The Obama Administration is poised to announce a major deal on tailpipe emissions standards, bringing the whole country under one federal standard that fairly closely appropriates what California passed in 2002 and has been trying to get a waiver from the feds about ever since.
President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California's tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard, the officials said. As a result, cars and light trucks sold in the United States will be roughly 30 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016.
The White House would not divulge details, but environmental advocates and industry officials briefed on the program said that the president would grant California's longstanding request that its tailpipe emissions standards be imposed nationally. That request was denied by the Bush administration but has been under review by top Obama administration officials since January.
But Mr. Obama is planning to go further, putting in place new mileage requirements to be administered by the Department of Transportation that would match the stringency of the California program.
Under the new standard, the national fleet mileage rule for cars would be roughly 42 miles a gallon in 2016. Light trucks would have to meet a fleet average of slightly more than 26.2 miles a gallon by 2016.
This is a major victory for California, as well as a step forward for all sides of this debate. Auto companies, who apparently signed off on the deal, can now have certainty about their future production needs. The states can get out of court and provide a better environment for their constituents. And we all can breathe cleaner air while using less oil.
But the hilarious postscript must be highlighted. Politico reports that this deal will be announced tomorrow, with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in attendance. As CapAlert notes, there's just one problem: California has a statewide election tomorrow, and Arnold is not an absentee voter. Yes, the Governor, the head cheerleader and supporter of the special election, might miss out on voting in it (although, if the announcement takes place early enough, he could be reasonably expected to make it home before the polls close at 8pm).
You know Arnold can't resist the lure of the spotlight. And better for him to stand at the side of a popular President than try in vain to rescue a flawed set of ballot measures which have probably already failed, given the 2 million vote-by-mail ballots already cast. It probably appeals to him to leave town on Election Day and hide out in Washington. That's par for the course for him, failing to ever accept responsibility for the damage he's caused.
President Obama has officially directed the EPA to review the decision to deny California (and 17 other states) a waiver under the Clean Air Act to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions, and considering that Obama's EPA is about to hire the lead attorney in the Supreme Court case that found the EPA has the authority regulate carbon emissions, I expect we will see the waiver granted in short order.
"For the sake of our security, our economy and our planet, we must have the courage and commitment to change," Obama said in the East Room of the White House. "It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs."
Today's actions come as Obama seeks to fulfill campaign promises in the first days of his administration. The moves fulfill long-held goals of the environmental movement.
Lawmakers and environmentalists throughout California are hailing the move (I'll put some reactions on the flip). But notably, another group on board with the decisions are - wait for it - the automakers.
Auto-industry officials were surprisingly receptive to President Obama's announcement about tightening emission standards, saying the steps he announced were the best they could hope for.
"It seems the president has set out a reasonable process," said a top industry official who refused to be named. "He can say with credibility that there's a new sheriff in town. Now, maybe there's room to discuss this with stakeholders."
The uncertainty of the process, given the Bush Administration's failure to set standards passed by Congress in the 2007 energy bill and this looming fight over the California waiver which could have ended up in Congress or the courts, may be a factor in the auto companies' tepid support. So too is the fact that Obama and the federal government still partially controls the fate of the Big Three in the auto industry bailout.
Eventually, we will much to what amounts to a national standard, with 40% of the country's population poised to back California's emissions targets and the auto industry forced to calibrate to the higher standard. This will SPUR innovation, not dampen it, and will eventually be a boon to an industry which has failed to adapt to changing needs for far too long.
President Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday.
The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.
Mr. Obama's presidential memorandum will order the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration's past rejection of the California application. While it stops short of flatly ordering the Bush decision reversed, the agency's regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.
Just to pre-empt the whining from the right, the EPA had never before in its history denied California a waiver under the Clean Air Act. The courts have looked at this from the perspective of the automakers and have ruled repeatedly in favor of California and other states, agreeing that they are well within their rights to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Not only did the Bush Administration deny California the right to implement their tailpipe emissions law, they slow-walked the fuel efficiency standards passed by the Congress and signed by the then-President in 2007. President Obama will direct the Transportation Department to finalize those standards as well.
