Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 29, 2010 | 3:02 PM | By

Storms Offer Big Boost to Sierra Snowpack

For a more expansive analysis of California’s current water picture, and an interactive map of current reservoir conditions, see Dan Brekke’s drought update, posted earlier this week.

State water officials expressed “cautious optimism” after the season’s second survey of the Sierra snowpack.

After a series of Pacific storms dumped several feet of fresh snow on the mountains, today’s (officially the “February”) survey reveals that the snow’s average water content is 115 percent of “normal” for this date (compared to 61% of normal at this time last year).

Water managers say even so, there’s more catching up to do and they still can’t rule out a fourth consecutive year of relatively dry conditions. Nor have they re-evaluated earlier tight allocations planned for agricultural water this year. With a lot of the recent precipitation still locked up in the state’s “frozen reservoir,” Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville are both still hovering around half of their normal levels for this date.

According to today’s release from the Dept. of Water Resources:

“DWR’s early allocation estimate was that the agency would only be able to deliver 5 percent of requested SWP (State Water Project) water this year, reflecting low storage levels, ongoing drought conditions, and environmental restrictions on water deliveries to protect fish species.  The agency will recalculate the allocation after current snow survey results and other conditions are evaluated.”

By the way, if you’ve never had the chance to see how the “manual” component of the monthly snow surveys are done, take about four minutes and watch this video from 2008, when I joined surveyor Frank Gehrke at the Tamarack Flat survey site, off of Highway 50. This is not the site you usually see on the local news. That’s Phillips Station, chosen for media photo ops because it’s right off the highway. Getting to this site takes a little more doing, as you’ll see.

FILED UNDER: Water, Alpine, sierra, snow survey, snowpack, Water
January 27, 2010 | 3:25 PM | By

EPA’s New Regional Chief: Act Locally

New EPA regional chief Jared Blumenfeld. Photo: EPA

New EPA regional chief Jared Blumenfeld. Photo: EPA

Yesterday I spoke with Jared Blumenfeld, the former head of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment–aka the guy who brought mandatory recycling to San Francisco and banished the phrase “Paper or plastic?” from the city’s supermarkets–by banning the plastic.

Blumenfeld now occupies a vast corner office in the EPA’s Region 9 headquarters, overseeing a territory that includes four Western states and 20 of the country’s largest cities. Born 40 years ago, just as Region 9 came into being, this week he was briefing reporters on his plans to “revolutionize” the region with a tighter focus on environmental justice, enforcement, and making small businesses more efficient.

What do these things have in common? For one thing, they’re all pretty local: specific communities with specific complaints and needs (a profile, incidentally, that fits Blumenfeld’s first initiative to a “T”).

So what about more sweeping changes on, say, climate? You could argue that it’s not the job of a regional head to get mixed up in Beltway politics. But given all the recent drama in Washington around cap and trade, maybe Blumenfeld’s local focus is intentional.

How, I asked him, has the mood in Washington affected his ambitions for EPA Region 9?

“I was looking at a recent poll that showed how many fewer people understand climate change last year than this year,” he replied. “I think the environmental movement has gotten away from the people. We’ve become overly specialized, jargony, focused on large problems no one person can solve.”

Having made San Francisco a considerably “greener” place, maybe Blumenfeld’s first task is to export small initiatives that–for the moment at least–make environmental problems feel local and solveable.

Amy Standen is the lead radio reporter for Quest, KQED’s multimedia science initiative.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, environmental justice, EPA, Policy
January 25, 2010 | 10:44 AM | By

California Storms: A Dent in the Drought

Spillway at Alpine Lake on Mt. Tamalpais. File photo: Marin Municipal Water District

Spillway at Alpine Lake on Mt. Tamalpais. File photo: Marin Municipal Water District

A version of this post also appears on Dan Brekke’s personal blog, Infospigot. Also see our updated map of reservoir conditions at the end of this post.

By Dan Brekke

Is California’s drought over? OK, let’s take a step back. Yes, I realize one could debate whether the last three years in California actually constitute a drought. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I think everyone can agree that we’ve had lower-than-average precipitation for the past three years.

