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IN THIS ISSUE – “Especially Grim“ Voter Poll for Newsom
POLITICS & TAXES
- Governor’s Popularity Waning, Survey Finds
- Historic Exodus from Legislature: “Who’s Going to be Left to Fill the Void?”
- Gas Prices Soar, But Legislative Leaders Won’t Put Brakes on Tax Hike
- Billions & Billions…State Cash Flow Continues to Stack Up; Jobs Rise & Building Falls
AIR & WATER
- Industry Emission Credits Imperil Air Quality Goals, Study Says
- Unions, Environmentalists Struggle Over “Just Transition” of Oil Workers to New Jobs
- Biden Restores California Air Pollution Leadership
- States & Cities Turn Up Heat on Banning Gas Stoves
- Biomass Energy Plant Prototype May Fire-Up in the Valley
- Western US Megadrought Driest in 1,200 Years, Researcher Says
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique service.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING FEB. 18, 2022
“Especially Grim” Poll Results Show Newsom’s Popularity Waning
CalMatters
Crime and homelessness.
Those are the two issues on which California Democrats are most vulnerable heading into the 2022 elections, according to a poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times.
And the survey’s findings were especially grim for Gov. Gavin Newsom: 48% of registered voters said they approve of his overall performance as governor, while 47% disapprove. That’s a marked increase in criticism from September 2021, when 50% approved of the governor and 42% disapproved — and Newsom overwhelmingly defeated an attempt to recall him from office.
- The survey found that disapproval of Newsom’s job performance is rising among key voter blocs, including Democrats, strong liberals, moderates, Los Angeles County voters, Latinos and Asian Americans.
- Voters also gave Newsom low marks for handling eight out of ten major issues facing the state, with 66% rating his response to homelessness as “poor” or “very poor” and 51% saying the same about his approach to crime and public safety.
voters’ clear dissatisfaction with the status quo could pose challenges for Democrats running in competitive, newly redrawn districts — and sway the outcome of high-profile races, such as for mayor of Los Angeles. According to the UC Berkeley survey:
- 78% of registered voters said crime has increased over the past year,and 65% said it’s worsened in their local areas.
- 59%said they would support amending Prop. 47, a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified some theft and drug felonies as misdemeanors.
- 54% believe California is on the wrong track,a 9-point increase from May 2021.
Poll: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ft4h17c
Historic Exodus from Legislature: “Who’s Going to be Left to Fill the Void?”
LATimes Calfiornia Politics
Chad Mayes has had several important titles over the course of more than two decades in politics: city councilman, mayor, Assembly member, Republican leader, independent legislator.
But by the end of the year, his designation is likely to be ex-politician. And if so, it will be entirely by choice.
“I’m not the only one that’s thinking this way,” Mayes said. “And the question becomes, who’s going to be left to fill the void?”
With one month remaining to file the paperwork for the 2022 elections, it has become impossible to ignore the historic exodus of incumbent members of the California Legislature.
While there have been other eras of great turnover in the state Senate and Assembly, the change now underway is being led by lawmakers who are voluntarily stepping down — with a surprising number of them choosing to do so in the middle of their current term.
For some, it marks not only the end of their time in Sacramento but the realization that their idealism was no match for the one-two punch of powerful interest groups and the era’s angry, uncompromising political climate.
“I thought we could change the system,” Mayes said in looking back at the expectations of lawmakers elected after voters loosened California’s legislative term limits in 2012. “There was this sense that we were going to take [power] back from the lobbyists, we were going to take it back from the staff.”
Seven years later, Mayes offers a concession.
“We actually failed miserably at that,” he said.
And for some members of the Legislature elected in 2012 and 2014, last year’s redrawing of political maps has left them facing the prospect of a grueling campaign to win over brand-new voters — to then have only two years before term limits send them looking for another job.
“The political world right now is brutal,” said Ian Calderon, the former Assembly majority leader who opted not to run again in 2020. “It takes a massive toll on your life.”
The number of sitting legislators who are stepping aside grew on Thursday, when Assemblymember Jim Cooper (D-Elk Grove) announced he will run for Sacramento County sheriff.
More than one in four members of the Legislature who took the oath of office in December 2020 will be gone when the new legislative session begins after this year’s elections. At least 25 members of the 80-member Assembly will have departed, along with 10 men and women in the 40-member Senate.
