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IN THIS ISSUE – “Be Useful. That is Always All I’m Trying to Do”
RECALL
- Recall Campaign Bears Down
- Schwarzenegger Emerges As California’s Elder Statesman & Recall Oracle
POWER & WATER
- Appellate Court Upholds Governor’s Emergency Powers
- Drought Partisans Renew Water War
- Will the A/C Stay On This Summer? Power Grid Managers “Guardedly Optimistic”
- 20% of Electric Vehicle Owners Return to Gas Cars
- Green Tech Drives Lithium Gold Rush in California & US
- Define “Infrastructure”…
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 7 , 2021
Recall Campaign Bears Down
Politico & CalMatters
On the day two Republican rivals unveiled flashy new campaigns— and the media magnet of a real, live bear — Gov. Gavin Newsom demonstrated again that his main strategy is to ignore them.
Newsom joined firefighter allies for his first official anti-recall event, but he wasn’t interested in talking about his opponents. Reporters asked Newsom about John Cox branding him an empty-suit “pretty boy,” or about Caitlyn Jenner’s launch video ahead of her media debut on “Hannity.”
Newsom said he hadn’t seen Jenner’s video — and would rather spend the three minutes elsewhere. Asked about his flurry of fundraising emails hitting Jenner, Newsom pivoted to vaccines.
His general two-step strategy on recall queries: the campaign is a partisan sideshow, and look at how great California is doing. The former entails the governor declining to name specific opponents who would no doubt relish the namecheck and instead assailing the recall campaign’s ideological roots: it’s a costly project of anti-science extremists, Newsom will say, whose initial petition included attacks on protecting immigrants and other planks of California progressive agenda. “That’s what’s really on the ballot,” said the man who will be on the ballot.
That’s the offensive piece.
The defensive tactic: stress as often as possible how California is looking better. We could almost recite by heart the statistics Newsom rattles off about California job creation, its unexpectedly brimming budget, a proliferation of IPOs and other measures of recovery. He emphasizes often how California’s test positivity rate has dramatically shrunk and powered that broader reopening — a point punctuated on Tuesday by San Francisco and Los Angeles moving to the least stringent tier. If all goes well, the hierarchy of restrictions will evaporate in mid-June.
We did see Newsom take a bite of humble pie. “I understand why people would sign” recall petitions in a year fraught with anxiety and stress and fear, Newsom said, and his task is now to “earn that trust back.” Clearly, the governor would rather focus on that task of making his case directly to voters — with an occasional jab at the recall’s origins — and let his Republican rivals busy themselves throwing elbows. Why descend into the mud when you’re up in the polls?
Lest there be any doubt, Newsom also made clear that he does not expect to block the election by convincing voters to erase their signatures. The governor said he doesn’t want to discourage anyone from revoking their support, but he said that’s too much of a longshot to alter his plan of treating the vote as a foregone conclusion.
Schwarzenegger Emerges As California’s Elder Statesman & Recall Oracle
NY Times
Arnold Schwarzenegger settled into a big leather rocker recliner on the back patio of his mansion. His tiny rescue dog, Cherry, scampered at his feet, wearing a butterfly bow.
On his lawn, his miniature donkey, Lulu, was making a break for the hedges. His miniature horse, Whiskey, loitered near a marble bust of Abraham Lincoln. His bar held a dollhouse-size replica of the tank he had driven during a stint in the Austrian Army. A biofuel Hummer was in the driveway. A nine-foot scale model of the Statue of Liberty stood in the foyer. Things were either very large or very small.
Here is where Mr. Schwarzenegger has been holding court in person ever since he went to Dodger Stadium in January to get vaccinated, an event that has been viewed 20 million times on social media. People clamor to get penciled in for a back-patio visit — not just the usual show business people, but also political consultants, talk show hosts and people trying to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Up Mandeville Canyon they come, through the wrought iron gates, to talk Newsom with Schwarzenegger. They usually end up talking Schwarzenegger with Schwarzenegger.
“Why did I get elected?” asked Mr. Schwarzenegger, 73, who rode a wave of populist angst in 2003 to become California’s 38th governor, winning the recall election that toppled Gray Davis. “Why did Trump get elected? Because people were dissatisfied with the politicians. They hate the politicians. They can’t trust them. This is the overriding story.”