The only reason to ask the question is that, after the first half of the wet season delivered only spotty rain, we’ve had a pretty solid week of downpours. Water is sluicing into our reservoirs, and the hills are greening up. Some counties, like Marin, have water tumbling down the spillways. All of that is a sign of what we think winter should be here.

My favorite water statistic from last week: when the storms were at their heaviest around Lake Shasta, California’s biggest reservoir, water was flowing into the lake at about 500,000 gallons per second. That’s 1.5 acre feet, or about enough for two-to-three “average” households for a year, every second.*

Amazing numbers like that aside, the people who get paid to think about whether the drought is over say “not yet.” Last week, Quest managing editor Paul Rogers wrote a good summary of the situation, for The San Jose Mercury News.

Rogers’ story does contain one bit of quirky California thinking about rain and water, though. He quotes a well established local meteorologist, Jan Null, about where we stand in terms of normal rainfall, saying: “This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

Of course, Null recognizes better than most that the amount of rain we get and when we get it is out of anyone’s control. But once you understand the importance of water in California, once you get how crucial the winter rains are, there’s a score-keeping aspect to weather-watching here. It becomes second nature to study the rain gauge and the seasonal precipitation table as an index of performance, a reflection on whether a great collective goal is being attained. Lots of rain means we’re doing well (and that we can put the complexities of water supply out of our minds). A dry spell means we’re failing (and the prospect of hell to pay, or at least the strong possibility of stringent conservation measures).

But in reality, there’s no performance going on. The rain is the rain, and the climate is the climate. California’s rainfall is famously variable. Dry spells can be counted on and the current run of dry years is the third we’ve had since I arrived in Berkeley in the 1970s.

My first California winter, 1976-’77, was bone-dry and was in fact the second year of the driest two-year period ever recorded here. A decade later, from roughly 1986 through 1992, we had another run of dry years. And if our winter rains were to stop now, we’d be in the fourth year of drier-than-normal years. In between these periods we’ve had average years and very wet years and years that didn’t quite hit the average. That might not be too different from anywhere else. The reason it’s a bigger deal here than it might be in, say, Wisconsin, is that we have a six-month dry season. We need to store water to get through that. We have 37 million people and millions and millions acres of farmland that need water, whether it’s falling from the sky or not. Thus the need to believe we can wish the rain to keep going during the wet season and the tendency to feel disappointment when the winter turns into a string of dry, sunny days.

*500,000 gallons per second. Here’s the arithmetic: California Department of Water Resources figures show that in the hour between noon and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19, net inflow into the lake was 66,288 cubic feet per second. That’s the highest inflow figure for any single hour that week. One cubic foot equals 7.48 gallons. 66,288*7.48 = 495,834.24 gallons. One acre-foot = 325,851 gallons. And 495,834.24/325,851 = 1.52 acre-feet. Per second. For the entire 24 hours of the 19th, Lake Shasta’s inflow averaged just over 1 acre-foot a second.


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

FILED UNDER: Water, Alpine, reservoirs, storms, Water, weather
January 21, 2010 | 1:52 PM | By

Santer: “Loss of Innocence” for Climate Scientists

The Dana Glacier, outside Yosemite, CA. Photo: Gretchen Weber

The Dana Glacier, outside Yosemite, CA, September 2008. Photo: Gretchen Weber

Yet another climate controversy has revived what have become increasingly common attacks on scientists’ credibility.  The latest flap arose when  the IPCC admitted on Wednesday, that its 2007 prediction that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 was unfounded.

Attacks on the integrity of scientists have brought about a “loss of innocence” in the climate science field, said Ben Santer, a Research Scientist for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Santer lamented that “Fourteen or fifteen years ago, it was possible to do science and not be too worried about being the subject of Congressional investigations, Freedom of Information Act requests, and very personal and very public attacks. Those innocent days are over now.”