While the Senate turnover will largely be consistent with previous cycles, the exodus is most pronounced in the Assembly. Five of the lower house’s members have already resigned, the latest being former Los Angeles County Assemblymember Autumn Burke, who gave 24 hours notice before her Feb. 1 resignation, saying it was of “the utmost importance that I have the flexibility and ability to spend more time with my family.”
Fourteen more have announced they’ll retire at year’s end. Five more will lose to a fellow incumbent on election day, drawn into the same district as their colleague under last fall’s statewide redistricting — assuming, of course, they don’t change their mind and drop out.
But it’s the high number of voluntary departures that provides the real eye-opener. In 2012, California’s last post-redistricting cycle, only four Assembly members made the same choice. That year, more than half of the lower house’s vacancies were due to term limits.
Gas Prices Soar, But Legislative Leaders Won’t Put Brakes on Tax Hike
Associated Press
Amid record-high gas prices, California’s Democratic legislative leaders said they are reluctant to adopt Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to halt a gasoline tax increase scheduled to take effect in July because the resulting $500 million goes to vital programs.
“I certainly have concerns” and others among Newsom’s fellow Democrats in the Assembly do as well, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said. “That’s something that could potentially jeopardize a tremendous amount of jobs in this state, it could inhibit some economic growth.”
The hesitancy by Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins comes with an average $4.72 per gallon gas price in California, the highest in the nation and up $1.30 from a year ago. The national average is $3.51 a gallon, according to AAA.
Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk said “Sacramento Democrats are tone deaf if they think people don’t need a break at the pump.”
California taxes gasoline at 51.1 cents per gallon, second only to Pennsylvania, according to the Federation of Tax Administrators. The planned tax increase is tied to inflation, which is surging. Last summer the tax increased from 50.5 cents per gallon.
Newsom, a Democrat, in his January budget proposed stopping the increase, at least for this year. That move would cost the state about $523 million in lost revenue that would otherwise go for things like roads and bridges. Newsom said that money can come instead from the state’s $45.7 billion surplus.
“We passed the gas tax for a very specific reason,” Rendon said. “We need to make sure that our transit operations are running and running smoothly. We want to make sure that our roads are safe and all those types of things. We want to make sure that our construction workers, folks in the building trades, are working on those projects.
“If we’re going to halt the gas tax, we want to make sure that we have a sense of what that means to our state and to our economy,” he added.
Atkins said the tax was approved with a difficult vote by lawmakers in 2017 and later ratified by voters. “It’s been doing the job,” she said.
Both leaders’ comments were in response to questions during an online forum by the Sacramento Press Club in which they also discussed other issues before the Legislature.
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher criticized the Democratic leaders.
“Gas prices hit a new record today and it’s getting harder and harder for Californians to drive to work and take their kids to school,” he said in a statement.
“Saying that the state won’t ease that burden while we’re sitting on a $40 billion surplus is astounding,” Gallagher added. “What’s a better use for that money? High-speed rail? The dog parks and sculpture gardens they’ve stuck in the budget over the years?”
Billions & Billions…State Cash Flow Continues to Stack Up; Jobs Rise & Building Falls
State Dept. of Finance
Preliminary General Fund agency cash receipts for the first seven months of the 2021-22 fiscal year were $15.954 billion above the 2022-23 Governor’s Budget forecast of $109.355 billion.
Of note, $6.206 billion of this total additional revenue is due to higher-than-expected Pass-Through Entity (PTE) elective tax payments under the corporation tax, a 2021 state tax change designed to allow some taxpayers to reduce their allowable federal tax liability starting with their 2021 tax returns.
Every dollar received from the PTE elective tax paid generates a dollar of personal income tax credit. While the amount of PTE elective tax payments can be tracked in monthly cash reports, the extent to which taxpayers will reduce their personal income tax payments to reflect the elective tax credits cannot be determined until more complete tax return data for 2021 are available. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that a portion of this $6.2 billion may overstate the amount of overall revenue strength to date.
Personal income tax cash receipts to the General Fund for the first seven months of the fiscal year were $9.175 billion above the forecast of $76.711 billion. Cash receipts for January were $5.98 billion above the forecast of $21.106 billion. Withholding receipts were $130 million below the forecast of $8.128 billion. Other cash receipts were $6.12 billion above the forecast of $13.885 billion, primarily due to stronger fourth quarter estimated payments.
