Streetsblog Los Angeles

Last May, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Woo, the former Los Angeles City Councilman and Mayoral Candidate, urban planner, USC Professor and Climate Change activist.  Woo expressed hope that the Southern California Association of Governments would set the bar for other regions when deciding how to follow new state laws by setting high targets for emissions reductions.  The reductions are a state requirement after the passage of California’s internationally lauded Smart Growth Law in 2008, SB 375.

Yesterday, SCAG took a pass on history and sided with the sprawl lobby in endorsing reduced targets for the region which includes Los Angeles County as well as the Inland Empire, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernadino Counties.  Instead of setting the goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 8% in 2020 and 13% in 2035 as recommended by the state’s Air Resource Board after a lengthy public process, SCAG chose to set goals of 6% reduction in 2020 and 8% in 2035.  The 8/13 targets were rejected by a 21 to 29 vote.

Unfortunately, this means that design standards and community plans throughout the region will have less density, encourage fewer transportation options, and create less vibrant communities with less open space over the next twenty five years than they would have if SCAG would have followed the state board’s recommendations.

This rejection marks a victory for the Building Industry Association which lobbied for a 5% reduction target and distributed misinformation far and wide to preserve Southern Californians right to sprawl.  The BIA claimed the rejected benchmarks would push gas prices to $9, would cripple the economy, and were completely unrealistic anyway.  That independent reviews showed that a plan to meet the 8/13 benchmarks would increase gas costs by two cents a gallon over twenty five years, would save the average working family save $3,600 annually on transportation costs, would create design standards that would encourage growth and calls for lower reductions than the ones passed in the Sacramento and Bay regions somehow didn’t make the B.I.A.’s “hysteria sheet.”

And that the SCAG Board chose to believe these phony statistics, without a methodology showing how they came to be, over the hard work of their own staff tells us a lot about the SCAG Board.

After the vote, the BIA was crowing.  Richard Lambros, the executive director of the association told the Associated Press:

They made a decision that is both aggressive and achievable and will make a significant reduction in emissions while still protecting California’s economy.

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(The SCAG Joint Policy Committees & Regional Council meets tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 2 from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. If you want a seat, get there by 10:30 and feel free to bring a lunch. This isn't Metro or City Hall, you can eat in the hearing room The meeting is held at S.C.A.G. headquarters, 818 W. 7th Street, 12th Floor, Board Room, across the street from the Metro 7th Street Station.)

Back in July, Matthew Roth summarized the goals of California's groundbreaking S.B. 375, the first piece of legislation in the country to tie sprawl development to declining air quality and quality of life. Roth, quoting work done by NRDC's Amanda Eaken, noted that there are a lot of great things that S.B. 375 would accomplish if properly enacted by state Metropolitan Planning Organizations (M.P.O's), but that the local politics of the M.P.O. could prevent Californians from seeing the benefits provided by Smart Growth and proper transportation planning.

At a meeting tomorrow in Downtown Los Angeles, Southern California will have its chance to show that it can put the long-term health of the state over provincial politics. The Southern California Association of Governments Joint Policy and Regional Council will consider a proposal from the state's Air Resources Board to set targets for Greenhouse Gas reduction in the region. The ARB wants to see an 8% reduction in the next ten years and a 13% reduction in the next 25.

That's a complicated way of saying that tomorrow, regional leaders will decide whether or not they want to clean the air to meet state law or not. Eaken lays out what's at stake in more simple terms:

Thursday, SCAG has the opportunity to adopt ambitious 13% targets that will deliver significant co-benefits of better transit, improved air quality and public health, and reduce household transportation costs for Southern California residents. Across California, there's a shifting market demand embodied by SB 375 that is already pushing in the direction of more walkable, transit oriented communities-exactly the kind of growth needed to help Southern California achieve emission reduction targets and create sustainable communities.

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa Jackson yesterday told House members that she would soon begin work on new auto fuel-efficiency rules for the year 2017 and beyond, responding to calls from carmakers searching for certainty -- and warily eyeing the new fuel standards being crafted in California.

The political and legal jockeying that ultimately led the White House to a deal on higher U.S. auto fuel standards began in California, where stronger efficiency rules were adopted, shut down by the Bush administration, and later embraced by 13 other states. 

Now, as the Golden State sets to work on its fuel standards for the year 2017, the endpoint of the current White House efficiency rules, clean energy advocates are vowing to push California officials for the strongest possible auto emissions limits. If California can set the stage for nationwide progress on fuel-efficiency once, the theory goes, it can easily happen again.

But not every California lawmaker is convinced that the state should be a pioneer. At today's House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) openly wondered whether California should continue prodding the rest of the nation towards greater energy efficiency -- a question equally applicable to the state's law limiting broader carbon emissions.

After noting that she spoke as "a proud Californian," Bono Mack asked Jackson, "If California changes their standards, are you saying we all have to agree with their standards?"