Santer, who’s been a key author of some IPCC reports, said the science that goes into those reports is the most rigorous that he’s seen in his career.”If your research suggests that humans are having a pronounced effect on climate,” he continued,  “I think the expectation is that you will be subjected to tremendous scrutiny.  And some of that is appropriate, certainly in terms of the science and the integrity and credibility of the science, but unfortunately, that scrutiny is moving to very unwelcome areas, and it’s also focusing on individuals and motives, and all of this stuff is very distasteful,” he said.

Santer was joined on the call by Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center , who raised concern that the intense and personal nature of much of the criticism climate scientists have been facing (most recently in response to the East Anglia hacked email incident, now widely known as “Climategate”) may be keeping promising young scientists out of the field at a time when they are most needed.  In the wake of the East Anglia emails, a blizzard of accusations of data manipulation blew through the blogosphere and in certain corners of the Senate.

“It does make it difficult to bring young scientists into the field,” Santer agreed.  They look at what has gone on and there is genuine concern there. They must be asking themselves, ‘Do I really want to get involved in critical but possibly contentious issues if there is the possibility that I will spend months or even  longer dealing with questions not about the science that I have done, but about my own personal integrity?’” said Santer.

Thompson affirmed that while it’s difficult to put a specific timetable on the disappearance of glaciers, the scientific evidence documenting glacier recession is overwhelming.  Research indicates that more than 90% of the world’s glaciers are receding, he said, including approximately 95% of the glaciers in the Himalayas.

“Glaciers do not have any political agenda,” said Thompson.  “They just sum up what’s happening in the environment and they retreat or react to that en masse.”

The conference call was organized by the activist Union of Concerned Scientists.

UPDATE 1/25/10
The London tabloid, the Daily Mail, reported yesterday that a lead author of the Asia chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 assessment admitted that he knew the 2035 claim was unsubstantiated, but he approved including it in the report anyway.  Murari Lal reportedly said in an interview with the Daily Mail that he knew the 2035 number came from a report that was not peer-reviewed, but that the claim of imminently disappearing glaciers would, “impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Michael Schlesinger, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Climate Research Group at the the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign responded to the Daily Mail report with dismay.

“I am greatly saddened and deeply offended by this person’s behavior,” he wrote in an email. “A scientist does not lie nor change the facts to suit an agenda.  Rather s/he tells it as it is, as best as it is known to her/him.”

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a spirited response to the Daily Mail story.  According to Romm (who reached Lal by phone):
[Lal] He said these were “the most vilest allegations” and denied that he ever made such assertions.  He said “I didn’t put it [the 2035 claim] in to impress policymakers….  We reported the facts about science as we knew them and as was available in the literature.”
FILED UNDER: The Science, Alpine, Cryosphere, glaciers, IPCC, Media, Views
January 21, 2010 | 1:00 PM | By

MAP: California’s Climate Lobby

Climate Watch now features a new page that brings together all of the interactive maps we’ve created so far. For the launch we’ve added an interactive map to our coverage of climate lobbying efforts in Washington. See our recent blog post, “The Climate Lobby Bulks Up” for more on who’s been spending big to influence climate legislation on Capitol Hill.

View KQED: Climate Lobbying in California in a larger map
The data for the map is from the Center for Public Integrity’s The Climate Change Lobby project. CPI tracks money helping to fuel the climate change legislation debates and maintains a database compiled from lobbying disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate’s Office of Public Records. (Read about the project’s methodology here.) The data does not include lobbying activity aimed at state laws and regulations, or dollars spent on advertising campaigns.

Climate Watch intern David Ferry combed the data and mapped the lobbying efforts based in California.  Chevron and PG&E top the list with $36 million and $34 million spent since 2003, respectively. Intel ranks third with $12 million. Our map skims the top of the database, showing only those organizations with more than a half-million dollars in spending.

