Air Resources Board

In this Google Earth view, the height of the "balloon" location markers indicates the volume of greenhouse gas emissions.

Wondering where all the petroleum refineries are located in California? Curious about which industries in your area emit the most greenhouse gases? Or which counties have the most big industrial polluters, and which don’t have any at all?

A new interactive map from the California Air Resources Board taps the versatility of Google Earth software to transform eye-glazing spreadsheet data into a visual, if wonky, feast.

The map shows the locations and greenhouse gas emissions of about 625 facilities — the largest industrial greenhouse gas emitters in the state. The graphical tool can filter by type of facility (cement plant, refinery, electricity generation), by county or air district. You can use the satellite view to see a facility’s physical footprint, then switch over to Google Earth to see how its carbon footprint stacks up against other emitters. The EPA released a similar map earlier this year, but without all the Google Earth bells and whistles.

Say you’re in Santa Clara County. There are 17 sites that pop up on the map. Eight generate electricity. The rest are a grab bag: a sewage treatment plant, a cement factory, a few manufacturing facilities. Toggle over to Google Earth to see how they all compare to each other, and it’s easy to identify the two biggest industrial greenhouse gas emitters in the county: Calpine – Metcalf Energy Center, LLC, a power plant in San Jose that released more than a million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2010; and Lehigh Southwest Cement Company in Cupertino, which released nearly 600,000 metric tons in 2010. But these are far from being the worst in the Bay Area. The Chevron Refinery in Richmond released 4.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2010.

The Air Board requires facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — comparable to the emissions of about 5,000 cars over the same time period — to report their emissions every year. The information was already public, but as the Air Board’s Stanley Young points out, “Not everybody has a lot of fun playing with an Excel spreadsheet.”

Air Resources Board

More than 600 industrial greenhouse gas emitters are included on the map.

Some out-of-state locations are included: plants in other states that sell power inside of California (check out those big emitters in Wyoming). And there’s one category that doesn’t appear on the map: electricity traders who buy power from out-of-state, then re-sell it in-state. As Young explains it, the traders do report emissions, but there’s no one carbon-emitting spot where it would make sense to locate them on a map.

All of the companies on this map are participating in California’s cap-and-trade program. The first  auction of carbon pollution permits is scheduled for November 14.

Craig Miller/KQED

California's new emission standards would mandate a 15% increase in zero-emission-vehicles by 2025.

UPDATE: Today, California air regulators approved a package of “Clean Car” standards that many are calling historic. But there’s nothing new about that. California’s been out front in the clean car derby for decades.

In her recent story on QUEST, Lauren Sommer unpacks the proposed emissions standards. As part of her reporting she spoke with Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, and a member of California’s Air Resources Board. Sperling puts the state’s new emissions standards in historical perspective, arguing that since the 1960s virtually all innovation in automotive emissions controls can be traced back to California. Here’s a snippet of Sommer’s conversation with Sperling.

Can you characterize the impact that California has had on the cars that we drive today?

Every car in the world is much cleaner-burning than cars before California’s regulations were put in place beginning in the 1960s. All of them have emission control technology that can really trace their history back to California.

California has had a big impact in two ways. One is through its air quality regulation, it has resulted in vehicles being much more clean-burning than they would have been otherwise. The other thing it did is through the zero-emission-vehicle mandate, even though the targets have not been met, it motivated car companies to be thinking about how can they use electric drive technologies. And so the Prius, for instance, was a direct response by Toyota to the reality that the future was going to be more electric.

We’re looking at almost a million-and-a-half zero-emission-vehicles on the road by 2025. How can a state mandate something to actually get these cars on the road?

The state says that if a car company wants to sell cars in the state, then a certain number of them must be zero-emission-vehicles (ZEV). It has led a tortured life. There’s been many changes along the way, lawsuits. But where we’ve ended up now is a rule that requires the car companies to produce 15% of the vehicles by 2025. And basically it’s a rule that if they want to do business in California, this is a requirement.

And is that something they’re happy about?