Sales and use tax cash receipts for the first seven months of the fiscal year were $223 million below the forecast of $17.919 billion. Cash receipts for January were $414 million below the month’s forecast of $2.014 billion. January cash receipts include a portion of the final payment for fourth quarter taxable sales.
Corporation tax cash receipts for the first seven months of the fiscal year were $7.995 billion above the forecast of $10.003 billion. Of that overage, $6.206 billion was from higher PTE elective tax payments. Cash receipts for January were $2.197 billion above the month’s forecast of $843 million.Total refunds for the month were $25 million higher than the forecast of $116 million.
Cash receipts from the insurance, alcoholic beverage, tobacco taxes, and pooled money interest were $1 million above the forecast for the first seven months of the fiscal year, and were $8 million below the forecast of $102 million for January. “Other” cash receipts were $994 million below the forecast for the first seven months of the fiscal year, and were $1.051 billion below the forecast of $397 million for the month.
California unemployment rate fell 0.5 percentage point to 6.5 percent in December 2021, bringing the 2021 average unemployment rate to 7.7 percent. California added 50,700 nonfarm jobs with ten sectors adding jobs: leisure and hospitality (15,000), professional and business services (12,000), educational and health services (7,600), government (4,100), information (3,100), other services (3,000), manufacturing (1,800), trade, transportation, and utilities (1,800), construction (1,200), and financial activities (1,100). Mining and logging remained unchanged. As of December 2021, California has recovered 71.7 percent of the 2.7 million nonfarm jobs lost in March and April 2020. Professional and business services became the first and only sector to recover to its February 2020 pre-pandemic level.
California permitted 104,000 units on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate basis in December 2021, down 11.7 percent from November 2021 and down 15.1 percent from December 2020. Despite this decrease, in 2021, California permitted a total of 117,000 units, the highest number of permitted units annually since 2006, up from 106,000 units in 2020 and 110,000 units in 2019.
The statewide median price of existing single-family homes increased to $796,570 in December 2021, up 1.8 percent from November 2021 and up 11 percent from December 2020. Sales of existing single-family homes in California totaled 429,860 units in December 2021, 15.7 percent below the 15-year high 509,750 units in December 2020, but 7.9 percent higher than the December 2019 pre-pandemic level of 398,370 units.
https://dof.ca.gov/Forecasting/Economics/Economic_and_Revenue_Updates/documents/2022/Feb-22.pdf
Industry Emission Credits Imperil Air Quality Goals, Study Says
Associated Press
Oil refineries, utilities and other companies that must pay to emit greenhouse gases in California have saved up so many credits allowing them to pollute that it may jeopardize the state’s ability to reach its ambitious climate goals, according to a report by a panel that advises state officials.
California runs one of the world’s largest carbon markets, known as “cap-and-trade,” which requires companies to buy, trade or receive pollution “allowances” equivalent to how much they plan to emit. The state makes fewer allowances available over time, with the goal of spurring the companies to pollute less as allowances become scarcer and more expensive.
California’s market has been closely watched by both advocates and critics of efforts to control emissions using market forces, not mandates. The state is required to reduce emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, an ambitious target, and the state has previously said more than a third of those reductions will come from cap and trade.
But companies that participate have saved up so many allowances — 321 million — that it could hurt the program’s ability to force significant emissions reductions, according to a report finalized last week by the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of five experts appointed by lawmakers and the governor. The banked allowances are roughly equivalent to all the carbon the companies emit in a year and they so far exceed the emission cuts cap and trade is supposed to achieve by the time it expires in 2030.
“If you can’t take that as a wake-up call you’re not paying attention,” said Danny Cullenward, a lawyer and economist focused on climate policy who serves as the committee’s vice chair.
The report comes as the California Air Resources Board is preparing an assessment of the state’s progress toward its climate goals, known as a “scoping plan.” It’s the first such plan in five years, and the committee urged the board to thoroughly look into the role cap and trade should play.
“Because of the size of the bank, it’s plausible that all the covered sources don’t reduce emissions at all over the course of the decade,” committee Chair Dallas Burtraw said.
One allowance is 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, about the same level of emissions produced by driving a car 2,500 miles (4,023 kilometers). During last year’s quarterly allowance auctions, one allowance cost between $17 and $28.