This will be announced in the East Room tomorrow. We now have a President who understands the need to act swiftly to combat the worst effects of climate change. California will finally be allowed to lead this effort.
It's worthwhile every so often to look for the silver lining in the storm clouds over this state. After all, we do have a new President! That seems to be working out! And his pick for EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, was confirmed last night. Which means that it's probably only a matter of days before California gets its long-sought waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions.
With a new occupant in the White House, California could soon start enforcing its landmark 2002 law requiring a sharp reduction in vehicle emissions.
State leaders and environmentalists are pressing for quick approval of a waiver that would let California and at least 13 other states impose tougher air-quality standards than allowed under federal law. The Bush administration rejected the request a year ago, but that could be reversed by President Barack Obama and his environmental team.
During the presidential campaign, Obama said he backed the California law. Last year, he co-sponsored a bill by Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California to approve the waiver.
"If I'm confirmed, I will immediately revisit the waiver," Lisa Jackson, Obama's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, told Boxer at her confirmation hearing last week.
This would set in motion a program to reduce emissions from vehicles by 30 percent over the next seven years. It would spur alternative transportation development like SUPERTRAINS out of necessity, and force the production of clean-energy vehicles. Industry was not going to innovate on their own; they had 30 years to recognize this problem but they sat on their hands. It's not a question of whether or not we can afford to implement this; given the natural disasters like wildfires that hit the state with increasing frequency, given the melting of the Sierra snowpack which decreases our access to water resources, given the public health effects of dirty air (a recent report showed that clean air increases lifespans by up to three years), given all the ancillary costs of climte change, we can't afford not to.
The Governor and state leaders have been lobbying for the waiver since President Obama's inauguration, and I'm confident that we'll see granting within the next week.
As the special session gets underway, the new "Budget Nun" Mac Taylor, and since it's a he this time I think we'll go with "Budget Priest", has released an overview of the Governor's proposals. The first thing that pops out is we now have a new shortfall number: $28 billion for the next 20 months, and an unsustainable long-term deficit thereafter.
State Faces $27.8 Billion Shortfall. We concur with the administration's assessment that the state's struggling economy signals a major reduction in expected revenues. Combined with rising state expenses, we project that the state will need $27.8 billion in budget solutions over the next 20 months.
Long-Term Outlook Similarly Bleak. The state's revenue collapse is so dramatic and the underlying economic factors are so weak that we forecast huge budget shortfalls through 2013?14 absent corrective action. From 2010?11 through 2013?14, we project annual shortfalls that are consistently in the range of $22 billion, as shown below.
Overall, Taylor is generally supportive of the Administration's proposals for closing the gap, but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the Governor is finally using realistic numbers and not employing any borrowing gimmicks. Compared to the 2008-09 budget, this is extremely welcome. However, Taylor makes the point that a short-term increase in the sales tax cannot possibly be the backbone of a long-term solution, and three years out we'd still see deficits in the range of $9-11 billion. Instead, he offers a couple points. First is one that I've been making a lot, that California needs to lobby hard for state and local government relief in the second stimulus package:
In the coming months, there is a good chance that Congress will pass economic stimulus measures in an effort to boost the national economy. In the past, some components of such measures have directly provided state fiscal relief. To date, the administration has not built any estimates of such relief into its budget numbers. For the time being, this is appropriately cautious to avoid counting on relief that may never come. The state, however, should continue to press the federal government for economic stimulus measures that will provide California with flexible fiscal relief. While such relief would not solve the state's budget problem, it could provide several billions of dollars in budgetary solutions.
(While we're at it, we could also recoup the $2 billion giveaway to Wells Fargo precipitated by the Treasury Department illegally changing the tax code to allow banks to avoid corporate taxes. Any California Congresscritters want to hop right on that?)
He also rightly notes that the Governor's tax proposals are regressive in nature, and offers one final solution - fix the VLF that you broke as your first act in Sacramento.