It has been 10 years since Mr. Schwarzenegger left Sacramento. An action-movie star who was elected — and re-elected — on a promise to rescue California from Democratic excess, he ended up with a 27 percent approval rating and a personal scandal that ended his marriage.
But California is the land of second — and third and fourth — chances. Mr. Schwarzenegger did not so much repair his image as allow California to recalibrate its view of his contributions. He is a more popular political figure today than when he was elected, a feat for a Republican in a state so blue.
The reasons are as sweeping and small as the reasons California elected him in the first place. Some of it has to do with the pandemic. Some has to do with former President Donald J. Trump. His embrace of bipartisanship has a role, as does the state’s fixation with recalls, not to mention Whiskey and Lulu, who stole the show in a series of homemade public service videos he posted during the pandemic. But much of it is Arnold — the only person in the state’s 170-year history to become governor in a recall — just being Arnold.
“As a state, we are drawn to personalities who, like him, speak with clarity about what they stand for and who they are — and have a sense of humor about it,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “But seeing him out there this year reminds me that Californians also have an ability to forgive and forget.”
Mr. Schwarzenegger persuaded past and present governors to join him in an ad touting face masks, and drafted his pets, children, staff and girlfriend, a West Los Angeles physical therapist, into helping produce public service announcements on social distancingand handwashing. He raised millions of dollars last year for protective health gear, anteing up $1 million of his own. During the election, he spent $2.5 million in eight states to keep polling places open.
In January, when Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud stirred a mob to storm Congress, Mr. Schwarzenegger posted a speechcomparing their actions to the 1938 Kristallnacht sacking of Jewish neighborhoods by European Nazis. The seven-minute video has drawn nearly 78 million views on his social media alone.
There is his Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the University of Southern California. And his new animated children’s series. And his forthcoming spy show on Netflix. And the environmental summit he is hosting this summer in Austria.
None of this, he said, is about ever running again for public office. “Elderly statesman” is how he describes his role now.
“When you leave office, you realize — well, I realized — that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said. “Just because I’m finished with this job that is only kind of a temporary job, does it mean that I have interest only in a temporary way? No! It’s like sports, with the follow-through.”
He leaped from the recliner and demonstrated a golf swing and a tennis volley. Cherry hopped to her tiny paws.
In a three-hour interview at his home days before the Newsom recall effort officially qualified for the ballot, Mr. Schwarzenegger was serious and funny, brutally honest and wily. His black zip-up jacket had a governor’s seal patch. It was morning, but he had already exercised and visited with his daughters, who had come by to play tennis. A fire crackled in an outdoor fireplace the size of a real Austrian tank.
As California’s Republican-led recall campaign has advanced toward a probable November ballot, about a half-dozen prospective challengers to Mr. Newsom, including some Democrats, have come to Mr. Schwarzenegger confidentially for counsel, according to his advisers. He sees them in person, or on FaceTime or Zoom — “I want to see people’s faces,” he said, brandishing his iPad.
He offers advice on the political dynamics, but he has not endorsed Mr. Newsom or any rival or taken a position for or against a recall.
“I have had everyone that is interested in it get in touch with me about it, and talk to me about it, and get advice about it,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “I tell people what the landscape is and what my experience was. I don’t encourage anyone — or discourage anyone.”
In hyperpartisan times, such neutrality is an exception. Though he is somewhat estranged from the Republican Party and has called Mr. Trump “the worst president ever,” he has championed moderation and looking beyond party. The Democrat he defeated to become governor, Mr. Davis, he now considers a friend.
“He speaks for a certain kind of California Republican,” D.J. Waldie, a Southern California author and cultural historian, said. “It may be a rare and a dying breed and it certainly doesn’t reflect the party leaders, but it does reflect something about the character of ordinary Republicans in California. I sometimes wonder if that gravelly Austrian accent might be the voice of Republicanism Without Trump.”
A global star with a wife from the Kennedy family, Mr. Schwarzenegger came to Sacramento at the expense of Mr. Davis,a liberal Democrat unlucky enough to have been in charge during the dotcom bust, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and blackouts.
He had not planned to run, even though Republican leaders had begged and Mr. Davis had stood him up at a meeting where he had hoped to lobby for his signature cause, after-school programs.
He said his now ex-wife, Maria Shriver — whose public accounts have echoed his recollection — was loath to drag their family into the political spotlight. He was undecided until Jay Leno ushered him onto his couch on the “Tonight Show” and a cheer erupted. “I let my mouth speak for itself,” he said, still laughing at his delight when it said he was running for governor. When he got home, he said, Ms. Shriver was in tears.