Well, remarkably they aren’t complaining about the numbers or the requirements. Basically the automobile industry is supportive of this new zero-emission-vehicle mandate. We’ve come a long ways. This is the industry that used to say it couldn’t do anything. It couldn’t do air bags; it couldn’t do air pollution regulations. Everything was too expensive, too difficult. They couldn’t improve fuel efficiency. And now, the industry is supporting all of these initiatives that California is taking. Some of them are national, but California is going further. I’d say there is much more of a partnership now between the auto industry and Air Resources Board than there was in the past.

California has always taken a sort of technology-forcing approach to regulation. Have we seen that work? And what’s the idea behind that?

The theory being the zero-emission-vehicle mandate is a policy to essentially just kick-start — jump-start the technology, get it going. The problem is that there is this tremendous inertia in the system and you can think about electric vehicles as being a disruptive technology. It’s a whole new way. It’s new supplier companies they need. They need new expertise. And so the role of the ZEV mandate is to just get us over the the hump. And then we use performance based standards and other kinds of policies that are more balanced and can be used to provide the incentives and the signals to the industry to move forward.

Many times when government tries to do this it doesn’t work out well, but many times it does. And I think what you need are good, smart, well informed regulators that are flexible. Everyone acknowledges we need to go to new technologies and it’s a big challenge on how to develop the policies that will lead us to this sustainable future.

With AB 32 the state has some very aggressive goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Is this stringent enough, in your opinion, to get the state where it needs to be?

Craig Miller/KQED

Transportation accounts for 40% of California's greenhouse gases.

Well the problem of oil and greenhouse gases is not really a California problem, it’s a global problem. So what California’s really doing with its climate policies generally, with the zero-emission-vehicle program, with the vehicle greenhouse gas standards…is creating a model for the rest of the country and the rest of the world. We are making a great effort to design the zero-emission-vehicle program…in such a way that they are easily replicated and easily coordinated by other states and by the federal government.

I was surprised to see hydrogen fueling stations in there. Obviously Governor Schwarzenegger was a huge proponent of the “hydrogen highway,” but is that still kicking around as one of the viable technologies we are going to see in the future?

Whenever we do analyses of the transportation sector and we say how do we get large reductions in oil use, how do we get large reductions in greenhouse gases, we always come back to the observation, the conclusion that we need fuel cell vehicles operating on hydrogen. It’s very difficult to imagine a future in which there is a dramatic reduction in oil use and greenhouse gases without hydrogen vehicles.

It’s possible we could have a future where there’s plug-in hybrid vehicles running on electricity and some of them on pure electricity, some with little combustion engines that are using low-carbon biofuels, maybe a little natural gas. That’s possible, but there are a lot of continuing issues with batteries, and fuel cells seem to be a more flexible, a potentially less expensive technology, that provides more utility to the consumer because we won’t have the range problems we have with electric vehicles. So in California, at ARB, in the analysis we’ve done for 2025 and 2050, fuel cell vehicles just play a huge role in that. So, many of us are convinced that fuel cells are going to be an important part of the future.

Spencer Platt/Getty

Consumer groups say the EPA's proposed fuel economy standard will mean you'll pay less at the pump.

At a public hearing in San Francisco today a diverse group of stakeholders lined up to support the EPA’s proposal to increase the fuel efficiency standard for cars and light trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon. As we’ve reported here, the rule would affect models between 2017 and 2025 and will likely be adopted by the end of the summer.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) worked closely with the EPA to develop the standard and testified that if the rule can be finalized as proposed, California will be willing to accept the national standard. CARB has been taking heat for this collaboration from Orange County Congressional Representative Darrell Issa, who has accused the state of meddling in national regulatory affairs.

“A lot of this work has been led by the state of California,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “California set the first tailpipe emissions standards more than a decade ago.” Unifying the standards across the country is something that automakers have long wanted.

Several auto makers including Chrysler and Hyundai testified early in the day that they support the proposal. Chrysler’s director of Regulatory Affairs, Reg Modlin, said the mid-term review built into the program will be important for companies that make cars. “We’re looking out a long way in technology terms and also in market acceptance terms,” he explained to me. “So the key thing in the mid-term review is to test, to evaluate if the market is buying the products that we’re looking for.”

