Over the past week, Governor Jerry Brown signed a number of bills related to climate change that he hopes will further the State’s greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals.
Beginning last week with the signing of Senate Bill 32 (Pavley), which establishes greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets for the year 2030, and Assembly Bill 197 (Eduardo Garcia), which gives the Legislature increased oversight of the California Air Resources Board, the Administration has now approved a number of measures placing stricter requirements on various industries and placing increased emphasis on benefits to residents in urban areas and the Central Valley. Continuing the trend, the Governor approved additional climate change measures earlier this week, including a spending plan for California’s available pot of Cap-and-Trade auction proceeds and Assembly Bill 1550 (Gomez), a bill that further narrows where those proceeds can be spent to benefit disadvantaged communities.
While the Governor and various authors of the bills lauded the measures as beneficial to California’s low income residents, they will still largely provide little benefit to poor, disadvantaged communities in rural, forested areas in the northern part of the state. The final Cap-and-Trade spending plan whittled away almost all of the funding to forest health projects that the Administration had previously promised to uphold for most of the session, leaving only $25 million of the $1 billion plan dedicated to wildfire prevention, tree mortality mitigation, carbon sequestration, and other vital climate change efforts in the forests. Similarly, while AB 1550 began its life with a provision requiring 25 percent of all Cap-and-Trade proceeds to be spent in low income communities statewide, giving rural areas currently excluded from the definition of “disadvantaged” by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) hope for a competitive boost for the funds, that number was dropped to a disappointing 5 percent during the last two weeks of session. One bright spot was the Governor’s signing of Senate Bill 859, a budget trailer bill including a provision requiring utilities to procure specific amounts of generating capacity from bioenergy facilities using feedstock from high hazard tree mortality areas. The provision was a last minute effort to help keep some of the state’s imperiled biomass facilities from closing while counties, State agencies, and the USDA Forest Service continue to work with utilities and private entities to mitigate the tree mortality disaster in California.