Choosing her words carefully, Jackson told Bono Mack (one of only eight Republicans to vote in favor of last year's House climate change bill) that the Obama administration's new fuel-efficiency rule "was the way to achieve smart legislation.

"I don't think I can simply say" whether California's environmental moves are certain to pave the way for national action on emissions caps, Jackson added, "because the trick of legislation will be to put [regulatory] authorities together in ways that get you [deals like] the clean car rule."

Jackson's cautious response came as she continues to beat back bipartisan efforts in both chambers of Congress to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas pollution in the absence of legislative progress on the issue. Yanking the EPA's formal "endangerment finding" on the public health effects of the changing climate, Jackson told the House panel, "would forfeit one quarter of the combined EPA-DOT program’s [auto] fuel savings and one third of its greenhouse gas emissions."

In its second
Earth Day release, the U.S. DOT yesterday unveiled a 600-page analysis of
transportation emissions mandated by Congress in the 2007 energy bill.
In addition to weighing in on many potential tactics for limiting
transport’s contribution to the changing climate, the document notably
recommits the Obama administration to that goal at a time when
Democrats are weighing a delay in the energy debate.

Indeed,
the analysis concludes with a candid assessment that the nation’s
existing methods of transportation and land use planning have generated
an unsustainable reliance on fossil fuel consumption:

The ingenuity of transportation planners and engineers has produced a
vast network of transportation infrastructure and services to support
the mobility and economic vitality of the Nation. However, our historic
approach to transportation and land use has created an energy-intensive
system dependent on carbon-based fuels and automobiles.

The authors, including three dozen aides at the U.S. DOT’s Center for
Climate Change and more than a dozen private consultants, also take a
direct tone in evaluating the various emissions-cutting policy
proposals that are available to the Obama administration.

For
instance, the analysis identifies several upsides to increasing the gas
tax, which has "a strong precedent for [its proceeds] being dedicated
to transportation investments," as opposed to a broader carbon tax or
cap-and-trade system, where multiple competing interests would — and did,
as the House climate bill shows — lay claim to a share of the
resulting government revenue to help finance efficiency upgrades.

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Republicans on the Senate environment committee, who months ago began criticizing
the Obama administration for evaluating federally funded infrastructure
projects for their impact on climate change, today introduced
legislation that would bar the White House from making climate a factor
in environmental reviews.

The GOP senators said their bill
was aimed at ensuring the government could not delay new road and
power-plant construction to gauge its climate impacts under the
precepts of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). That
40-year-old statute that requires local planners to conduct reviews of
any transport project that could significantly impact the health of
surrounding areas.

"As it stands, NEPA is
subject to frequent abuse by radical environmentalists who want to use
litigation to impose their agenda on federal agencies," Sen. David
Vitter (R-LA), one of the measure’s sponsors, said in a statement. "Our
bill seeks
to prevent that abuse."

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), responding to a petition from green groups, issued draft guidance
in February that asked agencies to evaluate the climate impacts of new
projects estimated to increase emissions by 25,000 metric tons or more
of CO2 — the same level that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
used for its rule on mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas production.

As the EPA noted in its explanation of the 25,000 metric ton threshold,
such a level of emissions would be equivalent to 4,600 new passenger
cars or the energy use of 2,3000 new homes.

The CEQ’s guidance is not set to become final until after a period of public comment ends next month.

The federal government can reap significant pollution-reduction
benefits by focusing on a national freight plan that replaces older
diesel equipment with newer, cleaner-burning train cars while building
out regional networks more efficiently, the Environmental Defense Fund
(EDF) said yesterday in a new report [PDF].

The
EDF report, aimed at lawmakers crafting the nation’s next long-term
transportation bill, uses freight’s growing share of U.S. carbon
emissions as a jumping-off point to call for broad reforms.

Freight
currently accounts for 25 percent of the transport sector’s annual
greenhouse gas production, according to EDF, but the government has
reported that freight’s share of total emissions is growing twice as
fast as that of passenger transport — thanks principally to the rise
of truck freight movement.

One of the report’s first examples of local freight reform is the CREATE project, a federally funded
effort to better align freight and passenger train movement in the
Chicago area. But the EDF’s policy agenda is not limited to rail;
efforts to retrofit and clean up diesel vehicles, such as California’s Carl Moyer program, get their due.

Two
more auto-centric recommendations from EDF are increased use of
tolling, which the group believes could be a tool for reducing
emissions, and electrifying truck stops. How do idling truckers
contribute to freight’s greenhouse gas production? From the report:

Read more…

Government subsidies for hybrid and electric cars, while
"politically seductive," will fail to achieve the Obama
administration’s national pollution-reduction goals if they are not
coupled with a significant increase in fuel prices, according to a new study by Harvard University researchers.

