SB 375 (Chapter 728, Statutes of 2008) directs the California Air Resources Board to set regional targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new law establishes a “bottom up” approach to ensure that cities and counties are involved in the development of regional plans to achieve those targets.

SB 375 builds on the existing framework of regional planning to tie together the regional allocation of housing needs and regional transportation planning in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from motor vehicle trips.

San Diego County has become the first major county to file its SB 375 compliance plan. So far, there have 德州扑克 been two ongoing court fights over whether the county’s long-term infrastructure-improvement planning does enough to push the region to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, as mandated by Steinberg’s law.

The county had to file its plan at the same time it was formulating its long-term approach to traffic congestion. Recent improvements to Interstate 15 have paid huge dividends. This made San Diego Association of Government officials even more committed to an expansion of Interstate 5 from the Del Mar area north to Camp Pendleton. Work is supposed to begin next year. Traffic engineers concluded there was no single project that would do anything close to relieving the congestion that would be accomplished with the I-5 improvements.

But that upgrade is now imperiled because greens have won at the appeals court level in both of the legal fights over the adequacy of San Diego County’s long-term plans.

What should 57% of infrastructure $ go to?

So what is one of the key fights in the legal battles over the county’s plan?

The contention of one side that spending on mass transit should start at 38 percent of infrastructure spending and reach 57 percent from 2040-2050.

There is no history of mass transit being popular anywhere but in packed-in cities like Tokyo and New York. California is not Tokyo or New York.

So how could those insane tree-huggers propose that 57 percent of future infrastructure spending in the San Diego region go to mass transit?

Bulletin: That isn’t what the Sierra Club supported. It’s what the county proposed and the Sierra Club and many other environmental groups rejected as unacceptable.

This is crazy enough on its face. But when you think about it more deeply, it becomes absolutely ridiculous. A state law is pushing local governments to assume mass transit will be the most logical way to move people around in a spread-out state — in 2040! This is happening even though there are so many promising energy-technology initiatives in the works — and even though there have been plenty of concrete gains since 2008.

Cars get cleaner as freeways de-emphasized

I had more on this issue in a Tuesday U-T San Diego editorial.

California is not the boroughs of New York City writ large. It is a sprawling state, and that is never going to [embrace mass transit] so long as housing is cheaper on the edges of the state’s population centers. Cars are infinitely more convenient for a typical day’s requirements — commuting to work; running errands on lunch breaks; getting kids to school, music classes, sports practice or jobs.

But instead of acknowledging this immense convenience factor, greens seek policies that would create mass inconvenience. The Interstate 5 experience in North County is already often bad; if the freeway upgrade is blocked, it will become routinely horrible. For people who hate cars, this amounts to a desired result.

They think this way even as we see rapid progress in developing far cleaner cars — and not just the Prius. As The New York Times reported Sunday, the “once-distant promise of clean, affordable hydrogen-powered cars is starting to become a reality,” with very positive implications for global warming. Pragmatic environmentalists will see this as good news. But not those who view cars and freeways the same way that most people think about bubonic plague.

Here’s a link to the NYT story on hydrogen-powered cars.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2014/12/02/nutty-sb-375-about-to-become-ongoing-nightmare-for-ca/feed/ 6 70961 https://calwatchdog.com/2013/11/27/carb-update-powers-expanding-beyond-ab32/ https://calwatchdog.com/2013/11/27/carb-update-powers-expanding-beyond-ab32/#comments Wed, 27 Nov 2013 19:14:38 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=53768 Irish wit Oscar Wilde once quipped, “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” He died in 1900, but he would have recognized the California Air Resources Board.

Under AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, CARB was charged with overseeing the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That effectively meant a 25 percent reduction.

Mission accomplished. As I reported from a March hearing, CARB Officer Richard Corey admitted, “The last three years have seen the biggest drop in carbon emissions” in the state’s history. He said California has nearly met its 1990 levels of carbon emissions.

But CARB’s AB32 functions are not going gentle into that good night, to paraphrase another Irish wit, Dylan Thomas.

Claiming authority AB32 actually did not provide, CARB has expanded its mandate well beyond AB32 and is now also responsible for the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, the Renewable Portfolio Standard, and the cap and trade carbon allowance auction program.

Cap and trade is the program set up a year ago that conducts quarterly auctions of carbon dioxide emissions, with “dirty” companies trading for “clean” credits from “clean” companies.

Specifically, CARB is targeting transportation, 
electricity, industry and commercial and residential sectors for emissions reductions. These sectors “must reduce … greenhouse gas emissions through the direct regulatory measures recommended by the program,” a study by the Legislative Analyst’s Office found. “However, after accounting for GHG emissions reductions resulting from the plan’s direct regulatory measures, the four sectors must together achieve additional reductions of approximately another 33 MMTCO2E (millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) through the cap-and-trade program.”

Numerous studies have shown that California’s cap-and-trade auctions will lead to significantly higher energy costs.

The idea behind the cap-and-trade program is that annual greenhouse gas emissions from certain sectors of the economy will be capped, started in 2013. This cap will be reduced over time, enforced through a carbon allowance purchasing system, managed by CARB.