The air board does not make public who holds banked allowances and there is a limit on how many an individual emitter may possess. If the program expires in 2030 as planned, companies would no longer need to pay to pollute and any outstanding allowances would be useless.
Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer for climate change and research at the air board, said it has tools to ensure banked allowances don’t jeopardize the program’s goals, such as taking allowances off the market if they don’t sell for 24 months. Additional allowances could only be removed at the direction of the Legislature or regulatory changes to the program. The air board previously took some allowances out of the auction following legislative changes in 2017.
“The fact that we have some unused allowances is actually a good thing from the perspective of the atmosphere, because that means those emissions didn’t happen,” she said.
Companies covered by cap and trade collectively emitted less between 2018 and 2020 than they did from 2015 to 2017, air board data shows. The beginning of the pandemic saw a decrease in economic activity that accounts for some of those reductions.
Shell Energy and the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, a coalition of labor and business groups, warned against altering the amount of allowances through any new measures, saying such a move would disrupt the “market integrity” of the program.
The air board’s last scoping plan found cap and trade would be responsible for 38% of the state’s emissions reductions — essentially anything that can’t be achieved by those other programs. The 2022 update will likely show a diminished role for cap and trade, Sahota said.
Any changes to the program and the amount of allowances sold would have ramifications beyond cap and trade. The state has brought in more than $18 billion through quarterly auctions of allowances, and it goes toward other programs designed to cut emissions. A quarter of the auction proceeds go directly to the state’s long-delayed and vastly over budget high-speed rail project.
California launched the program in 2013 and originally set it to expire in 2020. But in 2017, lawmakers and then-Gov. Jerry Brown extended it through 2030. Environmental justice advocates have long argued against it, saying it does little to improve air quality for people who live next to large polluters.
“The dangerously high number of offsets and allowances reported by the (committee) should sound an alarm for Californians and state leaders,” Neena Mohan, climate justice manager for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, said in a statement.
“Offsets” are projects aimed at removing carbon from the atmosphere, and companies can use a limited amount instead of carbon allowances. The offset projects don’t have to occur in California and include projects such as capturing methane emissions at coal mines.
State Sen. Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat, said he should have pushed harder to bar companies from keeping saved allowances after 2021, forcing them to start fresh. He’s leading a Senate hearing Feb. 23 on the scoping plan and said he’ll question air board and Newsom administration officials about cap and trade.
The air board’s 2017 analysis only modeled the possibility of about 150 million allowances — less than half of what’s been saved.
Unions, Environmentalists Struggle Over “Just Transition” of Oil Workers to New Jobs
CalMatters
A leading environmental lawmaker has proposed a bill that would create a state fund to support and retrain thousands of oil industry workers as California tries to phase out fossil fuel production.
The idea of guiding California’s 112,000 oil industry workers out of their current field and into other careers is often referred to as “just transition,” and is considered by policy researchers a necessary step to counter job losses as the state strives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But even with a Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature, such a proposal faces an uphill battle because it’s pitting unions against unions.
Community and environmental groups say the state should start moving half the industry’s workforce out of oil fields, refineries and plants now in order to meet California’s goal of cutting 40% greenhouse gas emission by 2030. But a union that represents a portion of these workers has opposed efforts in the past.
The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California – known as the Trades – which represents labor groups that include Ironworkers, electrical workers and Teamsters, worry about losing good-paying jobs. Last year, The Trades opposed a bill that would have prevented oil drilling near schools and communities, citing job losses.
This time, however, the Trades is being countered by another group of unions including steelworkers, municipal workers and teachers. Although the current bill doesn’t specify an amount, those unions hope the state will dedicate $470 million annually for wage subsidies and training to help workers move into the growing green energy sector.
Trades leaders say that beginning to dismantle the industry now will only push workers into lower-paid jobs. Instead, Trades officials say, the state should invest in big-ticket infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail and offshore wind projects that will create comparable jobs to what workers have been doing for decades.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi’s bill exposes a rift among labor unions on how the state should address the transition to a green economy at a time of growing income inequality and fewer well-paying jobs for middle-class workers.
It also puts labor’s main organizing body, California Labor Federation, in an uncomfortable position after Steelworkers requested that the organization convene “labor to labor” talks on the subject. Both sides say talks haven’t happened yet.
Messages left for the Labor Federation and its new incoming leader, former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, were not returned.
