Cap-and-Trade

The Senate released a spending plan for the unallocated portion of cap-and-trade revenues today, in the form of Assembly Bill 1613. The plan, say Senate leaders and advocates, focuses on environmental equity while supporting projects that will reduce greenhouse gases.

California's Global Warming Solutions Act, passed in 2006, opened the door for cap and trade, which among other things collects revenue to be invested in reducing emissions. The bill, A.B. 32, also created an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee to help the state spend those revenues equitably.

At its meeting a few weeks ago, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) agreed to include bike-share in its Car Sharing and Mobility Options pilot program. That means that areas that are figuring out how to get bike-share into low income areas now have a new funding option.

In "With cap and trade in doubt, key questions go unanswered," a recent article in Cal Matters, writer Julie Cart described “a scathing bipartisan scolding” by state lawmakers of the California Air Resources Board “over a lack of transparency” with the cap-and-trade program.

A few days after the largest oil lobbyist in the state told a legislative hearing that cap and trade is “the most cost-effective way to produce greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” the oil industry is trying out a new way to attack the state program.

California budget negotiations have moved into high gear with the naming of Senate and Assembly members to the bicameral budget conference committee. Leaders of the two bodies named five members each—up from three in previous years—and the conference committee held its first hearing this morning. The committee's job is to find agreement among the three competing state budget proposals before June 15, when it must submit a final version to both houses to be voted on. The final budget agreement must be signed by the governor by the end of the month.

In a wide-ranging conversation at the TransForm/CalBike Equity Summit, Malcolm Dougherty kept right on saying things that advocates are not used to hearing from the director of Caltrans. He reiterated Caltrans' commitment to its goals of  tripling biking trips and doubling the number of walking trips in the state. He said that California is investing more in transit than it ever has before, and he even said there are freeways in the state “that may not be serving their original purpose” and maybe should be removed, using the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco as an example of the improvements that could bring.

The major lobby group for the California oil industry has launched a new, and particularly dimwitted, effort to denigrate California's climate change policies. Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy, or CARE, one of the Western States Petroleum Association's front groups (as reported in Streetsblog several years ago), started a new website that purports to show how the state is wasting its money on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.