Click here to view a larger map and to see a list of the CA lobbying efforts.
View KQED: Climate Lobbying in California in a larger map

Don’t forget to visit the new Climate Watch Maps page, where you’ll see this map as well as all of the interactive maps we’ve created to illustrate data from various sources, including the Department of Water Resources, the California Air Resources Board and The Center for Public Integrity.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Center for Public Integrity, Policy
January 19, 2010 | 3:05 PM | By

NASA: 2009 Tied for Second-Warmest Year

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Parts of the northern hemisphere may have had an extremely cold December, but nevertheless, last year tied for the second-warmest in 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, according to the latest surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).  The analysis finds that global temperatures were so similar in 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2009, that they are all tied for second place. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 set the record as the warmest year, according to this report.

James Hansen, head of NASA’s GISS, and his team have released their end-of-year summary for 2009, initially posted on the Real Climate blog.  It’s pretty dense, but here are some additional highlights:

- The scientists offer an explanation for an apparent data discrepancy over whether 1998 or 2005 was the warmest year.  In short, it comes down to the difference in the way GISS and HadCRUT (Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit) assign or do not assign temperature data for areas without observing stations.  (HadCRUT leaves them out of the analysis, while GISS assigns values based on various factors outlined in the summary.)  GISS maintains that 2005 was the warmest year.

- According to the report:

“There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C.”

In other words, 2009′s cold December in certain areas of the planet, as well as an unusually cold 2009 summer in the United States and Canada, do not reflect overall global temperatures nor signal a cooling trend:

“It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid‐latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes. The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns…”

According to GISS data, December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s.

- The report underscores that monthly temperature anomalies tend to be greater than seasonal anomalies and that the the mean temperature of a particular month might not be the best way to identify global warming. Instead, one needs to look at measurements over the long-term, which, according to GISS data, indicate general warming over at least the last 50 years, just about everywhere on the planet.

The summary concludes with a sort of admonishment:

“The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.”

FILED UNDER: The Science, Temperature, Warming
January 14, 2010 | 12:35 PM | By

Nature Always Bats Last

Cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico Photo: Craig Miller

Cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico Photo: Craig Miller

Mike Newland is an archeologist at Sonoma State University’s Anthropological Studies Center. A version of this essay was originally broadcast as part of KQED’s Perspectives series.

Nature Always Bats Last

By Mike Newland

I’ve been pondering a 3,000 year old mystery that makes me uneasy about our current plight. Starting around 2,000 B.C., people in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert really got into big-game hunting.  We see this in the archaeological record—all of this big-horn sheep and antelope bone shows up in larger quantities.  Up in the mountains, great panels of rock art are chock full of hunters chasing sheep, and evidence of their hunting camps is tucked in shelters and around springs.

Big-game hunting isn’t that efficient.  You’re better off going for a wide range of edibles close by.  You get more food for less work.  This is an important point, because after 3,000 years of this big game hunting, this culture died out, and was replaced by folks that hunted and collected a broader range of food.

Bill Hildebrandt and Kelly McGuire, two archaeologists from Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Davis, have made a compelling argument about why people were so obsessed with hunting—they did it for status.

Good hunters were revered for their abilities to provide food and hunting trips could serve political and social functions.  But big game hunting was eventually done at the expense of the rest of the population: archaeologists still discuss whether the bow and arrow, probably introduced to California by groups coming out of Oregon, was such an effective hunting tool that the hunters wiped-out most of the big game, or whether the devastating effects of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, which caused major droughts throughout the Great Basin and desert areas, pushed these people over the edge.  But it is clear that serious changes took place, and big game hunting became unsustainable.  By the time the next group of folks came along, the big-game hunters were on the verge of collapse.

This is one of the reasons why archaeology is important—we can look at past cultures and see how we, as a species, have dealt with big problems.

This research makes me uneasy because archaeology has shown repeatedly that cultures not in balance with nature die out.  For millennia, people have sat around campfires debating whether to make the changes necessary to adapt to a shifting climate or depleted resource base, and invariably they said no. As a result, the graveyards of history are full of the corpses of cultures that failed to change when they needed to.