Green economy researchers say the state needs a clear plan for oil-industry workers otherwise the transition will be left to corporations, which are unlikely to provide financial support or offer laid-off workers a path to new careers.
Those workers labor on oil derricks spanning the Central Valley that pull 169,211 barrels of crude oil from the ground a day. They oversee the import and export of crude oil and petroleum along the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. And they fix pipes and repair machinery in refineries that convert 1.7 million barrels of crude into petroleum, such as Chevron’s refinery that looms over the city of Richmond. California has the third-largest refining capacity in the country.
While two-thirds of workers have less than a bachelor’s degree, they work in positions with an average compensation of $130,000 a year. The majority have health insurance and retirement benefits, while 23% are unionized. That’s far higher than the green energy industry, with an average salary of $97,000, and lower rates of unionization and benefits, according to a labor-funded just transition report.
“We are not used to saying, ‘In 10 years, five refineries are going to be gone. What should we do?’” said Carol Zabin, director of UC Berkeley’s Green Economy Program. “We don’t really know because it’s all left to private enterprise.”
Without a statewide plan, funding and timeline to support oil workers, she said, a just transition “sounds like an invitation to a fancy funeral.”
Muratsuchi, who represents parts of the South Bay region of Los Angeles, had proposed to create a just transition advisory commission, which would have been tasked with coming up with a plan by 2024. Even though he allocated some of the commission’s 13 seats to the Trades and oil industry, the bill died in committee last month.
“That was the lesson I learned,” Muratsuchi said in an interview. “In order to advance any plan for a just transition, we need to have buy-in and support of labor.”
Now, his latest proposal is being backed by some labor unions, including teachers and municipal workers.
It’s not clear where Gov. Gavin Newsom stands.
Newsom’s 2022 budget proposal allocates $50 million to support displaced oil and gas workers – a fraction of what labor wants – and adds $450 million to a Community Economic Resilience Fund, which was set up using federal stimulus money to help communities recover from the pandemic.
A spokesperson for the governor said that the administration is “continuing to advance strategies that create jobs throughout the state.”
Just transition advocates applauded the resilience fund, which could be used to grow jobs in the green energy sector. But $50 million to support displaced oil workers isn’t enough, said Tracey Brieger, campaign director at Jobs with Justice San Francisco, a worker advocacy nonprofit.
“It’s going to take strong and bold action to find the money and make the investment,” Brieger said.
While few details of Muratsuchi’s new bill have been hammered out, the legislation is intended to establish a Just Transition Fund, which would offer wage compensation, pension guarantees, healthcare, relocation funding and retraining programs to former oil workers.
The idea is based on a 12-year, just transition roadmap to shutter half of California’s oil industry by 2030. The roadmap was developed by Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a leading expert on just transition policy. The report was commissioned by the California Federation of Teachers, Steelworkers Local 675 and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299.
Experts say the closure of the oil industry will have wide-reaching implications – including large swaths of communities out of work and cities losing millions in taxes and fees from oil companies.
Both labor camps agree the state should have a role, but disagree over what that role should be.
While the Trades want the state’s commitment for massive infrastructure projects to sustain their members’ professions, they oppose deadlines to dismantle the industry. Last year, the Trades opposed the Climate Crisis Act that would have codified Newsom’s commitment to net-zero emissions by 2045. The bill died in the Senate after 18 Democrats voted against the bill or abstained.
The 19 unions that have endorsed Pollin’s roadmap also call for $70 billion annual investment from the state in green infrastructure, but ask for an additional $470 million annually for temporary wage subsidies and health insurance, and retraining programs to move oil workers into guaranteed green jobs.
More:
Biden Restores California Air Pollution Leadership
NY Times
The Biden administration is preparing strict new limits on pollution from buses, delivery vans, tractor-trailers and other heavy trucks, the first time tailpipe standards have been tightened for the biggest polluters on the road since 2001.
The new federal regulations are drawn from truck pollution rules recently enacted by California and come as the Biden administration is moving to restore that state’s legal authority to set auto emissions limits that are tighter than federal standards, according to two people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak on the record.
The developments represent a revival of California’s influence on the nation’s climate and clean air policies, following four years in which President Donald J. Trump waged legal, political, and, at times, seemingly personal battles with the state. The Trump administration had stripped away California’s authority to institute its own vehicle pollution standards, power that the state had enjoyed for more than 40 years.