A 55.4 percent majority of voters elected to recall Mr. Davis, and a 48.6 plurality chose Mr. Schwarzenegger as his replacement. As governor, he promised to overhaul the way state budgeting decisions were made. His finance proposals failed but he did win state election reforms that, over time, have made it harder for extremists in both parties to gridlock decision-making.
An impartial commission has replaced partisan gerrymandering in determining the boundaries of legislative districts, making it harder for the parties to game them. And California’s “top two” primary system has put more moderates of both parties on the ballot.
But passing those reforms consumed almost all of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s political capital by the time he left office. Looking back, he believes that the recall was chiefly an expression of much larger societal forces.
“In 2003 we were just getting out of a world recession — this was a worldwide phenomenon — and right alongside it was then the state problems,” he said.
He felt bipartisan compassion in November when Mr. Newsom got caught at a Michelin-starred restaurant after telling pandemic-weary Californians not to gather.
“Oy vey!” he said, laughing. “It’s — you know, you can see how it can happen. But you crunch and you say this is not the time to make this the issue. With the recall, it just put so much fuel on the fire.”
Scandal corroded Mr. Schwarzenegger’s own image when, months after he left office, news broke that he had fathered a child with a household employee in the mid-1990s. It was the last straw for Ms. Shriver, who had defended him in 2003 after several women said he had groped them.
“The end of the marriage was my screw-up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I couldn’t complain about it — I did it. I was the governor and, of course, I crashed down big time.”
His children are all adults now, and he is a grandfather. That back patio recliner helped him recuperate from heart surgery in 2018. A YouGov.com poll this year found him to be the nation’s most popular Republican with a 51 percent approval rating.
“My father always said, ‘Be useful,’” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “That is always all I’m trying to do.”
Appellate Court Upholds Governor’s Emergency Powers
CalMatters
And Newsom scored a big win against two Republican lawmakers this week, when a California appeals court ruled the governor has the legal right to change, rescind or make state laws — powers typically reserved for the Legislature — during an emergency. The unanimous decision overturns a ruling from November, when a superior court judge sided with Assemblymembers James Gallagher and Kevin Kiley in finding that Newsom didn’t have the authority to issue executive orders that amend or make new state laws. Newsom has issued more than 50 executive orders affecting more than 400 laws amid the pandemic, according to a database maintained by Kiley. And although the executive orders are nullified once Newsom or the Legislature declares an end to the state of emergency, the governor has asked lawmakers to extend his emergency spending authority through June 2022.
Gallagher and Kiley: “We have said from the beginning that this case will be decided by the California Supreme Court. The issue now squarely presented for the high court is whether the separation of powers still exists in California. We are confident it will uphold this bedrock principle of constitutional government.”
Drought Partisans Renew Water War
Sacramento Bee
When a bipartisan group of state legislators held a press conference last week to demand that Gov. Gavin Newsom declare a statewide drought emergency, they assembled at a withered farm field east of Fresno, complete with piles of dead trees in the background.
The choice was no accident. With California already experiencing drought-like conditions, Central Valley farmers and their elected representatives are the ones putting the most political pressure on Newsom to make it official.
“We need every tool in the tool box we can get,” said Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. “We are staring down the barrel of some very severe drought conditions right now.”
Experts say a statewide drought declaration would help drive home the need for conservation to Californians. But its impact would go well beyond symbolism and communications; it could bring significant consequences for the regulatory structure governing California’s complicated water-delivery system.
Many farmers believe an emergency order could loosen environmental regulations and free up water supplies for them. Environmental groups fear the very same thing – that more of California’s dwindling water supply could be directed to farming at the expense of fish and wildlife.
On Wednesday, in a further sign of the deteriorating conditions, the federal project placed a hold on deliveries to many farmers in the Sacramento Valley as well — a move that could devastate Northern California’s $800 million-a-year rice crop.
In the last drought, decisions by state officials to relax environmental standards “led to a vast shifting of water to agriculture, while wildlife, including the salmon our industry depends on, were left to die,” said John McManus of the Golden State Salmon Association, which represents commercial fishermen.
The debate over a drought declaration underscores a chronic truism about California water – there’s rarely enough of it to make everyone happy, creating an almost endless tug-of-war that usually pits farms against fish.