Car dealers are worried that customers can’t afford the more expensive technology in fuel-efficient cars. “Part of the concern is that it’s $3,200 [added] to the price of a car and that’s a lot of money for our customers,” Forrest McConnell of the National Association of Automobile Dealers told me. He says he’d prefer the EPA move more slowly to allow customers to get used to the new products.

I asked Gillis, the consumer advocate, about the affordability factor. He said that car prices go up every year and consumers are used to it. In addition, he argued that better fuel standards will mean that the consumer immediately starts seeing returns on that investment when they get to the pump. It’s a timely question amid forecasts this week of $4.50 gas by Memorial Day.

On Thursday, the CARB will meet to accept its own set of emissions standards, dubbed the Advanced Clean Car package, which includes greenhouse gas reductions that match the EPA’s proposed standards. In addition the Air Board will consider proposals to cut California’s greenhouse gas emissions more deeply by increasing the number of zero-emission-vehicles on the road to 15% by 2025 and beefing up the state’s plug-in electric car infrastructure. Check out Lauren Sommer’s recent radio story for QUEST on California’s tougher regulations.

Friday provided another blip in a confusing court fight over California’s centerpiece climate law, known as AB 32.

A “final” ruling from a Superior Court judge in San Francisco allows most implementation of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act to go forward, except for the carbon trading plan known widely as “cap & trade.” Regulators at the California Air Resources Board (ARB) will have to flesh out their prior assessment of alternatives to cap & trade that could also result in reducing the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Analysis of those alternatives is required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). While ARB officials still insist that their original work was adequate under the law, groups representing an “environmental justice” agenda had sued, claiming that alternatives had not been fully explored.

Judge Ernest Goldsmith agreed, and previously issued a preliminary ruling that appeared to shut down all efforts toward implementation of the law. Some observers thought the ruling jeopardized even measures supported by separate legislation, such as the state’s tailpipe emissions standards and renewable energy targets.

So ARB’s reaction to Friday’s ruling was mostly a sigh of relief. According to a written statement from spokesman Stanley Young:

“We are pleased that the court’s decision enables ARB to continue moving forward on implementation of a range of AB 32 measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, drive innovation, improve energy security, and steer California to a clean energy economy.

But the order expressly prohibits the Air Board from “engaging in any cap and trade-related project activity that could result in an adverse change to the physical environment,” until ARB fully complies with CEQA. ARB says it will continue its fight on the cap & trade front:

“We respectfully disagree with the court’s determination that ARB did not adequately analyze alternatives to cap and trade program in the Scoping Plan, and will file a notice of appeal on Monday.”

In their own statement, plaintiffs in the case celebrated putting the brakes on cap & trade, at least temporarily:

“We are encouraged that the Judge is now requiring CARB to take a hard and honest look at cap and trade,” said Bill Gallegos, Executive Director of Communities for a Better Environment, one of the environmental justice plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  “We have even more evidence now that cap and trade does not work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the European Union, emissions have increased by 3% in the past year under their program, and we also know that cap and trade has the worst impact on health in low income communities and communities of color,” Gallegos added.

The first auctions of emissions permits under the cap & trade program are scheduled to start early next year. “That’s eminently doable,” says David Pettit, a Santa Monica-based senior attorney with the Natural Resource Defense Council. Pettit said that ARB analysts went back to work on alternatives when the first preliminary court decision came out, months ago, so the additional “homework” required by the court is well underway.

As to the many other provisions under the law, Pettit said “The vast majority of the essential programs needed to meet AB 32′s GHG limit are unaffected by this ruling.” NRDC is a supporter of cap & trade.

Photo: Craig Miller

Suspend cap-and-trade, or stop the whole show.

Those are the options offered by the environmental justice groups who won a court ruling against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in March. The groups were seeking to halt cap-and-trade over health concerns for communities located near industrial polluters. A California Superior Court judge ruled that CARB had violated state environmental law by not adequately considering alternatives to cap-and-trade, and suspended all 68 regulations that implement California’s global warming law, AB 32, until the board complies.

The two sides entered negotiations to find ways for the state to move forward with parts of AB 32 other than cap-and-trade, but those talks broke down on March 30.