More:
States & Cities Turn Up Heat on Banning Gas Stoves
Politico
Cities and states fed up with Congress’ fumbling on climate change are taking their frustrations out on gas-burning stoves.
Having already reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out dirty heating oil and adding renewable energy largely without federal help, dozens of local governments are voting to drive down their carbon footprints by banning natural gas hookups in new buildings altogether. And it’s dividing Democrats and putting the party at odds with key allies.
More:
Biomass Energy Plant Prototype May Fire-Up in the Valley
MIT Technology Review
A startup plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide.
The facility, developed by Mote of Los Angeles, would rely on the mounds of agricultural waste produced on the state’s sprawling almond orchards and other types of farms. It would heat leftovers like tree trimmings and fruit pits to temperatures above 1,500 ˚F, hot enough to convert the biomass into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Mote plans to separate out the carbon dioxide and pump it deep underground into saline aquifers or retired oil wells near the plant. The hydrogen would be sold to serve the state’s growing fleets of emissions-free buses and trucks.
The process should permanently store away the carbon captured by the plants as they grow. And the hydrogen would defray the high costs of the process.
Mote says its facility would be the first to convert biomass to hydrogen while capturing the carbon emissions. But it’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS.
Such operations could remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere over time, even as they provide low- or no-emissions replacements for fossil fuel. But there are serious challenges to doing it affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide.
Dan Sanchez, who runs the Carbon Removal Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, says the process that Mote intends to use, known as biomass gasification, is technically difficult and expensive. It requires careful pre-treatment of the waste and cleaning of the resulting gases. And gathering up the fuels from scattered farms or forests will be complicated and costly.
In addition, the company’s longer-term prospects could be constrained by the lack of infrastructure for moving around and storing the resulting gases, as well as limited demand for the high-cost variety of hydrogen it plans to produce.
But Mote’s plant might be a particularly effective approach to BECCS because the resulting fuel is carbon free, while other types of plants produce fuels that release some amount back in the end.
And Mac Kennedy, the company’s chief executive, says the facility could become profitable within a few years by taking advantage of state subsidies for low-carbon fuels and federal tax credits for carbon storage. He hopes to eventually build more plants across California and beyond, potentially tapping into other fuel sources like trees removed from forests, whether in the aftermath of wildfires or in the hopes of preventing them.
BECCS is a loosely defined technology that can include facilities running on wood chips, switchgrass, or municipal waste, and producing electricity, ethanol, or so-called synthetic fuels that can power today’s cars, trucks, and planes.
The concept has seized a growing share of attention in research and policy discussions as climate models increasingly find that the only way to avoid very dangerous levels of warming this century is to suck vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Plants and trees do a great job at that, but when they die, rot, or burn, much of the carbon is returned to the air. Various BECCS schemes promise to “make sure it’s permanently out of the atmosphere,” says Roger Aines, who leads the Carbon Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The hope is that these operations can be at least carbon neutral, adding no more greenhouse gases they remove. But some promise to draw down much more than is generated, achieving what’s known as negative emissions.
Cost estimates vary widely depending on the technologies, fuel sources, and outputs. But a 2020 study, led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, found that costs for using biomass to capture and permanently store nearly 200 million tons of carbon dioxide would run between $62 and $137 per ton in the US. That includes the revenue from resulting products, which the study assumed would mean selling electricity generated from such plants.
That range is well below the current cost of another popular idea for removing carbon from the air, direct air capture, which can exceed $600 per ton. But even with costs nearly as low as $60 per ton, BECCS wouldn’t be profitable on its own.
That means, for now, such operations will often depend on government subsidies to be viable. “Certainly the added costs of BECCS, or any negative-emissions decarbonization strategy, would need to be somehow compensated for the industry to grow,” Matthew Langholtz, a natural-resources economist at the Oak Ridge Lab and one of the authors of the study, said in an email.
If BECCS does reach large scales, some experts fear, it could come at the expense of food production as plants expand beyond agricultural waste for fuel sources. Eventually, it could even create incentives to raze forests and grasslands and grow crops for bioenergy in their place.
These and other issues make it tricky to properly account for how much carbon is removed and how much is released throughout the process. Farming produces lots of highly potent greenhouse gases. Up until now, most BECCS plants have produced carbon-containing fuels like ethanol that release some CO2 when they’re burned. And operations that sell the resulting carbon dioxide for one of its most common uses, enhanced oil recovery, will be helping to extract additional fossil fuel from wells. (Mote says it wouldn’t use carbon dioxide for this purpose).