Alternative Program Realignment. As noted above, raising the VLF tax rate to 1 percent has merit from a tax policy perspective. If the Legislature made it the foundation of a program realignment with local governments, programmatic outcomes could be improved as well. Under this approach, $1.6 billion of state criminal justice and mental health programs could be realigned to counties and supported by (1) the revenues raised by the increase in the VLF rate and (2) most of the VLF fee revenues currently retained for administrative purposes by the DMV. By consolidating these program responsibilities at the county level, and giving counties significant program control and an ongoing revenue stream, we think California could achieve greater program outcomes and significant budgetary savings.
You can see the total savings chart at the end of this PDF, but clearly the VLF raise is the big story here. The LA Times picked it up as a news story and also on their op-ed page today. For those who counter that the VLF is just as regressive as the sales tax, it doesn't have to be.
Right now the VLF is a flat rate on the assessed value of a vehicle, which is based on its purchase price and a fixed schedule of depreciation (basically 10% per year). It's true that if all you did was raise the VLF to its old rate of 2% it would remain about as regressive as a sales tax (see Table 5 here), but that's not the only way you can do it. Unlike a sales tax, which needs to be a flat rate for administrative reasons, the VLF could easily vary by assessed value. It could stay at its current rate of 0.65% up to, say, $10,000 in assessed value, increase to 2% for more expensive cars, and increase still further to 4% for top end cars. The average rate would still be about 2%, but the incidence of the tax would be more progressive.
You can also build progressivity into the VLF by having it function as a carbon tax, essentially. You could set the VLF at a higher rate for cars that produce greater emissions, and at a lower rate for cars that are cleaner. As California is about to get a waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions under the Clean Air Act in a new Obama Administration, they would certainly be empowered to do so.
This is a repudiation of the very issue Schwarzenegger ran on in 2003. We'll see if he's inclined to own up to his mistake.
Among the many executive orders that Barack Obama will seek to overturn to rack up some quick victories at the beginning of his term, none may have a more lasting impact than granting the waiver to California to regulate their tailpipe emissions.
The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration's decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. "Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer," Obama said in January.
California had sought permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to require that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles be cut by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016, effectively mandating that cars achieve a fuel economy standard of at least 36 miles per gallon within eight years. Seventeen other states had promised to adopt California's rules, representing in total 45 percent of the nation's automobile market. Environmentalists cheered the California initiative because it would stoke innovation that would potentially benefit the entire country.
"An early move by the Obama administration to sign the California waiver would signal the seriousness of intent to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil and build a future for the domestic auto market," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
There are two reasons this is a major change. One, by granting that carbon dioxide emissions threaten human welfare, you open up a whole toolkit of innovative policy choices to follow to restrict them. Cap and trade or a carbon tax becomes not just a policy option but a madate under the EPA. The second, as noted in the article, is that dozens of states will seek to follow the California ruling on tailpipe emissions over the federal government. And once you have 45% of the market mandating a higher fuel efficiency standard, it is unlikely that automakers will create a secondary market at the lower standard. You will have raised the CAFE number by default.
All of this is a recognition that the dangers of global warming is real, and that an Obama Administration will not stand in the way of sound science that declares the danger and seeks to mitigate it. For all of the effort by polluters to save John Dingell's chairmanship from the clutches of Henry Waxman (and they're enlisting all the legislators they've bought off to that end), this executive order would have lots of reach regardless who controls global warming legislation in the Congress. It would mean that California can control its own destiny and regulate its own air. It will force innovation and create economic opportunity and improve public health and possibly save lives.
Measure R on the Los Angeles ballot would impose a 1/2 cent sales tax on county residents to pay for increased transit lines and services. This couldn't come at a more crucial time, as the MTA is poised to become a casualty of the financial crisis:
The next potential victims of the nation's credit crunch: nearly 1.5 million people who ride buses and trains each weekday in Los Angeles County. Transit officials say riders could soon be facing serious service cuts.
That's because the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority might have to quickly come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to pay investors under terms of deals it made involving American International Group, the troubled financial and insurance giant.
"I've lost a lot of sleep over this," said Terry Matsumoto, the chief financial service officer and treasurer for the MTA. He said it was "absolutely" certain the agency would have to cut service if the deals sour.
The state is already cutting transit funding in the budget, and sales tax revenues, which already partially fund the MTA, are seizing up, as the economy slows and job loss increases (fortunately unemployment flattened out in September, albeit at 7.7%).
