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IN THIS ISSUE – “We have to be hunble.”
Election analyst on the record low voter turnout
- Governor, Legislative Leaders Take Budget Battle into 12th Round
- Primary Election Low Voter Turnout “Not a Shining Example of Civic Engagement”
- Urban Quality of Life Deterioration Drove Election Results
- Assembly Speaker Tussle Lingers Until Next Year
- Clearing the Air – Controversial Climate Change Plan Debated
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 client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 10, 2022
Governor, Legislative Leaders Take Budget Battle into 12th Round
Politico’s California Playbook
If the battle over California’s state budget were a boxing match, the fight would be in the 12th round.
This isn’t boxing, though, so don’t expect any oversize championship belts, knockout punches (fingers crossed, for everyone’s sake) or even Snoop Dogg appearances (you know what I’m talkin’ about, Tyson v. Jones Jr. viewers). Still, the days leading up to a June 15 deadline for the Legislature to pass a budget will assuredly bring their fair share of sweat, jawing and fancy footwork on the part of lawmakers and Co. — all free of steep pay-per-view rates.
As negotiations reach the homestretch, a behemoth of a budget bill hit the Legislature’s website (link at the bottom of this story) — the kind of legislation long enough to test the Legislature’s systems, including, presumably, its printers.
The bill, reflecting a joint Assembly-Senate budget agreement, cleared the Senate Budget Committee today and is “likely” to reach the Senate floor Monday, its committee chair, state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), tweeted:
“Meanwhile, negotiations w/ @GavinNewsom continue,” she wrote.
Those negotiations have, by all appearances, drawn their fair share of haggling despite the state swimming in a record budget surplus. Part of the rub has to do with how much cash to put toward ongoing costs, as revenues are still buoyed by massive influxes of pandemic relief and a tangled web of other variables make it difficult to predict how much California can expect to rake in next year. That’s not to mention the Legislative Analyst’s Office warning about the heightened risk of a recession over the next two years — a caution with the power to reverberate in a state still haunted by painful ‘08-era cuts.
Beyond those number-crunching wrinkles, there’s considerable daylight between statehouse leadership and Gov. Gavin Newsom in several policy areas, including school funding, an arena where the Legislature passed on a Newsom proposal meant to shield school districts from funding dips associated with pandemic-era enrollment declines.
It’s a move that has the education community “reeling,” longtime school lobbyist Kevin Gordon told Playbook PM last week.
Meanwhile, as Democrats prepare to finalize details, Assembly Republicans are trying to put on the brakes with a “Where Did the Money Go?” campaign, complaining that the state is spending without accountability, pointing to homelessness programs and wildfire prevention that they say have yet to yield results — as well as the backlog at the EDD that left many Californians waiting months for Covid-relief help.
“The bottom line is this: Here in California we continue to pay the most to get the least in results,” said Republican Leader James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), standing in front of the Capitol this morning.
Another bottom line: Republicans have little power to halt a mass surplus-era spend in a Legislature dominated by Democrats.
So, if you’re watching ringside as the final round of California’s budget bout concludes, look for Newsom and Democratic leadership in the corners.
Caifornia’s Fiscal Year 2022-23 State Budget, allocating more than $200 billion, will be signed next week after final legislative vote and governor’s approval. Want a sneak peek? Here’s the budget bill, all 1,000+ pages:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB154
Primary Election Low Voter Turnout “Not a Shining Example of Civic Engagement”
CalMatters
California mailed out more than 22 million ballots to registered voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary election. But as of Wednesday, just 3.5 million had been counted.
The tally is far from complete — county elections offices will accept through June 14 ballots postmarked by June 7, and the Secretary of State has until July 15 to certify the results of statewide races.
So, although turnout stood at just 16% on Wednesday — stoking fears California could break its low-turnout record of 25.17% set in 2014 — things could change significantly in the coming weeks. Los Angeles County, for example, estimates it still has 400,000 votes left to count.
Elections guru Paul Mitchell told my colleague Ben Christopher that, based on the historical gap between the initial ballot count and the certified total, “The way I think about it … you have to add 9 or 10 points. So maybe it’s 28%. But who knows! We have to be humble.”
Nevertheless, “it seems safe to say that turnout in (Tuesday’s) primary will not be held up as a shining example of citizen civic engagement,” the nonpartisan California Target Book, which tracks election data, wrote in a Wednesday email.
All that makes it difficult to ascertain what, exactly, Californians are feeling. President Joe Biden suggested that San Francisco voters recalling progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin is an indication that “both parties have to step up and do something about crime, as well as gun violence.”