Now it’s our turn. History shows that nature won’t hesitate to take us out.  We’re lucky in that we have probably one of the most adaptive cultures in history: we’ve made major changes—abolition of slavery, passing of environmental legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment—when we thought it was in our collective best interest. Even still, these landmark changes required decades of hard work and dedication to educate the broader population.  We have our work cut out for us.  We can either rise to the occasion, and make the investments necessary to stem climate change, or we can take our place with the rest of the dead in the graveyard.

FILED UNDER: The Science, Ecosystems, Views
January 12, 2010 | 6:18 PM | By

Climate and Development Affecting CA’s Butterflies

Atlantis Fritillary butterfly at Sierraville, CA Photo: Jennifer Wolf

Atlantis Fritillary butterfly at Sierraville, CA Photo: Jennifer Wolf

California’s butterfly populations are suffering from the combination of a warming climate and increased land development, according to a new analysis from scientists at UC Davis.

The study, scheduled to be published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, draws from butterfly expert Arthur Shapiro’s database of more than three decades of observations of 159 species from 10 sites in the Sierra Nevada at varying elevations, from sea level to tree line.

The data shows that over the last three decades butterfly species diversity declined at half of the sites, with the most severe reductions occurring at the lowest elevations, where habitat destruction is greatest.  The sites in the middle range showed evidence of habitats shifting upslope, as lower elevation butterflies began appearing at higher elevations.  The only site studied where butterfly biodiversity and abundance has increased is at the highest elevation site, at 2,400-2,775 meters.

“These patterns are quite consistent with other studies on a variety of organisms,” said Shapiro.  “The trend is for organisms to seek the climate to which they are adapted. So if it’s getting warmer, that means you go north, or you go up.”

While the population shifts appear consistent with warming temperatures (Both average maximum temperatures and average daily minimum temperatures increased across the majority of the sites), the study finds that warming alone is not enough to account for the loss of biodiversity at low and middle elevations.  Researchers analyzed county land use data at the sites, and found that it correlates with the butterfly population data.  The authors propose that habitat destruction due to urban and suburban development is most likely the leading cause of butterfly population deterioration at the lower elevation sites.

Citing pressures from human development as the main cause for species loss, the United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity.  At the Johannesburg summit of 2002,  governments agreed to achieve “significant reduction” in the rate of biological diversity loss by 2010, but according to the BBC, conservation organizations are acknowledging that this target is not going to be met, and that, in fact, the problem may be worsening.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, The Science, Ecosystems, Temperature
January 11, 2010 | 8:50 PM | By

Committee: No Free Lunch for Carbon Emitters

California’s cap-and-trade program took another baby step toward fruition on Monday, with the release of the state-appointed Economic and Allocation Advisory Committee’s final report on implementing carbon regulation.

Stopping just short of recommending a 100% auction of emission credits, the report, which is non-binding and was written to help the California Air Resources Board develop an economically sound cap-and-trade program, advises the state to sell off the majority of its carbon permits to emitters — with a few exceptions. Industries that “rely heavily” on carbon-based energy or compete directly with firms that do not face carbon regulation, the report says, should be “provided with assistance” or given funds earned from the auction.

The report pointedly advises against handing out free permits to utilities. Although the state’s utilities will almost certainly pass increased costs onto customers, the committee predicts that the price spike will provide an incentive for Californians to start saving energy. The committee’s press release says the report takes a “household friendly” approach to cap-and-trade, recommending that at least 75% of the proceeds from selling carbon permits be returned to households through either tax cuts or direct financial transfers.

Even before the report was released on Monday, the looming possibility of a carbon permit auction was causing anxiety in industrial circles. The AB-32 Implementation Group, an organization that aims to protect California business interests, claimed last week that if the price of carbon is set to $60 per ton, “large employers could be subject to an ‘Auction Tax’ of up to $143 billion by 2020.” Environmental groups have been urging the Air Board to auction off all the carbon permits initially offered.

In a written statement, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to the committee’s report, saying “the best program will be one that returns value to the people through tax cuts, rebates or dividends, and I applaud the Committee for recognizing those options.”

Here’s a quick run down of the rest of the report’s key recommendations:

Protect Low Income Households

The report recommends returning some of the auction’s profits to low income households, since such households tend to spend a greater percentage of their income on energy.