This is not the time for cutbacks in service at the MTA. Ridership is at record highs, as people both avoid still-high gas prices (historically speaking) and more attention is paid individually to greenhouse gas emissions. The Air Resources Board just released their final draft for compliance with AB32, and I can't see how they could possibly reach their goals for greenhouse gas emission cuts without an increase in transit. That includes passing high-speed rail, of course, but obviously the existing transit structures, can't be pulled back at this important time.
Speaker Bass has been calling for the Governor to prioritize a federal stimulus package and has also been making noises about a state-based stimulus as well. That has to include protections for transit concerns like the MTA, and increased funding flowing to them as well. It's a job creation engine, an economic sustainability engine, and an engine to a better environment.
We can all do our part in Los Angeles County by passing Measure R as well.
• A Superior Court judge in Alameda County has ruled that cell phone companies cannot charge early-termination fees, and has ordered that Sprint return $18.2 million dollars to consumers. This will probably get fought on appeal, but right on. The concept of fee for service has worked pretty well for most of consumer capitalism, as has being nice to your customers instead of bullying them into compliance.
• There's been a lot of outrage at the LA City Council's ruling banning new fast-food restaurants from breaking ground in South LA for a year. Actually, far from being an issue of infringing on freedom, it's a little thing called land use, and every city has them - even the one that the outraged Will Saletan lives in.
I'm pretty skeptical that these proposed South LA regulations will do any good. But it's not unique or unusual for land use regulations to exist. And working class people around the country suffer dramatically larger concrete harms from the sort of commonplace suburbanist regulations that Saletan's been living with, without apparent complaint, in Chevy Chase. Those kind of regulations are bad for the environment, bad for public health, and serve to use the power of the state to redistribute upwards. So if you're going to rail against land use regulations, maybe pick the ones that really hurt people.
• In environmental news, Senate leaders like Barbara Boxer are calling for the resignation of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson for his preferring ideology over science, defying the advice of his own staff, evading oversight and misleading Congress, particularly about refusing the California waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions. They're also asking the Attorney General to investigate whether Johnson perjured himself at one of the California waiver hearings in Congress. In addition, Jerry Brown is suing the EPA for their refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at the nation's ports.
• And this is pretty interesting, turns out the Sarah of "Sarah's Law" (parental notification) doesn't have the squeaky-clean image her sponsors claim:
Backers of a ballot measure that would require parents to be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor acknowledged Friday that the 15-year-old on which "Sarah's Law" is based had a child and was in a common-law marriage before she died of complications from an abortion in 1994 [...]
A lawsuit co-sponsored by Planned Parenthood Affiliates and filed Friday in Sacramento County Superior Court asks the Secretary of State to remove the girl's story and other information it deemed misleading, including any reference to "Sarah's Law," from the material submitted for the official voter guide.
"If you can't believe the Sarah story, there's a lot in the ballot argument you can't believe," said Ana Sandoval, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood and the campaign against Proposition 4.
Using someone's life story for political means, and wrongly at that. Good people.
Don't forget the Begich fundraiser in SF tonight.
The No on 6 campaign will be doing some organizing in the next few weeks against Prop 6, another Runner initiative to wastefully incarcerate more of California's youth. There will be meetings in SoCal (tomorrow), SF(9/9), and in the Central Valley (9/16). Full details at the No on 6 website here.
Building on Bob's report about the San Francisco Clean Energy Act, the California Air Resources Board has released its draft blueprint designed to fall in line with the mandate of AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, by cutting emissions 30% by 2020.
The 75+ page plan includes a range of policy recommendations. Chief among them is increasing the state's renewable electricity standard. The plan also contains provisions for a regional cap-and-trade program that could work in harmony with other more specific policies to reduce pollution economywide. The plan also says CARB will consider a vehicle "feebate" program that would provide incentives to consumers to buy cleaner cars.
In addition, the proposal includes plans to reduce emissions from heavy-duty trucks with hybrid engine technology and better fuel economy. Like many of CARB's proposals, the heavy-duty truck provisions would improve public health by also reducing smog-forming pollution. The plan also advocates for a high-speed train system in California.