Yet, the Legislative Analyst explained in a 2012 letter to the Legislature that CARB’s cap-and-trade program is not needed to meet AB32’s mandates.

The LAO has also warned the Legislature that cap and trade would greatly increase production costs for businesses forced to comply with CARB’s regulations. But the Legislature has taken no action to curb CARB’s overreaching.

AB32 concerns

For five years, the Legislative Analyst’s Office has raised questions about CARB’s overreaching. The LAO has specifically expressed concerns with the AB32 scoping plan, and the non-legislated Low Carbon Fuel Standard. CARB has never done a rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of the scoping plan.

The 2008 Legislative Analyst’s Office review found that CARB’s early economic analysis raised numerous questions:

* How implementation of AB32 was compared to doing business-as-usual;

* The incompleteness of CARB’s analysis.

* How specific greenhouse-gas reduction measures are deemed to be cost-effective;

* Weak assumptions relating to the low-carbon fuel standard;

* A lack of analytical rigor in the macroeconomic modeling;

* The failure of the plan to lay out an investment pathway;

* The failure by CARB to use economic analysis to shape the choice of and reliance on greenhouse gas reduction measures.

The LAO continues to use the 2008 report in legislative testimony, as it is still relevant and has been disregarded by the Legislature and CARB.

“[By] assuming that no actions are taken to reduce GHG emissions by 2020, CARB overstates the problem that it then credits the scoping plan with addressing,” the LAO’s 2008 report found.

The scoping plan includes an inconsistent and incomplete evaluation of costs and savings associated with its recommended measures, the LAO has consistently reported.

Low Carbon Fuel Standard

The LAO said CARB had a very weak basis for its assumptions about the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

The $25 billion in annualized costs that CARB attributes to the scoping plan are largest in the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. That measure alone accounts for $11 billion, or 44 percent of the scoping plan’s annualized costs. Yet it provides just less than 9 percent of the plan’s emissions reductions, the 2008 report found.

According to the report, “However, CARB further claims that these $11 billion in annualized costs would be offset by equivalent savings on petroleum products (mainly gasoline) that would no longer be purchased for transportation purposes. Therefore, according to CARB, the net annualized cost of this measure is zero.”

Tiffany Roberts, an economist and analyst with the LAO, has been critical of CARB’s macroeconomic analysis. “The findings are highly dependent upon key assumptions, some of which are based on incomplete data,” she said at the Senate Transportation hearing in March, which I reported on.

However, nothing is likely to change. Gov. Jerry Brown is a big supporter of AB32. And CARB Chair Mary Nichols, pictured above, is one of his longtime associates.

By Joseph Perkins

The California Public Utilities Commission routinely rubber stamps renewable energy projects without discussion. But that was not the case this past Thursday, when Commissioner Michael Florio objected to a solar project that came before the state agency.

It was part of a deal between San Diego Gas & Electric and Sol Orchard, a Carmel company, to buy 50 megawatts of locally produced solar power from 21 individual ground-mounted photovoltaic plants — solar orchids rather than trees — in San Diego County.

The cost of the project, which ultimately will be passed along to the utility’s ratepayers, was 40 percent higher than other such deals the CPUC considered during its meeting. “An expensive and dubious project such as this one simply does not merit our approval,” Florio argued.

Florio’s fellow commissioners ultimately overruled him.

They approved the SDG&E deal with Sol Orchard for 50 overpriced megawatts along with another SDG&E deal to buy 200 megawatts from Mount Signal I Solar Farm in Calexico and a deal by Southern California Edison to buy 250 megawatts of solar power from a McCoy Solar development in Riverside County.

The CPUC’s motivation to approve even the most questionable solar projects is attributable to a state mandate, the so-called Renewable Portfolio Standard, requiring SDG&E, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric to generate a third of their electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal by 2020.

If the RPS mandate wasn’t ambitious enough, Gov. Jerry Brown made it even more so with his Clean Energy Jobs Plan. 

Toward the goal of adding 20,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity over the next eight years, the plan calls for 8,000 megawatts of utility-scale generation of solar, wind and geothermal, as well as 12,000 megawatts of localized generation close to consumer loads and transmission and distribution lines.

Considering that renewable energy sources account for less than 15 percent of in-state electricity generation, according to the California Energy Commission, it seems highly doubtful the big three utilities will meet the 2020 RPS mandate, much less the governor’s unrealistic goal for local generation of renewable energy.

The problem is that the state’s target for renewable energy generation is far ahead of the market for such energy. In fact, private R&D funding for renewable energy is $1 billion less than it was 10 years ago, according to the state energy commission.

That’s because, for all the promise of renewable energy, the price of electricity generated by solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources remains higher than the price of electricity generated by natural gas and nuclear power, which, between them, continue to generate 70 percent of the Golden State’s electricity.

That’s why lawmakers have mandated an artificial share of the state’s electricity market to renewable energy. That also is why the state government continues to directly and indirectly subsidize renewable energy.