Farmers and environmentalists use the courts, the regulatory agencies and the Legislature to fight over how much water should flow naturally through the rivers – and how much should be pulled out of the rivers to nurture the state’s $50 billion-a-year agricultural industry.
When supplies get really tight, the rivalry intensifies, and two straight ultra-dry winters have left California leaders with difficult choices on how to balance the competing demands.
Newsom has so far resisted declaring a statewide emergency, saying conditions are tough but don’t yet warrant an official drought finding. In the last drought, urban Californians were forced to scale back their outdoor water usage, and some political pundits believe the Democratic governor is reluctant to announce bad news with a recall election heading to the ballot.
Newsom did issue a regional drought declaration last month for Sonoma and Mendocino counties, reflecting dire conditions on the Russian River. But that order only ramped up the criticism in many rural precincts; Republican lawmakers grumbled that Newsom was acting to help the affluent wine country while ignoring the plight of farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, a GOP stronghold.
“The Central Valley can’t afford to be overlooked,” state Sen. Andreas Borgeas, R-Fresno, said on Twitter.
Anxieties over drought crystallized in late March, when the managers of the State Water Project and the federal government’s Central Valley Project – the twin networks of reservoirs and canals that deliver billions of gallons of supplies to farms and cities – issued stunning updates on California’s water conditions.
The state project, which mainly serves urban Southern California, the Bay Area and parts of rural San Joaquin Valley, cut its expected 2021 allocations in half, to just 5% of what its customers had contracted. The federal project said most of its customers, including farm irrigation districts in the San Joaquin Valley, might not get any deliveries at all.
By that time, the federal Department of Agriculture had already declared a drought disaster in California, making farmers eligible for financial assistance. The calls for Newsom to declare a statewide emergency gathered momentum, with both Democrats and Republicans in rural areas petitioning the governor.
Many leaders in California agriculture acknowledge that a statewide drought declaration by Newsom won’t make farmers’ troubles disappear overnight. There simply isn’t enough water in the system to make an enormous difference in supply.
“The entire system is so dry and there aren’t the full reservoirs,” said Mike Wade, director of an advocacy group called the California Farm Water Coalition. “I don’t think anybody has any expectation that there’s a hidden supply of water that’s going to show up if there’s a drought declaration.”
But farmers in the Valley do think Newsom could ease their plight.
At the very least, Jacobsen said Newsom could order a streamlining of the regulations that can often slow down the approvals of water transfers – private deals made between farmers and other water users, usually for cash.
Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown issued a similar order in 2013, two years before he issued a statewide drought declaration. The declaration was rescinded in 2017 after the wettest winter on record.
“What we’re asking for is very reasonable,” Jacobsen said. “At least to have something to be able to get through this year, it makes a difference.”
The executive order Newsom issued last month, declaring a drought emergency on the Russian River, acknowledged that water shortages exist elsewhere.
In particular, he mentioned the Klamath region of far Northern California, where farmers have been told by the federal government’s Klamath Project that they could get as little as 8% of what they need to grow their potatoes, onions and other crops.
The federal government says this is the worst year on record for the amount of water flowing into Upper Klamath Lake, which serves as the project’s primary reservoir.
If history is any guide, it could make for a contentious summer in the Klamath area, which straddles the Oregon border and has witnessed extraordinary demonstrations by farmers over water allocations.
In 2001, thousands of farmers staged a symbolic “bucket brigade” to protest water shortages; some of them used blowtorches to open up locked canal gates. The protests caught the attention of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who ordered water delivered to the growers the next year – a move that was blamed for causing the deaths of more than 60,000 salmon.
Now farmers again are complaining that they’re being shut out, but they say Newsom’s drought declaration would have little practical effect on that irrigation network this year, given that it’s managed entirely by the federal government.
Still, it has symbolic significance for the farmers, said Paul Simmons, the executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, and “would at minimum signal and ensure that local governments, both states and the federal government recognize there is a problem and they are all on the same page to bring to bear any resources that may be available.”
Indian tribes, fishing organizations and environmentalists, however, fear a drought declaration could be used to harm the ecosystem. They’re insisting that water must stay in the lake – and the Klamath River – to protect endangered salmon and suckers.
“To use the emergency powers just to waive the environmental laws in Siskiyou County, if that’s the result of a drought declaration, thanks but no thanks,” said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Karuk Tribe, which depends heavily on harvesting fish from the river. “If you’re going to issue a drought declaration and actually enforce environmental laws, that’s what we need and what we want.”