Jim Downing at the SacBee has more here. Analysis on the flip:
Just to update on the EPA's denial of a waiver to California to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions - the White House is now refusing thousands of documents on the matter to Henry Waxman's Oversight and Government Reform Committee, citing executive privilege.
"I don't think we've had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is conducting the investigation.
An EPA official, Jason Burnett, has told committee investigators that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson had favored granting the waiver but denied it after meeting with White House officials. In testimony last month, Johnson refused to say whether he'd discussed the waiver request with Bush.
The White House waited until the very day that the Oversight Committee was going to rule on contempt citations for failing to respond on this issue. And the OMB and the EPA basically answered by saying "we've given you enough documents, no more documents for you."
It's clear that the EPA and the Bush Administration will stonewall until the day they leave office on this front, and so it's up to the next President to make a determination on the waiver. And all you need to know about California's chances of being able to regulate emissions is that Obama supports the waiver, and McCain has been vague and evasive about it (not to mention he's taken more money from oil companies than any other Presidential candidate).
Meanwhile, California is offering another regulatory solution: they're adding a Global Warming score to the sticker of every car for sale in the state.
The California Air Resources Board said Thursday the window sticker will give consumers the information they need to choose a cleaner-burning car or light truck.
"This label will arm consumers with the information they need to choose a vehicle that saves gas, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps fight smog all at once," board chairman Mary Nichols said in a statement. "Consumer choice is an especially powerful tool in our fight against climate change. We look forward to seeing these stickers on 2009 model cars as they start hitting the showrooms in the coming months."
We'll see if this affects consumer choice in the coming months, although the fuel economy portion of the sticker is already driving demand. To say nothing of those 5 hydrogen fuel cell cars turning up on Southern California roads.
Henry Waxman has assembled a litany of evidence detailing the role of the White House in the EPA denial of a waiver to California to implement the landmark tailpipe emissions law under the Clean Air Act. The most intriguing pieces of information are emails between EPA staffers and White House officials, which show how the staff found the waiver routine, and the White House stepped in to block it. Also, EPA Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett admitted in a deposition that the White House was the main player in the negotiations:
According to Mr. Burnett's deposition testimony, Administrator Johnson's preference for a full or partial grant of the waiver did not change until after he communicated with the White House. When asked by Committee staff "whether the Administrator communicated with the White House in between his preference to do a partial grant and the ultimate decision" to deny the waiver, Mr. Burnett responded: "I believe the answer is yes."
California creates the same amount of greenhouse gases as the entire country of Mexico. With the other 17 states that have signaled they would take the option of following the California emission plan added in, you have the emissions equivalent of maybe half a billion to 750,000,000 people on the planet that would be reduced if it weren't for the White House stepping in to stop progress. I believe in state-level innovation as steps to solving the crisis of climate change, but here we have a case where California did everything right, and the White House still held the trump card.
There's a hearing today in the House Oversight Committee, and EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is planning to testify.
(b) As a state regulation related to fuel economy standards, any state regulation regulating tailpipe
carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles is expressly preempted under 49 U.S.C. 32919.
(c) A state regulation regulating tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, particularly a regulation that is not attribute-based and does not separately regulate passenger cars and light trucks, conflicts with:
1. The fuel economy standards in this Part
2. The judgments made by the agency in establishing those standards, and
3. The achievement of the objectives of the statute (49 U.S.C. Chapter 329)
This actually changes little in the near term. The EPA has already denied California a waiver to regulate their own emissions, a ruling that is under court appeal. And the Supreme Court has already ruled on the belief that gas mileage standards and greenhouse gas emissions are separate, and that the states may act to regulate the latter.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and a coalition of governors have acted swiftly:
NHTSA has no authority to preempt states from regulating greenhouse gases. Congress and two federal district courts have rejected NHTSA's claim to such authority. Furthermore, this attack completely undermines the cooperative federalism principles embodied in the Clean Air Act, and is an end run around 40 years of precedent under that law.
Our states intend to comment on the proposed rulemaking and, if necessary, will sue NHTSA, just as California and other states have sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to ensure that states retain the right to reduce global climate change emissions...