CalMatters updates:
Official results, Secretary of State:
https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov
Urban Quality of Life Deterioration Drove Election Results
CalMatters commentary by Dan Walters
It may be tempting to make too much of what happened Tuesday in California’s two most prominent cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Right-wing media are screaming that the overwhelming recall of San Francisco’s uber-progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, and businessman Rick Caruso’s top finish in a field of 12 candidates for mayor bodes well for a Republican comeback in this deep blue state.
That’s not going to happen.
However, it’s also tempting to make too little of Tuesday’s voting patterns in those two cities. Progressives rationalize Boudin’s ouster and Caruso’s strong finish as attempts by the Trumpian right to seize control. In fact Boudin tried, and failed, to make that case to his city’s voters.
Rather, both outcomes reflect legitimate concerns by voters, including those who consider themselves to be left-of-center Democrats, that the quality of life in both cities has deteriorated and that their elected leaders have failed to recognize and confront that fact.
Deterioration is especially stark in San Francisco with rampant drug use that is taking a heavy toll on human life, squalid camps of the homeless dominating city sidewalks and a wave of burglaries and smash-and-grab robberies that goes unpunished.
Writer Nellie Bowles vividly captures the San Francisco crisis and why ordinarily progressive San Franciscans became disgusted in a lengthy article that Atlantic magazine published today.
“They did it because (Boudin) didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality,” Bowles wrote. “It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot — that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.”
Bowles noted that Boudin’s recall was foretold by the recall of San Francisco school board members who were preoccupied with symbolic acts of political correctness, such as changing the names on school buildings while ignoring the effects of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying — really trying — to be good,” she wrote. “But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting — or at least ignoring — devastating results.”
Boudin himself came close to acknowledging why he lost, albeit with a tinge of rationalization, telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “Voters were not given an opportunity to choose between criminal justice reform and something else. They were given an opportunity to voice their frustrations and their outrage and they took that opportunity.”
What about Los Angeles?
It has suffered from the same chronic problems that plague San Francisco and a political leadership that has been equally ineffective in dealing with them. Caruso, a very wealthy shopping center developer, tapped into widespread frustration, particularly about crime, in a deluge of self-financed media ads.
Los Angeles’ notoriously low voter turnout also helped Caruso garner more than 40% of Tuesday’s vote, topping Congresswoman Karen Bass, the candidate of the city’s Democratic leadership, by several points.
However, with neither getting a majority, they are headed for a runoff in the November election, when turnout will be higher. That will be a truer test of whether Angelenos are ready for the change that Republican-turned-Democrat Caruso promises but Bass and her supporters shouldn’t ignore the quality-of-life backlash.
Assembly Speaker Tussle Lingers Until Next Year
CalMatters
A leadership battle in the California Legislature is a guilty pleasure for those who work in and around the Capitol.
A power struggle pits one faction of Democrats against another and, like any family feud, brings out the worst in everyone, rupturing the façade of camaraderie that politicians prefer to present — which is why it’s so much fun to watch.
Robert Rivas, an assemblyman from Salinas, touched off such a clash late last month when he met with Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, claimed that he had support from a majority of Democrats and demanded that Rendon step down.
Rendon refused, leading Rivas, perhaps foolishly, to publicly declare that he had enough votes to become speaker and claimed to be negotiating with Rendon for a transition.
Rendon will be termed out of the Assembly in 2024 and had planned to hand off the speakership sometime next year, in accordance with recent practice. But Rivas didn’t want to wait, so the stage was set for a political duel.
Last week, Democrats met behind closed doors for hours and when they emerged, Rivas and Rendon issued a joint statement that reinstated the façade of camaraderie. Rivas conceded that Rendon would remain in office for the remainder of the legislative session.
But what then?
Even if Rivas has a majority of the Democrats now, it’s uncertain that he will have it after this year’s elections, when at least a dozen new Democrats will win seats. Officially, the new and returning Democrats will elect — or re-elect — a speaker when the new session convenes in December. Rivas clearly would like matters to be settled before then, but Rendon just as clearly is in no hurry.
Underlying the conflict is a burgeoning ideological clash between progressives and moderates playing out in at least a dozen Assembly districts this year. Progressives, the core of Rivas’ support, have chafed at Rendon’s perceived reluctance to advance an ambitious left-wing agenda — single-payer health care, especially.
With Rendon now seemingly secure for at least a few more months, his duel with Rivas will focus even more attention on the progressive/moderate battles in Assembly districts that are opening up because of term limits and the post-census changes in district boundaries.
