden is it now depicted as an evil assault on Mother Earth by environmentalists? Because in the past decade, dramatic gains in its efficiency and effectiveness have made it a game changer, allowing drilling to access immense oil and natural gas reserves in North America that heretofore were considered either unreachable or prohibitively expensive to reach. …

My full Cal Watchdog article is here. Here’s a related editorial.

The point is plain and obvious: The fracking scare has been ginned up in California for political reasons. Back to you, @AndreaLeon.

By Chris Reed

So the Washington Post has a 1,500-word-plus analysis of why leaders and members of environmental groups — starting with the biggest of all, the San Francisco-based Sierra Club — are “more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind.”

But reporter Darryl Fears‘ analysis is, well, vanilla. He focuses initially on the angle that outreach is lacking and that having diverse leaders and members is not a priority of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeepers, etc.

What about the angle that cleaning up polluted minority communites in industrial areas is infinitely less of a priority for white enviros than protecting coastal view planes, gnatcatchers, snail darters, etc?

Greens pushed polluters into minority communities

That’s referenced, but only in paragraphs that offer telling detail but superficial insight:

“’We essentially have a racially segregated environmental movement,’ said Van Jones, co-founder of the nonprofit Rebuild the Dream and a former adviser on green jobs to the Obama administration. ‘We’re too polite to say that. Instead, we say we have an environmental justice movement and a mainstream movement.’

“The Sierra Club, billed as the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental organization with 1.3 million members, was founded in 1892. Like groups that followed, such as the Nature Conservancy in 1915 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, they were largely white, upper- and middle-class, and focused on the protection of wilderness areas.

“Two decades later, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring,’ alerted Americans to the impact of pesticides and toxic pollution on the environment.

“Acting on Carson’s revelations, the mainstream environmental groups helped to push chemical warehouses, pesticide companies and coal-fired power plants from rural and exurban areas, and many polluters migrated to low-income urban areas where people of color live.

“In the 1980s, the Government Accountability Office, the United Church of Christ and the Commission for Racial Justice each issued reports that established a direct link between race and the location of toxic-waste sites, according to a study on power plants and their proximity to minorities released in December by the NAACP. …

“Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University said that in 1980 all five of Houston’s landfills were in minority communities, as were six of the city’s eight incinerators. He said mainstream environmental groups he approached for help did not seem concerned.”

‘Environmental justice’ for plants and birds, not people

And why would that be? Why would those holding “mainstream environmental values” be so unconcerned about “environmental justice”? How could the suffering of humans seem less crucial than the suffering of flora and fauna?

Maybe because some humans don’t exactly trigger empathy among enviros.

Fears doesn’t go near the incendiary topic. But as I noted in a Dec. 31 article for Cal Watchdog, the fact is white environmental groups’ indifference to the interests of minorities used to be a lot worse than indifference:

“The environmental movement for decades called for zero population growth — seen as code for making minorities have fewer kids and for curbing illegal immigration. Now the rhetoric has shifted, but the history isn’t going away. Check out this Southern Poverty Law Center dossier on John Tanton, a Sierra Club activist who led’s the club’s population committee in the early 1970s before it was revealed that he was a white nationalist.”

This matters. Greens pine for the way things used to be — in many, many ways.

I think that by any objective measure, “environmental justice” — fighting the history of sticking heavy polluters in minority communities — is more important than fretting about declining numbers of gnatcatchers and snail darters. But Democratic leaders defer to environmentalists, and enviros don’t agree. Save the obscure fishies! Bugs are people too!

As for poor minorities, well, let them eat cake.

By Chris Reed

As Californians begin to appreciate the immense economic potential of the state’s underground natural gas and oil reserves, the debate will sharply intensify over the safety of hydraulic fracturing — the newly refined and improved tool used to access previously unreachable reserves. Fracking, the shorthand term for the process, involves using high-powered streams of water, with a small amount of chemicals and solids or sand, to break up rock formations thousands of feet underground.

Of the states most associated with fracking — North Dakota, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania — what has happened in the latter is of most interest to Californians. In the Keystone State, the use of fracking to tap vast natural gas reserves in an underground formation called the Marcellus Shale flourished under a liberal Democratic governor, Ed Rendell. The former Philadelphia mayor simply never gave credence to the various scare tactics used to try to block fracking and brushed off the criticism from the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page, environmental groups and others with an ideological, quasi-religious abhorrence of fossil fuels.

If Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown is to be persuaded to follow Rendell’s path, advocates of fracking need to learn from Pennsylvania and how the debate unfolded there.

Stick to the facts to counter hysterics

Advocates should argue that fracking is not perfect, but that no oil exploration is, and note that when properly regulated, it has a strong safety record. Scott Perry, who was the director of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management under Rendell, liked to respond to the harshest critique with this just-the-facts statement: “There has never been any evidence of fracking ever causing direct contamination of fresh groundwater in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.”

The argument that fracking, which is typically at a depth of 5,000 feet or more, might affect water tables thousands of feet higher isn’t one that most scientists take seriously. John M. Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor who served in high posts in the Carter and Clinton administrations and has been a key adviser to the U.S. Energy Department on fracking, says careful regulation addresses environmental fears in comprehensive fashion. He adds that fracking “is by far the biggest event that I’ve seen” in 50 years of monitoring world energy developments.

What’s striking about media coverage of fracking safety questions is how it largely ignores the fact that the Obama administration rejects the alarmism of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In House testimony in May 2011, EPA Director Lisa Jackson said she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.” The U.S. Geological Survey dismissed the idea that fracking causes earthquakes. Most definitively, a November 2011 Energy Department study concluded that there were legitimate pollution concerns surrounding hydraulic fracturing. But the concerns involved the worries about surface air and water quality and about community effects that would come with any heavy industrial project, and were not due to the deleterious effects of fracking underground.

Efficiency gains: It’s not the chemicals, it’s the computers

In explaining why fracking is so much more effective than it used to be, advocates should stress that it is a result of computing power — not more toxic and dangerous chemicals. Drillers are now able to use extraordinarily sophisticated sensors to take the equivalent of a gigantic MRI of underground rock formations, then focus their water cannons on weak spots in the formations surrounding the shale formations with natural gas and oil reserves.

Now, as in the past, by volume the chemicals and sand used are less than 1 percent of the total water used. Because of fracking’s increased efficiency, this means much less water is used than in past versions — and thus fewer chemicals.

Another claim regularly invoked by fracking critics is that the process wastes an extraordinary amount of water. But the Marcellus Shale Coalition says 90 percent of the water used is recycled, and that far more water is used in Pennsylvania on golf courses than in fracking. The recycling percentage is only going to improve as focus grows on the importance of reuse.

The ‘Goebbels’-like anti-fracking documentary

Fracking supporters can shore up their case by pointing to the intentional deception in a 2010 anti-fracking documentary, “GasLand.” The movie’s most unforgettable image is residents of a town in a heavy drilling area — Dimock, Pa. — lighting their tap water on fire, leaving the plain impression this was the result of fracking. Instead, even director Josh Fox acknowledged in an interview with McClatchy-Tribune that it resulted from local conditions unrelated to the chemicals used in fracking. Fox, however, insisted it wasn’t misleading.

Defenders of Pennsylvania’s fracking record like to bring up “GasLand” because they know it is so easily discredited. In a 2011 interview with a newspaper in Lancaster, Pa., Teddy Borawski, chief oil and gas geologist for the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, relished the chance to tee off on the documentary. “Joseph Goebbels would have been proud,” he said. “He would have given him the Nazi Award. That, in my opinion, was a beautiful piece of propaganda.”

And in the war of talking points, the fact is that fracking has actually led to the single best news on the U.S. environmental front in many years. Natural gas is much cleaner than coal and oil, and fracking has increased supplies so dramatically that it now costs only a third or less of what it did in 2008 in the United States. The result: “The amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years,” as AP reported last summer.

The irony could hardly be greater. For decades, environmentalists have argued that renewable energy such as solar and wind power are the only way to reduce the release of dangerous emissions into the atmosphere. But it is plentiful new supplies of a fossil fuel, natural gas, that has been the game changer. The U.S. has reduced carbon dioxide emissions more than any other nation since 2006, according to the International Energy Association.

California could thrive if it joins the “brown energy” revolution. The  Monterey Shale formation under the Central Valley is far bigger than the Marcellus Shale formation under Pennsylvania and other northeastern states. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 15, “The overall economic benefits of opening up the Monterey Shale field could reach $1 trillion.”

Allowing fracking to work its magic will be especially difficult in a state that is home to AB 32 and that is ground zero for regulatory excesses in the name of preventing pollution. But while governor of Pennsylvania from 2003-2011, Ed Rendell overcame reflexive green objections with his just-the-facts approach. It can work in California, too.