With help from Camille von Kaenel, Blanca Begert and Jordan Wolman
HOLDING ON TO OIL: The Biden administration and California lawmakers are pouring billions into clean energy technologies, with the promise that fossil fuel workers will have a place in the new, renewables-focused economy.
Someone may have forgotten to tell the Trades.
The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California continues to plague Democrats trying to pass climate policies in Sacramento.
That’s despite the rise of promising new industries like offshore wind and hydrogen production that are more union-friendly than previous iterations of the renewables industry, and despite some high-profile alliances, like the Trades’ immediate past president, Andrew Meredith, going over to offshore wind developer RWE.
There still aren’t enough high-paying jobs in the right places to make the Trades’ 500,000 pipefitters, plumbers, painters and other construction workers comfortable enough to relinquish their alliance with Big Oil. And environmental groups’ opposition to hydrogen and carbon capture isn’t helping.
“We believe we’re still going to be working in the oil and gas space for the foreseeable future,” Chris Hannan, president of the Trades, told Alex.
The Trades allied with the Western States Petroleum Association last session to oppose SB 253, a bill to require large businesses to report their greenhouse gas emissions. They also opposed last year’s law establishing a buffer zone between oil wells and homes, schools and other sensitive areas.
While these bills ultimately passed, the Trades’ opposition carries more weight than oil companies’ among the state’s increasingly progressive Democratic supermajority.
“Certain parts of the Trades are extra sensitive to the main industries they work for,” said state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Sherman Oaks). “When Chevron rings the alarm, okay, that’s tens of thousands of jobs there, so we’ve got to be super attentive.”
It’s not necessarily a national story: California is one of the few Democratic-led states with significant oil production and the valuable project labor agreements that go along with it, which are part of the reason that California’s fossil fuel workers make an average of $30,000 more per year than solar workers do.
But the struggle highlights two bigger questions about how states can pass policies curbing their oil production — and how they can quickly build massive amounts of clean energy infrastructure without undercutting labor.
“We’re at that crucial fork in the road,” said state Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Salinas). “The impact of making the wrong decisions is going to be long-lasting and pretty devastating. I don’t think that it’ll be easy to undo the damage.”
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COP-DATE: Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is using his visit to Dubai this week for COP 28 to make the point that the entire world is having problems with insurance because of climate change, not just California.
Lara, who’s under pressure to woo insurers back to fire-prone areas where coverage is hard to find, has been meeting with insurance experts from around the world, he said during a live-streamed conversation Monday with Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot on the sidelines of a reception in Dubai.
“We’re all tied, so when there’s fires in Greece, or fires in Louisiana or Alaska, or floods in Bangladesh, that all affects us and our ability to find insurance that’s affordable,” Lara said. “Insurance doesn’t know partisanship.”
Case in point: A climate-focused subcommittee of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a bipartisan group, voted over the weekend to begin identifying gaps in property insurance when it comes to climate change and propose a menu of solutions. Lara called the plan to gather and analyze data from the companies “unheard of.”
Lara also said one of his take-home goals from COP is making sure insurance companies have a plan to bring their greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
It’s not a new idea: the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance launched in 2021. But the group has been losing members lately because of political pressure from state-level Republicans who are pushing back against environmental, social and governance-related decisions in finance and say the alliance’s goals may violate antitrust laws. — CvK
TOP COP AT COP: Guess who else was at COP28? California attorney general Rob Bonta, who spoke at a side event on Sunday about the lawsuit he filed in September against five large oil majors and the American Petroleum Institute.
Bonta’s talk teed up a panel about efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account around the world. Speakers included Natalia Greene, from the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, who spoke about the August vote in Ecuador to stop oil drilling in a section of the Amazon. John Beard Jr. from the Port Arthur Community Action Network in Texas discussed a recent legal win in the battle to stop gas exports from the Gulf Coast.
Said Bonta: “If you look at our over 100 page complaint that was very carefully constructed with data and evidence gathered, it will make your blood boil.”
METHANE MADNESS: This was a big weekend for methane, one of the most potent heat-trapping substances around.
On Saturday, the EPA unveiled new regulations, two years in the making, to slash methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 80 percent.
The release coincided with new methane pledges and announcements at COP28, including a voluntary pledge from 50 global oil and gas companies to end methane emissions by 2030. (Environmentalists called the move a smokescreen.)
California had a methane announcement too. In Dubai on Saturday, state officials kicked off a partnership of subnational governments committed to reducing the short(er)-lived, yet highly potent, greenhouse gas, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of current global warming.
The coalition is non-binding and doesn’t include new targets or specific goals that countries sign onto. But it’s aimed at helping states and municipalities learn from each other and develop strategies to reduce methane emissions from different sectors.
(Readers may recognize this as the same initiative that was launched last September during Climate Week in New York City with seven jurisdictions. It has now expanded to 15 signatories, with new collaborators from Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Bolivia, Germany, Spain and the U.S.)
As California prepares to launch the first of its methane tracking satellites next year, UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change is hosting a COP event Dec. 6 on the challenges and opportunities of using new methane remote sensing data. CARB chair Liane Randolph will be presenting. — BB
GETTING IN THE POOL: We’ve reported that carbon accounting firms are salivating in theory over Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 253, the new law that requires big businesses to report their greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s a new group seeking to capitalize on the flurry of demand for emissions accounting and verification services: the Carbon Accounting Alliance, which launched last month and has 158 members eager to help companies comply with California and EU emissions laws.
“This is going to move faster than any transition we’ve ever had,” co-founder Andrew Griffiths, director of policy and partnership at U.K.-based sustainability certifier Planet Mark, told Jordan. “This transition represents the greatest market opportunity in human history. There are going to be winners and there are going to be losers in this race in every sector in every industry.” — JW
— There’s a traffic jam for clean energy to connect to the California grid.
— It was a good year for SoCal firefighters, relatively speaking.
— How Biden’s new EV tax credit rules threaten to slow the transition to electric cars.