It just adds to the extreme hackitude that has characterized this Administration's actions on global warming. We learned this week that over half of all EPA scientists have "experienced incidents of political interference in their work." Now the Department of Transportation gets added to the list.
Congressional Democrats are now trying to move legislation that would overturn the EPA's anti-scientific decision which denied California a waiver to regulate their own tailpipe emissions. Arnold Schwarzenegger is suing the EPA. It seems that the only group of people who aren't on board with this policy are Republican members of Congress.
Most GOP members of the state's congressional delegation are siding with the Bush administration in trying to keep states from imposing stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions than the federal government. Without bipartisan support from the state's representatives, the bill's proponents say, the measure's prospects are dim.
"I don't support California thinking that it can act alone effectively," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), noting that climate change is a problem that extends beyond state lines.
A House bill to allow California and other states to implement their own tailpipe regulations was introduced last week, with the support of 27 of the 33 California Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. Only two of the 19 Republicans -- Rep. David Dreier of San Dimas, who is perhaps Schwarzenegger's closest ally in the delegation, and Rep. Mary Bono Mack of Palm Springs -- signed on as cosponsors.
In addition to Issa, John Campbell, Kevin McCarthy, George Radanovich, Devin Nunes and Wally Herger are quoted, all saying a variation of how global warming is a big problem and we have to have a unified solution. Of course, 18 other states are signing on to California's lawsuit, representing a majority of the population who actually wants to do something abut climate change.
I really think this has the potential of politically isolating the GOP. It's notable that Dreier and Bono Mack understand that their districts are becoming more purplish, and that they need to stay out in front of them. But the combination of hypocrisy among the state's rights crowd and being on the wrong side of popular opinion (most California Republicans favor granting the waiver) and scientific rationality could make for a powerful wedge. We know that people are finally starting to drive less. Utilities are starting to block production of any and all coal-fired power plants. And there's a growing recognition that this is a public health issue as much as it is an environmental issue. Those who are standing in the way of renewable projects, alternative energy solutions, and yes, government mandates to solve the problem are dinosaurs. At the Congressional level, I believe this vote will resonate in November.
Incidentally, if you want to see some of that post-partisan leadership in action, check it out:
Schwarzenegger spokesman Bill Maile said the governor supports the legislation. By allowing California to implement "the nation's toughest tailpipe regulations," he said, "it will help us achieve our aggressive goals to reduce greenhouse gases." But a number of California Republicans in Congress say that they have yet to hear from Schwarzenegger or his office.
• If you're interested in helping Barack Obama but aren't flying to Ohio or Texas like Brian and Julia, the Obama campaign is urging supporters in California to make phone calls into Texas this weekend. MoveOn is also running Yes We Can parties on Saturday and Sunday.
• Let's not give the Governor a heap of credit just yet for accepting the Legislative Analyst's suggestions to close billions of dollars in tax loopholes. According to the Sacramento Bee he ran away from this proposal within a matter of hours.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told business leaders Thursday he supports a proposal by nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill to rescind $2.7 billion in tax credits, but he later softened that stance and said he doesn't necessarily support all of her recommendations.
The Governor will be in Columbus this weekend for the Arnold Classic, an annual bodybuilding and fitness event, so if you get a minute, Juls, you can go ask him about this yourself!
• Tired of being bashed with the facts over the past several weeks, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has come out swinging, defending his decision to deny the California waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions on the grounds that global warming is a global problem. Which means, of course, we need to do less to fight it. Also today the EPA turned over documents related to their decision, months after they were requested.
• On a somewhat different note, I'm interested in this protest by the environmental justice community against cap-and-trade solutions such as what is promised in California as unfair to low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by polluting industries that would be able to buy their way into continuing to pollute those areas.
EJ groups, long overlooked in the more mainstream environmental movement, fear that climate legislation will once again disregard the concerns of the communities who are already most affected by the factories and refineries responsible for global warming. In a cap-and-trade system, poor communities, where polluting plants are most often sited, will still bear the brunt of impacts if industries are allowed to trade for rights to pollute there. Instead of this system, they're advocating a carbon tax, direct emissions reductions, and meaningful measures to move America to clean, renewable energy sources.