Left-leaning organizations will use the prospect of a Rivas speakership to drum up support for their candidates in those districts while Rivas’ bid for the speakership will give business interests a new impetus to pour money into moderates’ campaigns.
Were it to come down to a head-to-head contest in December, with Rendon seeking another term as speaker and Rivas attempting to block him, the handful of Republicans in the Assembly could become the decisive factor if neither man can muster 41 Democratic votes.
That’s happened before, most spectacularly in 1980 when two Democrats, Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy and Assemblyman Howard Berman, waged a very bitter battlefor nearly a year — one that ruined friendships and included death threats and clandestine spy operations. Eventually, the McCarthy faction joined forces with Republicans to elect Willie Brown, who became the Assembly’s longest serving speaker.
Simultaneously, but much more quietly, there was a leadership coup in the state Senate. Democrats dumped President Pro Tem James Mills and elevated David Roberti on his promise to protect Democratic seats after Republicans had defeated three Democratic senators.
Eight years later, a group of dissident Democrats, dubbed the “Gang of Five,” unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Republican support for ousting Brown.
The Rendon-Rivas dustup is the closest we’ve come to an all-out power struggle since those long-ago clashes.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/06/democratic-factions-vie-for-power-in-assembly/
Clearing the Air – Climate Change Plan Debated
CalMatters
As California races to prevent the irreversible effects of climate change, some experts are questioning key policies that the state is counting on to meet its ambitious goals and accusing state officials of failing to provide substantial details to back up its claims.
The California Air Resources Board’s proposal, called a scoping plan, outlines policies that would transition the economy away from fossil fuels. The purpose of the plan is to fulfill state mandates to reduce planet-warming emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
In this year’s highly-anticipated climate policy blueprint, some critics say the state agency has not been transparent on how it plans to achieve its goals. The process has left legislators and others at the forefront of the climate discussion confused over the air board staff’s projections.
“The draft scoping plan does California a disservice,” said Danny Cullenward, an economist and vice chair of the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of five experts appointed by the governor and top legislators to assess the effectiveness of the state’s landmark cap and trade program. “It focuses on long-term goals at the expense of near-term action.”
At two recent state committee meetings, environmentalists, academics and climate policy experts who serve on state advisory panels voiced concerns over California’s approach to tackling the climate crisis. They called the plan incomplete, ambiguous and confusing.
In addition, in a letter sent Thursday to the Air Resources Board and Gov. Gavin Newsom, 73 environmental justice groups called the proposed scoping plan “a setback for the state and the world.”
“It fails to accelerate our 2030 and 2045 climate targets, and it fails to increase the pace of California’s actions beyond existing commitments,” the letter says. “We need a plan that transitions us away from the extractive, fossil-fueled energy system at the pace and scale demanded by climate science and environmental justice.”
The Air Resources Board did not send representatives to speak at either of the two meetings — a joint Senate and Assembly committee hearing and the emissions trading advisory committee.
But in a response to questions from CalMatters, air quality officials said the plan is a “guidance document” and that specific emissions reductions would be detailed when individual regulations are drafted.
“It is not a final document, nor intended to be. It is also not a regulation. It is a guidance document and as such leaves room for new information that may become available later,” said air board spokesperson Dave Clegern.
The plan focuses on increasing dependence on renewable energy, such as wind, solar and electric cars, and capturing carbon dioxide emitted by oil refineries and other industries.
The debate pits those who want to mandate an end to fossil fuels against those who want an approach that relies more on market incentives and technology.
Environmentalists have long viewed the use of carbon removal technology and cap and trade as continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. But others side with the oil industry, saying the state won’t be able to reduce carbon emissions fast enough without them. And across the political spectrum, many say the state’s approaches are too flawed to produce the results that the Air Resources Board says they will.
“In place of tangible strategies to reduce emissions, the draft plan aims to achieve far fewer emission reductions than other leading climate jurisdictions in the U.S. are already pursuing,” Cullenward said. “Nothing less than the future of California’s climate policy is at stake.”
The board plans to hold a public hearing on the plan on June 23 and vote in August.
Critics say staff haven’t provided much evidence of how some key components could work, including the state’s reliance on carbon removal and the role of its cap and trade program, which is a greenhouse gas market for industries that allows them to buy and sell credits.
Air board staff used modeling to predict how each sector of the economy will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In their draft plan, they say carbon removal technologies will help capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide at oil refineries and other industries that are difficult to decarbonize, such as cement.
