Gov. Jerry Brown is facing tricky environmental and energy issues in California
California Gov. Jerry Brown's decisions regarding environmental and energy issues will affect public and private spending and public health for the foreseeable future.
Margot Roosevelt
Los Angeles Times
01/31/2011
Brown is expected to sign the bill. He also has pledged to shift away from Schwarzenegger's emphasis on industrial-scale plants underway in the desert, saying he would streamline permits for the larger plants but rely on localized generation (panels on smaller, already degraded parcels of land, atop parking lots and warehouses, and on residential rooftops) for more than half the 20,000 new megawatts of renewable generation he proposes.
Brown may back a European-style "feed-in tariff" that would pay residents and businesses a generous rate for power generated on their property and fed into the grid. Brown's newly appointed members of the Public Utilities Commission, with strong ties to consumer groups, are likely to be receptive toward what Brown has touted as "carefully calibrated renewable power payments."
WATER
Pumping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to supply Central Valley farms and Southern California cities has tilted the West Coast's largest estuary into ecological free fall, devastating fish populations and triggering court-ordered endangered species protections.
An $11-billion bond package slated for the November 2012 ballot includes restoration money for the delta and millions of dollars for new dams and reservoirs. The Schwarzenegger administration also handed Brown a plan to build a $13-billion tunnel system under the delta, echoing an unsuccessful canal proposal that Brown backed during his first stay in the governor's office.
Voters may be reluctant to support a bond measure that would demand more than $600 million in annual debt service when education and other state services are being slashed. Some environmentalists instead favor stricter conservation measures.
A clue to Brown's leanings may lie in his pick for deputy resources secretary overseeing delta issues: Gerald Meral, an official in Brown's previous administration, who supported the peripheral canal around the delta that was rejected by voters.
GLOBAL WARMING
California has moved forward with the nation's most sweeping regulation of planet-heating gases. It set standards to cut tailpipe emissions from automobiles through 2016 models, rules later adopted by the Obama administration. It is forcing refiners to cut the carbon content of transportation fuels. And it has designed a cap-and-trade program for industrial plants.
Environmentalists want the Brown administration to speed up the timetable for industrial permits to be auctioned under the trading program rather than being given away for free as Schwarzenegger preferred.
Business groups want to delay the cap and trade program, which takes effect in 2012.
The most controversial issue this year is likely to be the new curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles for the 2017 to 2025 model years. California agreed to delay rule-making until September, when the Obama administration plans to release its own proposed standards. But the state could end up moving forward with stricter curbs if federal proposals are too weak, given California's goal to cut its overall carbon footprint 80% by midcentury.
The effort, said the Air Resources Board's Nichols, "involves highly sensitive coordination with the Obama administration, which is anxious to keep the auto industry and Congress on board with a national approach."
How Brown will resolve these issues is unclear. Sean Hecht, executive director of UCLA's Environmental Law Center, says environmentalists must show Brown that their concerns "are worth spending political capital on. ... California's economic future depends on its environmental health."