A statewide drought emergency declaration wouldn’t automatically translate into more water for farmers.
Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that a declaration would make it easier for state officials to curtail water rights – that is, restrict Californians from pulling water out of the rivers. In many cases, it’s farmers who would have the most to lose from these curtailment orders, Obegi said.
A drought emergency could “cut both ways,” he said.
Still, environmentalists believe they have a lot more to fear from a drought emergency order.
Glen Spain, legal counsel with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said he believes farmers would try to leverage a drought emergency to persuade the State Water Resources Control Board to ease many of the environmental regulations designed to protect California water quality. The idea would be to free up supplies for agriculture “at the expense of the fish and fishing dependent industries,” Spain said.
In the last drought, the state board agreed – at the urging of the operators of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project – to ease water quality standards in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the estuary that serves as the hub of the two projects’ delivery systems.
Easing those standards meant the projects could pump more water to their farm and municipal customers. It also reduced the amount of water running its natural course through the Delta and out to the ocean, hurting the Delta’s struggling fish populations, Obegi said.
At the same time, Obegi said, the system’s health was compromised by overly generous releases of water from Shasta Lake, the largest reservoir in California, to satisfy demands from farm irrigators along the Sacramento River.
Obegi said these water releases had the effect of raising water temperatures later in the summer in the river, which is home to the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon.
Officials said only 5% of the juvenile salmon survived long enough to make it to the ocean in 2014. The next year, despite efforts to reduce water temperatures, only 3% of the juvenile salmon survived, bringing the species perilously close to extinction.
“We’re still struggling to rebuild those runs, those populations,” McManus said.
Environmentalists say conditions along the state’s rivers are worsening by the day. The state board last week scolded managers of the state and federal water projects for violating standards on water flows in the Delta – in effect, pumping more water to their customers than they were allowed.
Mary Lee Knecht, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the federal project, said in an email that the agency “continues to coordinate with our partner agencies, including DWR, fishery agencies, and the State Board, on the best path forward.”
Ted Craddock, deputy director with the Department of Water Resources, which runs the State Water Project, said in an emailed statement that “near-record low levels of runoff” are hurting reservoir levels but said the state is releasing water from Lake Oroville in order to meet water-quality standards in the Delta.
“In coordination with the U.S Bureau of Reclamation and the State Water Resources Control Board we are looking at all options to balance water deliveries, environmental requirements, and the health and safety of Californians that rely on the State Water Project,” he said.
Obegi said the two projects’ recent violations are a bad sign of what might come this summer. He said conditions are ripe for another massive salmon die-off, comparable to what happened in 2014 and 2015.
“We’re seeing a virtual repeat of that whole scenario this year,” he said.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article251167759.html#storylink=cpy
Will the A/C Stay On This Summer? Power Grid Managers “Guardedly Optimistic”
Sacramento Bee
The managers of California’s electricity system can’t promise they’ll be able to keep the lights on this summer.
Still reeling from two nights of rolling blackouts during last August’s heatwave, state officials say they’ve fortified the power grid against more outages but acknowledge that another extraordinary surge in temperatures could spell trouble.
“We have some guarded optimism that we’re going to get through it,” said Elliot Mainzer, president of the California Independent System Operator, which runs the electric grid.
In a conference call with reporters late Tuesday, Mainzer and other leaders of California’s power network said PG&E Corp. and the state’s other major utilities have lined up more power since last summer. By August, California should have roughly 3,500 additional megawatts of capacity compared to last year, enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million homes.
That should be enough to steer California through a major heatwave — even the 110-plus temperatures recorded last August — as long as the scorching weather is confined to California. But if it’s another “West-wide heat event” that smothers multiple states, as was the case last August, then California might not be able to import enough power to get through the crunch, Mainzer said.
“If it’s really hot here and it’s really hot everywhere … things will really tighten up,” he said.
The summer forecast reflects the difficult balancing act California faces as it transitions to a carbon-free power grid by 2045 — the target set by the Legislature.
The state gets more than one-third of its power from solar and other renewable resources, and the percentage rises considerably in spring and summer. For a few seconds in late April, the grid was running on 95% renewable energy, a record.
Yet the movement to an all-green grid is creating headaches. Last August’s blackouts occurred in part because of the rapid decline in solar production during the early evening hours, when the sun went down but it was still hot.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has embraced California’s role as a leader in the fight against climate change, has vowed not to retreat from the move to an all-renewable grid even as he demands greater reliability in the state’s electricity supply.