The
team at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
used U.S. Department of Energy economic models to evaluate six possible
outcomes for Washington’s newly reinvigorated push for a 17-percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2020, in keeping with President Obama’s pledge at the global Copenhagen climate talks.

Five
of the Harvard team’s six outcomes assumed a future carbon price of $30
per ton (higher than the price envisioned in the House-passed climate
bill) that rises over time, with other tweaks added to the system,
including continued government tax credits for hybrid and electric
vehicles, an immediate 50-cent hike in the gas tax, and more increases
in auto fuel-efficiency standards.

The researchers
concluded that taxpayer-funded clean-vehicle credits "are expensive and
not particularly effective at reducing CO2 emissions, at least in the
near term." In order to trim transportation’s 30-percent contribution
to total U.S. emissions, the Harvard team recommended an
all-of-the-above approach:

[O]ptions now being
discussed in Congress cannot by themselves achieve the significant
reductions in the transportation sector needed to meet the Obama
administration’s targets for total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by
2020. The most effective policy for reducing CO2 emissions and oil
imports from transportation is to spur the development and sale of more
efficient vehicles with strict efficiency standards while increasing
the cost of driving with strong fuel taxes. Without addressing both,
CO2 emissions from the U.S. transportation sector will continue to grow.

Of course, higher gas taxes are as anathema to politicians as clean-car
subsidies are alluring — which is leaving green groups wary of a
bipartisan Senate proposal
to include a new motor-fuel fee in climate legislation. The oil
industry has said it prefers a new carbon tax on fuel because companies
can more easily pass on the costs to consumers, attributing the resulting gas-price hikes to congressional climate action.

From the Harvard researchers’ perspective, however, expensive fuel is merely a means to an end.

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Last week, the New York Times broke the news that Texas based oil companies were funding the ballot initiative that would "temporarily" place the Greenhouse Gas reforms required by A.B. 32 on hold until California's unemployment rate reached 5.5%.  When discussing the news with some of my friends, it was greeted with a yawn.  After all, this is hardly the first time an out-of-state interest has placed a lot of money behind a ballot proposition, and A.B. 32 spends a lot more time promoting clean fuel than it does human powered transportation or transit.

At first glance, their lack of concern has some validity.  The California Legislative Analyst's Office doesn't even mention impacts to Smart Growth, transit, bikeways, Fix-It-First, or pedestrian improvements when discussing the impacts "postponing" the legislation would have.  It does mention vehicle emission standards, "cap and trade," programs, and green jobs.  In fact, when the state set targets for Land Use reductions in the Greenhouse Gas plan mandated by A.B. 32; it only plans for 1% of those reductions to come from land use.

While it's true that A.B. 32 has a lot more to do with bringing more clean cars to California than bringing Livable Streets, the legislation has also been the backbone of other major pieces of transportation reform.  Among them, S.B. 375, is the much heralded "Anti-Sprawl" Bill passed last year.  In a lengthy interview last May, Los Angeles City Planning Commissioner and Member of the Air Resource Board Michael Woo explained how S.B. 375 was reliant on a strong commitment to removing Greenhouse Gasses from our air:

SB 375 tackles a separate problem.  Pavley’s landmark climate law AB 32 committed California to the goal of rolling back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020, but it didn’t really spell out how California is going to achieve that goal.  SB 375 authored by Senator Steinberg is the next step in terms of addressing one of the major causes of Greenhouse Gas emissions related to transportation and land use.

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(editor's note: This is Part I of a two part series.  Next week we'll look specifically at how the repeal or delaying of this legislation would effect transportation and Livable Streets. - DN)

In 2006, the California Legislature passed, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed, A.B. 32, landmark legislation that would require the state to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. 

The legislation was the first of its kind in the United States, and while there has certainly been some eye rolling at the Governor’s jet-setting lifestyle; there’s almost no debate that reducing Greenhouse Gases is considered the central plank of the Governor's term in office. For transportation reformers and environmentalists, A.B. 32 is important legislation that could still be a “game changer” in the way California thinks about transportation.

However, thanks to a coalition of pro-business Republicans and the oil industry there is a strong push to place a measure on this fall’s ballot to “delay” the measure, citing the current economic client as a valid reason to delay trying to clean California’s air.  The measure would "delay" the implementation of A.B. 32 until the state unemployment level dips below 5.5%.

While the people officially pushing the ballot measure, former Gubernatorial candidate and current Congressman Tom McClintock and Assemblyman Dan Logue aren’t officially members of the oil lobby; a recent New York Times article revealed that oil giants Tesoro and Valero have funded the effort to get A.B. 32 on the ballot.  Neither firm will either confirm or deny their involvement.

Steven Maviglio, of Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs took exception to the idea that A.B. 32 is bad for the economy, "First of all, this initiative would destroy the clean energy economy.  There's more than $5 billion in venture capital, 3,000 businesses and 45,000 people employed in clean tech.  This would take a wrecking ball to the only flourishing part of the economy."

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