Today, the environmental justice groups submitted their final documentation to the court, proposing two options. The first stops the implementation of all measures in CARB’s Scoping Plan for implementing AB 32. The other stops only the development of the cap-and-trade program, until an environmental review is completed.

“Our preference is that the focus be on cap-and-trade,” said Bill Gallegos, the executive director of Communities for a Better Environment, one of the plaintiffs. “We mainly just want to make AB 32 stronger.  There are very positive things in that law and we don’t want to see them all on hold.”

CARB has said that it will appeal the court’s decision. Should that happen, the appeals court could stay the recent order and allow implementation of AB 32 and cap-and-trade to continue.

California’s cap-and-trade program, which is scheduled to launch in January of 2012, represents about 20% of the total emissions reductions called for under AB 32.

I had the chance to sit down for a few minutes with California’s top air regulator today. Mary Nichols, who chairs the state’s Air Resources Board joined us by satellite from Sacramento. The seven-minute interview will air on KQED’s This Week in Northern California, Friday evening.

Nichols after a day-long public hearing in December of last year. (Photo: Craig Miller)

On Wednesday, blogger Jon Brooks posted a call for questions on “News Fix,” the KQED News blog. It was a worthwhile experiment but the results speak to the extent to which Nichols has become a lightning rod for opponents of environmental regulation in general and cap & trade in particular — and to some degree the state of public policy discourse in America today. The comments, some emailed and some posted on the comments thread at News Fix were largely a stream of invective directed at Nichols and the Air Board. Some questions were a bit technical for a seven-minute TV interview. Others were valid but off-topic. As the latest installment in our series of “Climate Watch Conversations,” I tried to keep to the climate-related business of the Board (with one exception: I felt I needed to have her address events unfolding in Japan and concerns here about radioactive drift).

Nonetheless I was able to cull a few for this brief interview. Several questions make it clear that some remain convinced that implementation of AB 32 will be a drag on California’s economic recovery:

Corey:

“Don’t you think that now is a time to worry about jobs and the well-being of people? Do you understand how many jobs this bill will kill? Do you understand that the amount of “green” jobs created will still not cover the jobs lost?”

You can hear all of her answers in the video segment posted on the This Week site and below.

As Nichols is often perceived as a person vested with considerable power, Steve, Chris, and Jeremy Schellhardt wanted to know why Nichols’ post is appointed, rather than elected. This question didn’t make it into the seven-minute broadcast window but Nichols answered, with no apparent irony, that she had never been asked that before. She said she thinks the power of the position is overestimated. When I asked if she’d rather be elected, she said “No! I don’t want to have to go out and raise money to keep my job.” Personally, I liked the question offered by Taggart:

“I’d like to know how many times Ms. Nichols has taken “alternative transit” to work in the past year. Bet I could guess.”

Answer: She walks to work (in Sacramento, though she confesses to driving when she works in Los Angeles). I wonder if that was Taggart’s guess.

In retrospect, I would say this was a worthwhile experiment but I don’t think I’d repeat it for an interview of such short duration. I could’ve bypassed your comments and pursued my own line of questioning, as journalists typically do. Or I could have ignored the extraordinary crisis unfolding in Japan and its potential implications here. Neither seemed like a good choice. The brutal time constraints of television meant that readers and I were both shortchanged in terms of questions we’d like to have answered. We’ll learn from this and pursue a longer format for the next one.

James Goldstene, executive director of the state’s Air Resources Board, told members of a House subcommittee that the EPA’s recently released regulations will not create a “regulatory train wreck.”

Goldstene  held up a planned power plant in Northern California to advance his case, saying that the Russell City Energy Plant will stand as an example of how power companies can use the “best available technology” for reducing emissions, as required under a recently issued EPA rule. The plant, to be built on the Hayward shore of San Francisco Bay, is a 600-megawatt plant to be fired by natural gas.

Goldstene’s appearance before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power (part of the Energy & Commerce Committee) was to counter Republican efforts to pull EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, contained in a bill known as the Energy Tax Prevention Act. Goldstene said passage of the bill into law would “send a stark message…that the U-S isn’t serious about being a leader in the future economy.” It would also upstage a ruling by the US Supreme Court affirming the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Goldstene’s full testimony is available as a PDF download.