"[C]arbon trading is undemocratic because it allows entrenched polluters, market designers, and commodity traders to determine whether and where to reduce greenhouse gases and co-pollutant emissions without allowing impacted communities or governments to participate in those decisions," says the statement.
I think it's a powerful argument, and something the environmental movement has to seriously consider. If we're going to allow polluting industries to pollute, there will be an adverse affect. How do we deal with that?
• In yet another reason why we should not allow the continued consolidation of media, new LA Times owner Sam Zell has now taken to the airwaves, blaming the coming recession on... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talking about the coming recession. Yeah, shut up already! This is the owner of the largest paper in California requesting what amounts to censorship, incidentally.
• Finally, a federal judge in San Francisco today lifted the injunction on the Wikileaks website, which allowed whistleblowers to post documents and anonymous information about government and corporate malfeasance. A win for the First Amendment and the public interest.
Sen. Barbara Boxer's digging into documents on the decision by the EPA not to issue a waiver to California so we can regulate tailpipe emissions is bearing some serious fruit. The EPA staff went to great lengths to try and persuade the Bush lacky Steven L. Johnson not to overrule them and precedent and deny California the right to reduce greenhouse gases in our state. LAT:
Some officials at the Environmental Protection Agency were so worried their boss would deny California permission to implement its own global-warming law that they worked with a former EPA chief to try to persuade the current administrator to grant the state's request.
That unusual effort was revealed by documents released Tuesday by congressional investigators probing whether EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson was swayed by political pressure when he decided not to allow California to enact vehicle emission standards stricter than the federal government's.
They actually even supplied him with talking points to lobby Johnson with. (flip it)
So Barbara Boxer is not sitting on her heels waiting for a new President, she's acting boldly to reverse Stephen Johnson's horrible EPA decision blocking California from regulating tailpipe emissions.
Senate environmental committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has introduced a bill that would overrule EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and instruct him to grant California's waiver.
Right out of the gate, it's got bipartisan support. Cosponsors include Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Joseph Lieberman (ID, CT), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), John Kerry (D-MA), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Barack Obama (D-IL), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).
It was fairly certain that litigation would reach the same result, or that a Democratic President would order the EPA to reverse the decision. But that would take quite a while, and in the interim, the climate deteriorates even further.
Shortly before Stephen L. Johnson was sworn in by President Bush as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he gave the president a towel symbolizing a New Testament passage in which Jesus washes his disciples' feet. The towel, given to graduates of Johnson's alma mater, a small evangelical college, symbolizes a life of Christian service.
Like the president, Johnson is a deeply religious man who says he relies on his faith in his work. Johnson prayed and spoke gratefully of early-morning prayer sessions held in his government office in a promotional video filmed there for an offshoot of a worldwide Christian ministry.
We'll see if Boxer can get what would be a needed 67 votes to overcome a Bush veto. But good for her for trying to accelerate the process.
To be completely honest, while I expected a long hearing today, I didn't quite realize it was going to entail over four hours of testimony and fourdistinctlivebloggingthreads. A lot of stuff there to process, and Hill Heat (which also live-blogged part of the hearing over at Daily Kos), Think Progress, and TPM Muckraker all spotlight key highlights (the latter two with the assistance of somewhat-hillarious video clips), as David noted in his earlier post here.
At the end of the day, though, EPA Administrator Johnson's rationale was best summed up in one of his exchanges, a little after noon, with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). Observing that Johnson had responded to a prior question by saying that California's vehicle emissions standards were not needed "in my opinion," Whitehouse flatly stated that the law is pretty clear that he can't substitute his preferences for California's policy judgment. A bit flummoxed, Johnson fell back once again on the argument that the Clean Air Act lets him decide whether California has met its conditions.