Invest in a Low Carbon Economy

The committee recommends that the state create an independent Investment Advisory Board to help make it reach its low carbon targets.

Simple Auctions

The state’s carbon permit auctions should simple and allow the public to sell permits in the auctions along with the state.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Assembly Bill 32, California Air Resources Board, cap and trade, carbon credits, Economics, Emissions, Policy
January 7, 2010 | 3:54 PM | By

State Senators Hear Cap-and-Trade Caveats

Craig Miller

Photo: Craig Miller

The dark underbelly of cap-and-trade was somewhat exposed in a four-hour hearing today before the Senate’s Select Committee on Climate Change and AB-32 Implementation. AB-32, of course, is shorthand for California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which mandates a carbon trading program be in place by 2012.

Here’s my “highlights reel” from the panel of experts who testified, in order of appearance:

Mary Nichols, Chair, California Air Resources Board

- On carbon pricing: “There is no approach that does not involve administrative costs & headaches” but cap-and-trade “seems like a pretty good mix” of certainty provided by an enforced cap and market flexibility (versus an outright carbon tax of some sort).

- On California going “solo” with carbon trading (i.e. without the other states and provinces currently signed to the Western Carbon Initiative): The larger the territory, the more potential for “bad actors” but the greater the potential for meaningful savings & benefits to the economy.

Michael Wara, Stanford Law Professor

- On carbon offsets: “…difficult to administer;” to ensure real reductions, changes in behavior, has proven to be “a significant and ongoing challenge, in practice.”

- California appears to be “opting for prudent limits” on allowable offsets, at an anticipated 4%, versus more than 30% in the Waxman-Markey bill that has cleared the US House of Representatives.

- “Very few [offset] programs have been run without controversy.”

Ken Alex, California Attorney General’s Office

- On enforcement: “Every system has cheaters, especially where billions of dollars are involved.”

- Cap-and-trade provides “a permanent incentive for cheaters.” Unassailable data is essential for regulators.

- Regulators “must have sufficient authority” to assess meaningful penalties. Alex, who was involved in sorting out the state’s energy crisis of 2000-2001, recalled that “million-dollar penalties were irrelevant.”

Dallas Butraw, Economist, Resources for the Future

- Warned against a “phone book-sized” regulation.

- Cost of carbon emissions permits will be passed along to consumers but could be offset by tax breaks or a dividend system similar to what oil & gas companies pay to residents of Alaska.

David Harrison, Economist, NERA Economic Consulting

- On lessons from Europe: Despite a rocky start for the EU’s “pilot” program, the system for carbon trading in 27 countries has “evolved over time” to become “very successful.”

- The EU experience “really does show that cap & trade works. Emissions have been reduced.”

- There is “no silver bullet” for determining allocations; that in Europe has been a “messy” and “contentious” process.

- In spite of it all, the EU experience demonstrates that cap-and-trade is “not perfect but it really is better than the alternatives,” and provides a good laboratory for California.

The committee, chaired by Fran Pavley (D-L.A.), also heard from several business and environmental groups. At one point a speaker from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) argued briefly with a utility representative about whether electric rates are actually higher or lower in California, compared to the nation as a whole (apparent compromise: rates may be higher but average bills are lower).

Utilities complained that the system, as proposed, forces power companies to bear the brunt of the burden. Business interests warned that unbridled implementation of AB-32 “could add to an already alarming increase in job losses,” claimed that the state has no authority to hold carbon permit auctions under AB-32, and asked for initial permits to be given away to industry. Environmentalists asked for the opposite, urging that 100% of initial permits be auctioned off, i.e. that emitters be made to pay for them.

Numerous speakers expressed nervousness over validity of carbon offset programs. Regarding the various schemes for carbon storage in forests or soil, Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said “This one makes my head hurt.” There’ll be a lot of Excedrin passed around before this is through.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Assembly Bill 32, cap and trade, Carbon capture, Carbon offsets, Economics, Emissions, Policy