Yet Marybel Batjer, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said the effort to keep the lights on this summer has meant some compromises.
While nearly 2,000 megawatts of the newly-added energy is in the form of industrial-scale batteries — which can store excess solar power for nighttime use — some of the additions are electrons generated the old-fashioned way, by natural gas-fired plants that have signed contracts with the big utilities.
“We’re not pleased that we still have to use gas, fossil fuels,” Batjer said.
But there’s little alternative to temporarily increasing the use of gas-fired power, she said. Electric supplies will be tight for the next several years, especially with PG&E scheduled to retire its Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo in 2025. The plant has 2,200 megawatts of capacity.
“We have some pressure on us for the next three or four years,” Batjer said.
Last summer’s rolling blackouts were the first in California since the 2001 energy crisis, when companies like Enron were able to exploit flaws in the state’s market structure and deliberately withhold power in order to jack up prices.
State officials said they were embarrassed by last year’s blackouts but said they were small in scope compared to the disaster that struck Texas in February, when millions were blacked out for days. The California blackouts struck several hundred thousand households for a total of about three hours.
The Texas outages “were about 500 times worse,” said David Hochschild, chairman of the California Energy Commission.
https://www.sacbee.com/article251179984.html#storylink=cpy
20% of Electric Vehicle Owners Return to Gas Cars
Business Insider
- Roughly 20% of electric vehicle owners in California replaced their cars with gas ones, a new study shows.
- The main reason drivers made the switch was the inconvenience of charging.
- The findings suggest new challenges facing the growth of the nascent electric vehicle market.
In roughly three minutes, you can fill the gas tank of a Ford Mustang and have enough range to go about 300 miles with its V8 engine.
But for the electric Mustang Mach-E, an hour plugged into a household outlet gave Bloomberg automotive analyst Kevin Tynan just three miles of range.
“Overnight, we’re looking at 36 miles of range,” he told Insider. “Before I gave it back to Ford, because I wanted to give it back full, I drove it to the office and plugged in at the charger we have there.”
Standard home outlets generally put out about 120 volts of power at what electric vehicle aficionados call “Level 1” charging, while the high-powered specialty connections offer 240 volts of power and are known as “Level 2.” By comparison, Tesla’s “Superchargers,” which can fully charge its cars in a little over an hour, offer 480 volts of direct current.
That difference is night and day, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Energy by University of California Davis researchers Scott Hardman and Gil Tal that surveyed Californians who purchased an electric vehicle between 2012 and 2018.
Roughly one in five plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners switched back to owning gas-powered cars, in large part because charging the batteries was a pain in the… trunk, the researchers found.
Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.
“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible,” said Tynan, who has tested a wide range of makes and models of PEVs over the years for his research.
Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Volt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty – something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV.
Public charging stations may look like the electric version of the gas station, but nearly two-thirds of PEV drivers in the survey said they didn’t use them. Exactly why they didn’t use the public stalls was not specified.
EVs have come a long way in recent years in terms of range, safety, comfort, and tech features, but Hardman and Tal note that very little has changed in terms of how they are recharged.
The researchers warned that this trend could make it harder to achieve electric vehicle sales targets in California and other countries, and the growth of the market overall.
“It should not be assumed that once a consumer purchases a PEV they will continue owning one,” Hardman and Tal wrote. “What is clear is that this could slow PEV market growth and make reaching 100% PEV sales more difficult.”
Fixing the charging issue will require more participation from automakers, who have yet to find a profitable way of producing electric cars. Even Tesla, easily the leader in the category, was only able to eke out a first-quarter profit by selling energy credits and bitcoin.
“For all those legacy automakers, that profit and loss piece does matter. And that’s why you’re getting this half effort on electrification,” Tynan said.
https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-car-owners-switching-gas-charging-a-hassle-study-2021-4
Green Tech Drives Lithium Gold Rush
NY Times
Atop a long-dormant volcano in northern Nevada, workers are preparing to start blasting and digging out a giant pit that will serve as the first new large-scale lithium mine in the United States in more than a decade — a new domestic supply of an essential ingredient in electric car batteries and renewable energy.
The mine, constructed on leased federal lands, could help address the near total reliance by the United States on foreign sources of lithium.
But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.