In other words, Johnson was saying that yes, he can essentially do as he pleases in terms of interpreting Section 209 of the Clean Air Act. I point to my earlier post on this subject: while he may indeed have some amount of deference provided, it has to be within reason:
This argument for strong deference to the Administrator's reading of the act (usually we'd say "agency deference," but it's now clear that the rest of the agency isn't at all with him) is right along the lines that our own Tim Dowling anticipated-- and debunked as unlikely to stand up in court in this case-- after the waiver was denied. EPA staff seem to have convincingly laid out why, under the law, the waiver should be granted and anything to the contrary wouldn't fly. Johnson's assertion that the Clean Air Act lets him instead impose his policy preferences entirely novel reading of the Act is simply shaky.
Sure, Johnson said today, things like precedent, 99% supportive public comments and his staff's unanimous opinions weigh on him (though by the way, many of those public comments looked to him like a "card-writing campaign" designed to draw him into a "popularity contest"-- the nerve of those people, and the tens of thousands we're told have already emailed to protest his decision!). But at the end of the day, in his incomplete legal judgment, it's his independent decision to decide that there weren't "compelling and extraordinary circumstances" for a waiver because global warming is different and is a worldwide pheonomenon, and that's all there is to it.
Do check out Sean Siperstein at Warming Law's liveblog of today's events in the Senate Environment Committee, where Barbara Boxer and others made EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson squirm for quite a while this morning.
The background, including Boxer's finding that the EPA staff favored the granting to California of the waiver for them to regulate tailpipe emissions, is here and here. More on today's session is here and here, including the hilarious admission that the EPA used duct tape to redact documents about their decision-making process.
BOXER: Colleagues, this is the tape, this is the tape that was put over - finally the administration had a way to use duct tape. This administration, this is what they did to us. They put this white tape over the documents and staff had to stand here. It's just unbelievable. [...]
I mean what a waste of our time. This isn't national security. This isn't classified information, colleagues. This is information the people deserve to have. And this is not the way we should run the greatest government in the world. It does not befit us. So that's why I'm worked up about it and think we have been treated in a very shabby way.
Even Lieberman was laying into Johnson on this one. What an embarrassment.
Late on Friday, the EPA delivered a box of hard-copy documents about the California waiver denial from to Senator Barbara Boxer, theoretically meeting her past-deadline demand for disclosure in advance of Thursday's Senate hearing. The catch, as per the Associated Press-- many documents were either missing or contained numerous redactions. In a letter from Deputy Administrator Christopher Bliley, EPA invoked executive privilege regarding executive deliberations and attorney-client communications, claiming above all that a failure to restrict public release of the documents would have a "chilling effect" on agency decisions [...]
Boxer had threatened to subpoena the agency if it did not turn over the waiver documents. She said she would continue her quest for all the information. Boxer aides said the agency's offer to show her the redacted information privately was not satisfactory.
Apparently 16 pages of a 43-page Power Point presentation were completely blank except for the titles - one of which said "EPA likely to lose suit."
Sen. Boxer is extremely angry about this dodging of federal oversight, calling it "an insult to the American people and a dereliction of duty." There's a hearing about the EPA waiver denial in the Senate Environment Committee scheduled for Thursday, and the Chief Administrator Stephen Johnson will be there. Insofar as Senate committee hearings are must-see TV, this will be one of them.
When we last left EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, his agency was facing a lawsuit from California and over a dozen other states over his failure to grant a waiver allowing tailpipe emission regulation. It was fairly clear that this decision was wholly political and in no way matching the scientific studies inside the EPA; Johnson's staff was unanimously opposed to the decision. Last week, Sen. Boxer chaired a field hearing in Los Angeles to investigate what was behind the denial of the waiver. Johnson failed to attend. This is from an email:
California Attorney General Jerry Brown, California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, the NRDC's Fran Pavley, and Congresswoman Hilda Solis all appeared as witnesses. Unfortunately, one chair at the briefing was noticeably empty: the seat we reserved for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
Clearly, EPA Administrator Johnson does not want California and 18 other states to implement California's higher emission standard for automobiles -- a key part of our fight against global warming -- but the public deserves to know why. We can't let Administrator Johnson hide the truth from the American people.
At the hearing, Attorney General Brown called on Boxer to subpoena Johnson and all of the relevant documents that went into the decision. Boxer is planning a hearing on January 24th with the EPA Administrator, and she's attempting to use public pressure to get Johnson to release the documents. She's asking supporters to forward Johnson this email (over):