The plan cites studies from Lawrence Livermore, MIT and other institutions about how the technology may work, but adds, “ultimately, the role for mechanical (carbon dioxide removal) will depend on the success of reducing emissions directly at the source.”
Air board officials included in their models that carbon capture technologies were deployed in 2021 and will ramp up quickly by 2030. The plan says about 2 million tons of carbon dioxide were captured in 2021 — even though no facilities exist in California.
But they acknowledged in the plan that this assumption was wrong: Use of the technology in California by 2025 is “unlikely, and those emissions will be emitted into the atmosphere.” They said they would revise their modeling in the final version.
Air board officials say reducing emissions alone won’t address the growing threat of climate change. The path to carbon neutrality cannot be achieved without extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and smokestacks, according to their analysis. In their plan, by 2035, 5% of total emissions would be eliminated through carbon capture technologies, and that drops to 3.5% by 2045.
Carbon capture is the practice of collecting carbon dioxide emitted by smokestacks, transporting it in pipelines and injecting it deep underground for long-term storage so it does not warm the planet. (The practice is different from biological sequestration, where carbon dioxide is removed from the air and stored in natural habitats, such as vegetation, forests, wetlands and soil.)
The Air Resources Board’s staff’s preferred option, known as Scenario 3, projects that technologies will capture nearly 80 million tons of carbon dioxide from polluting facilities per year by 2045. The scenario predicts that carbon-capturing infrastructure will be installed on most oil refineries by 2030 and on all cement, clay, glass and stone facilities by 2045.
A panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change Policies on Tuesday discussed the pros and cons of carbon capture and storage and how it could inform the types of policies lawmakers push for. Much of the hearing centered on the controversy behind the practice and whether it did more harm than good.
The panelists provided vastly different accounts on its effectiveness, frustrating some lawmakers, who said the comments were inconsistent.
“The frustrating thing for me is that we have conflicts on what we’re hearing today, so how do I do the right thing for my constituents or the environment?” said state Sen. Brian Dahle, a Republican from Lassen County who is running for governor. “That’s very challenging for a legislator, sitting here with four panelists not all agreeing as we’re trying to move to the future.”
Some experts at the hearing said carbon capture plants could remove more than 90% of carbon dioxide emissions from smokestacks.
George Peridas is director of carbon management partnerships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally-funded research facility. He said California is well-positioned to launch projects in parts of the state with deep sedimentary rock formations, including the Central Valley, which could serve as prime locations to store carbon dioxide.
“The Central Valley has a world class geology – that means just the right kinds of rocks for safe and permanent storage,” he said. “Carbon capture and storage is well-understood, heavily regulated, available for deployment today and has an overwhelmingly positive track record.”
Globally 27 carbon capture and storage projects are operating so far.
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering, was the only person at a hearing to tell the legislators that the state is overstating the impact of carbon capture and storage, citing the capture rate of existing facilities that have produced much lower results.
He said the net capture rate is much lower because the fuels that are used to operate the equipment offset the emissions it swallows.
For instance, at the Petra Nova coal-fired power plant in Texas, carbon capture and storage equipment was installed in 2016 at a coal-fired plant to capture a portion of emissions from one of eight smokestacks. It eliminated 92% of carbon dioxide from that portion, which amounted to about 33% of total emissions from that single smokestack, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, the natural gas needed to run the technology emitted carbon that offset some of those benefits. The plant had repeated outages and it has been shut down since 2020 for economic reasons.
The Shell Quest carbon capture and storage project in Canada also has been widely scrutinized. The plant captured 5 million tons of carbon dioxide since 2015, but it also emitted 7.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases over the same period — the equivalent carbon footprint of about 1.2 million gas cars, according to a 2022 report from Global Witness, an international watchdog organization. That means just 48% of the plant’s carbon emissions were captured, according to the report.
“It’s nothing close to what we would need to solve a climate problem,” Jacobson said. “Completely useless.”
Sarah Saltzer, managing director of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage and the Stanford Carbon Initiative, said the technology will improve in the coming decades. She said the state should streamline carbon removal projects to advance its carbon-reduction goals.
“We cannot rely on renewables alone as we do not have the capacity,” she said. “We believe that including carbon capture and storage and a wide range of portfolio options for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide provide a way to deal with hard-to-decarbonize sectors.”
In its analysis, air board staff said the facilities could have more benefits as they increasingly become powered by renewables and more companies start to invest in them.
More:
https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/06/california-climate-change-plan-flawed/