“Blowing up a mountain isn’t green, no matter how much marketing spin people put on it,” said Max Wilbert, who has been living in a tent on the proposed mine site while two lawsuits seeking to block the project wend their way through federal courts.
At the Salton Sea, investors plan to use specially coated beads to extract lithium salt from the hot liquid pumped up from an aquifer more than 4,000 feet below the surface. The self-contained systems will be connected to geothermal power plants generating emission-free electricity. And in the process, they hope to generate the revenue needed to restore the lake, which has been fouled by toxic runoff from area farms for decades.
The fight over the Nevada mine is emblematic of a fundamental tension surfacing around the world: Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.
In addition to Nevada, businesses have proposed lithium production sites in California, Oregon, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina.
But traditional mining is one of the dirtiest businesses out there. That reality is not lost on automakers and renewable-energy businesses.
“Our new clean-energy demands could be creating greater harm, even though its intention is to do good,” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director for the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a group that vets mines for companies like BMW and Ford Motor. “We can’t allow that to happen.”
This friction helps explain why a contest of sorts has emerged in recent months across the United States about how best to extract and produce the large amounts of lithium in ways that are much less destructive than how mining has been done for decades.
Just in the first three months of 2021, U.S. lithium miners like those in Nevada raised nearly $3.5 billion from Wall Street — seven times the amount raised in the prior 36 months, according to data assembled by Bloomberg, and a hint of the frenzy underway.
Some of those investors are backing alternatives including a plan to extract lithium from briny water beneath California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea, about 600 miles south of the Lithium Americas site.
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Politico
President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care.
Republican elected officials, on the other hand, are fiercely opposed to a broad definition of the old term. Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” (Mitch McConnell) for massive tax hikes and expanded federal authority. It’s a “Socialist agenda” (Steve Scalise)—a “kitchen sink of wasteful progressive demands.” It will set the nation on a “road to hell” (Rachel Campos-Duffy of Fox News).
If all of this sounds a bit histrionic for a simple debate about replacing water pipes, we’ve been here before. Between the 1820s and 1850s Americans hotly debated the merits of public investment in roads, bridges, canals, riverways and, eventually, railroads. At issue was more than whether to tax and spend or the limits of federal authority. These advancements in transportation effected the collapse of physical space between different regions of the country, drawing ordinary people into new market relationships with one another.
America’s transition from a nation of dispersed communities and local economies to a national market generated exciting opportunities. It also created new winners and losers and fundamentally altered the people’s relationships to their neighbors, families and government. When they argued about whether to dredge a river or build a canal, Americans of the antebellum period were really arguing about what kind of country they wanted to live in. And that’s exactly what politicians are still fighting about today.
Not unlike the antebellum period, today’s debate over infrastructure—who should fund it, what it properly encompasses, whether it is even worthy of investment—reflects more than just a disagreement over roads and bridges. It’s a debate over the scope of government and the future of the country.
Conservatives seem to accept that “roads and bridges” are appropriate areas of investment. Some are willing to go so far as broadband or electrical grid improvements. But advances in electrical cars and wind power threaten the already dying extractive industries at the heart of many small communities where conservatism holds sway. More ominously, the idea that the federal state might broaden the concept of infrastructure to include direct payments to families or support for home health care violates many long-cherished conservative ideals (and myths) about the self-sufficiency of families and communities.
Like Henry Clay’s Whig Party, many Biden Democrats believe that strengthening the country’s physical and human infrastructure will underwrite future economic growth. It’s a bold and corrective step to counter decades of erosion in what the postwar middle class once took for granted (good highways and schools, private pensions and health care, stable retirement systems).
The debate over Biden’s infrastructure plan is probably going to last for months. Maybe longer. But as was the case almost 200 years ago, the real fight isn’t about what infrastructure means, or what the federal government’s role should be in building bridges. It’s about where those bridges actually lead.
Your public policy seminar for the week:
Like Henry Clay’s Whig Party, many Biden Democrats believe that strengthening the country’s physical and human infrastructure will underwrite future economic growth. It’s a bold and corrective step to counter decades of erosion in what the postwar middle class once took for granted (good highways and schools, private pensions and health care, stable retirement systems).
The debate over Biden’s infrastructure plan is probably going to last for months. Maybe longer. But as was the case almost 200 years ago, the real fight isn’t about what infrastructure means, or what the federal government’s role should be in building bridges. It’s about where those bridges actually lead.