I-80 near the Oakland interchange known as "the Maze." (Photo: Craig Miller)

In a strongly-worded letter [PDF] to the CEOs of seven major auto manufacturers, California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols defended California’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks and accused the trade group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, of misrepresenting California’s cooperation with federal agencies in letters to Congress.

At issue, wrote Nichols, are letters the Alliance sent to Congressmen Darryl Issa (R-Vista) and Fred Upton (R-MI) in January, calling “our commitment to a national program into question.”

“For the Alliance to suggest we are no longer committed to a cooperative effort is disingenuous at best, and incorrect,” wrote the Air Board chairman.

Nichols called on the executives to “distance” their companies “from future efforts by the Alliance to undermine the achievement of our mutual goals to set standards that will provide American consumers with cleaner and more efficient vehicles.”

The letter comes just as California and federal agencies announced a shared deadline for their collaboration to set national fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for model year 2017-2025 cars and trucks.

Margot Roosevelt of the Los Angeles Times has more, including a response from an Alliance vice president who reportedly would not address the Nichols letter directly, but did express support for the shared fuel standards deadline.

Six environmental justice groups sued state regulators over implementation of AB 32. (Photo: Craig Miller)

The half-dozen environmental justice advocacy groups sued over state regulators’ implementation plan and won a tentative ruling in their favor, from a state court in San Francisco. A lawyer for the Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment called the ruling “very important and exciting,” but the groups insist that they’re looking to tweak the regulations under California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, not blow it up.

“We brought this case as a last-ditch effort,” said Alegria De La Cruz, legal director for the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in San Francisco. She told me in a phone interview today that the focus was “in making sure that ARB follows the law and takes into consideration the most vulnerable communities in California, as it rolls out this transformative measure.”

De La Cruz pointed out that the cap-and-trade regulation is “still in development” and said what her organization wants is to, in effect, send regulators back to the drawing board on some — but not all — of the law’s implementation. “We have confidence that [CARB] will be able to get this work done and still meet it’s deadlines,” she said. In December, the Air Board approved a broad set of cap & trade regulations, subject to some fine tuning.

The “work” she refers to would be to flesh out CARB’s analysis of potential alternatives to carbon pricing through cap & trade. Plaintiffs in the suit argued that the Air Board gave short shrift to those alternatives before adopting cap & trade, and Judge Ernest Goldsmith agreed, writing that “With the decision to use cap and trade as the main vehicle by which emissions will be reduced, ARB skipped the determination that no other mechanisms facilitate the achievement” of the law’s emissions reductions goals.

The lawsuit was presaged back in August of last year, when members of the state-appointed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee sent a letter to the Air Board, expressing “serious concerns” that the proposed regulations failed on several fronts, including a means to identify communities particularly vulnerable to the effects of industrial emissions, as well as to costs imposed by a cap & trade system.

All parties have until Tuesday to file reactions to the ruling, which might not be finalized for weeks. State lawyers say they want to see the final ruling before deciding whether to appeal.

Lawyers at the gates. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Oil companies couldn’t bring it down with a well-funded statewide ballot initiative. But the state’s landmark 2006 law to combat climate change by regulating carbon emissions might be undone by another of California’s major environmental laws.

Cara Horowitz reports for Legal Planet that a San Francisco superior court could set aside implementation of AB 32, finding that the “scoping plan,” the implementation strategy developed by the state’s Air Resources Board, does not comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA.

According to the report, the ruling, in a suit filed by “environmental justice” groups could follow a 15-day period for objections, which expires next week. So far most coverage of the “proposed ruling” seems confined to the legal blogs.

UPDATE: The only response issued from the Air Board so far is: “We are reviewing this tentative decision and will respond within the allotted time.” That allotted time is up next Tuesday, after which the judge has several weeks to finalize the ruling.

UPDATE: Major daily newspapers picked up the story on Friday. Here’s Wyatt Buchanan’s take for the San Francisco Chronicle.