Technically, all these applications can still remove more carbon than is released across the entire process. But making sure that’s actually happening as the sector scales up will require creating common, reliable accounting standards, and that has proved very difficult in similar areas, like forest carbon offsets.
The idea for Mote sprang from a research effort that took shape several years ago when scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab tried to solve a conundrum facing California.
Toward the end of his administration in 2018, Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that, while nonbinding, set a goal of achieving “carbon neutrality” across every sector of the state’s economy by 2045. The riddle: How could the world’s fifth-largest economy achieve that goal when researchers and businesses have yet to develop affordable and clean ways of growing crops, raising livestock, powering planes, and operating other industries?
It’s a local version of the same basic problem that forced climate modelers to factor high levels of BECCS into their projections as they calculated ways to prevent the planet from blowing past 1.5 ˚C of warming, given rising emissions, rising temperatures, and slow progress toward clean energy. If companies, states, or nations can remove enough greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, they can theoretically balance out the levels they’re continuing to emit, or even achieve a net decrease.
In a report published in January 2020, the Lawrence Livermore team concluded that the only way to make the math work for California was to remove more than 125 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2045. And they highlighted one approach that promised to do so in an especially scalable and affordable way, using an old and well-known process: cooking but not combusting waste biomass, under high temperatures and pressures and with limited amounts of oxygen, to convert it into gases. By adding systems that captured and stored the resulting carbon dioxide, this technique promised to offset the state’s ongoing emissions.
Much more:
Western US Megadrought Driest in 1,200 Years, Researcher Says
Associated Press
The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds.
A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study calculated that 42% of this megadrought can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
“Climate change is changing the baseline conditions toward a drier, gradually drier state in the West and that means the worst-case scenario keeps getting worse,” said study lead author Park Williams, a climate hydrologist at UCLA. “This is right in line with what people were thinking of in the 1900s as a worst-case scenario. But today I think we need to be even preparing for conditions in the future that are far worse than this.”
Williams studied soil moisture levels in the West — a box that includes California, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, most of Oregon and Idaho, much of New Mexico, western Colorado, northern Mexico, and the southwest corners of Montana and Texas — using modern measurements and tree rings for estimates that go back to the year 800. That’s about as far back as estimates can reliably go with tree rings.
A few years ago, Williams studied the current drought and said it qualified as a lengthy and deep “megadrought” and that the only worse one was in the 1500s. He figured the current drought wouldn’t surpass that one because megadroughts tended to peter out after 20 years. And, he said, 2019 was a wet year so it looked like the western drought might be coming to an end.
But the region dried up in late 2020 and 2021.
All of California was considered in official drought from mid-May until the end of 2021, and at least three-quarters of the state was at the highest two drought levels from June through Christmas, according to the U.S. drought monitor.
“For this drought to have just cranked up back to maximum drought intensity in late 2020 through 2021 is a quite emphatic statement by this 2000s drought saying that we’re nowhere close to the end,” Williams said. This drought is now 5% drier than the old record from the 1500s, he said.
The drought monitor says 55% of the U.S. West is in drought with 13% experiencing the two highest drought levels.
This megadrought really kicked off in 2002 — one of the driest years ever, based on humidity and tree rings, Williams said.
“I was wondering if we’d ever see a year like 2002 again in my life and in fact, we saw it 20 years later, within the same drought,” Williams said. The drought levels in 2002 and 2021 were a statistical tie, though still behind 1580 for the worst single year.
Williams used 29 models to create a hypothetical world with no human-caused warming then compared it to what happened in real life — the scientifically accepted way to check if an extreme weather event is due to climate change. He found that 42% of the drought conditions are directly from human-caused warming. Without climate change, he said, the megadrought would have ended early on because 2005 and 2006 would have been wet enough to break it.
The study “is an important wake-up call,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of environment at the University of Michigan, who wasn’t part of the study. “Climate change is literally baking the water supply and forests of the Southwest, and it could get a whole lot worse if we don’t halt climate change soon.”
Williams said there is a direct link between drought and heat and the increased wildfires that have been devastating the West for years. Fires need dry fuel that drought and heat promote.
Eventually, this megadrought will end by sheer luck of a few good rainy years, Williams said. But then another one will start.