Amid the swell of protesters demanding California put an end to oil, and a police force growing irritated with their monotonous chanting (“I’m going to be singing that one in my sleep,” said one officer), I met Theodore Hunt. It was not a chance meeting. Earlier, on the first day of the Global Climate Action Summit at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, I had rented an electric-assist bike to get to a lunch meeting, navigating the downtown streets by way of Google Maps with my iPhone in the bike’s basket. In a rush to lock up the bike outside the restaurant, I left my phone behind.

Hunt was my savior. When I called my number on a borrowed phone, he answered, and promised to leave the phone for me later at the office of the bike company, Jump. But the office was far, and I needed my phone, so instead I tracked him down using an iPad and the Find Your iPhone app. When the tiny phone icon showed up at a building across the street, I scurried down three flights of escalators, borrowing phones along the way to sync up my coordinates with Hunt. Cops, security guards, random strangers — by the time we all spotted a tall African-American man on a bright red bike waving from across Third Street, it seemed all of San Francisco had become invested in our saga. When Hunt and I made the handoff and I hugged him with gratitude, a small cheer went up.

It was a magically reassuring moment during an international gathering of climate activists, elected officials and corporate leaders who had come here committed to holding the United States to the terms of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, Trump and his administration be damned.

Much of the summit was simple corporate and government backslapping — noble but too easily mocked. What does it matter if General Electric presents its climate ideals when the corporation refuses to back down on plans for a new coal plant in Kenya? Starbucks might have banned plastic straws, but emissions still accumulate in the long lines at its many drive-throughs. And McDonald’s? Really?

For protesters outside the fences, maintaining global temperature below the point-of-no-return threshold means that, in some cases, entire industries have to be shut down. “We have to keep 80 percent of the fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground,” the noted author and climate warrior Bill McKibben has written. “If we don’t—if we dig up the coal and oil and gas and burn them—we will overwhelm the planet’s physical systems, heating the Earth far past the red lines drawn by scientists and governments.”

The problem with that strategy is that with those industries, oil and coal, come many thousands of well-paying, often union jobs. “Climate strategies that leave coal miners’ pension funds bankrupt, power plant workers unemployed, construction workers making less than they do now,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a speech on opening day, “fundamentally undermine the power of the political coalition needed to address the climate crisis.” The issue of the climate versus jobs will be used by the foes of both labor and clean energy to divide the country, Trumka noted. It already has.

In the near term, if oil extraction were to suddenly come to an end in California, 30,000 people would lose their livelihoods, and thousands more will be out of work in places where industries depend on California oil. In the long term, jobs wouldn’t be available to a new generation full of people like Theodore Hunt — smart, honest and capable, but not necessarily pre-armed with the privilege and educational credentials to parlay those qualities into a six-figure job. Hunt, who is 28 and single, told me he works as much as he can: As a mechanic servicing the city’s network of electric bikes, he can earn as much as $800 on a busy week. If he meshes his maintenance duties with a food-delivery service, like Uber Eats, he might make $1,200 in a week — a decent living wage almost anywhere besides San Francisco, where he can’t afford to live.

But the big weeks are rare, and if Hunt gets sick, or injured, or takes a mental-health break, he doesn’t get paid at all. He belongs to the 8.5 percent of California workers whom the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center calls the “unincorporated self-employed.” He gets paid when he delivers a meal or services a bike. He does not get paid when he stops to eat lunch. If he wants health insurance, he must buy it himself.

Hunt likes his job: The hours vary, he gets to be outside, he interacts with people. Like so many other “green” jobs, Hunt’s is many times more pleasant and safer than mining coal, or working on an oil rig. But it’s not a steady living on which to buy a house or support a family.

Nor is installing solar panels on rooftops, a job that generally pays $14 to $20 and hour, rarely with benefits. Trumka told the summit that 4,000 megawatts of solar had been installed in the San Joaquin Valley over the last two decades. “Fifteen million job-hours of union work, at union wages and with union benefits, made that possible,” he said. But once those plants are built, it takes only a few people to keep them operating, and no one has to mine the fuel. The same math applies to wind farms: Once the turbines are up, most of the work is done.

Paul Getsos, national director of the People’s Climate Movement, has spent more than a decade thinking through what it means to bring the labor movement into the climate fight by way of a just transition for workers. He organized in disadvantaged communities around the Obama administration’s stimulus package. Later, he assessed green jobs for the Center for Community Change, and found that “the promise of ‘green jobs’ wasn’t fulfilled for a lot of communities. There’s a very narrow view of what a ‘green job’ is.” The solution to the worker-transition conundrum for a 100 percent clean energy economy is to expand that definition. “Manufacturing electric cars is a ‘green job,’ said Getsos. “Rebuilding infrastructure in North Carolina to keep people safe from coal ash — that’s a ‘green job.’”

Retrofitting homes and business to use less energy is also a green job — and one of the best, according to Getsos: “[Energy efficiency] is one of the areas where there is access to new jobs that don’t require higher education.” It’s also ripe for job growth. In New York City, a mandate to retrofit the city’s buildings — which account for two-thirds of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions — will yield 17,000 jobs between now and 2030.

Energy efficiency isn’t a big field in some of the smaller towns where dirty fossil-fuel plants exist. In Centralia, Washington, where a coal plant employing 300 workers making $80,000 a year will begin shutting down in 2020, environmentalists and labor negotiated an agreement with the city and the plant operator, TransAlta, to invest $55 million in worker retraining and community development in exchange for an expedited permit to build a natural gas plant on the same site. (Natural gas isn’t perfect, but for the climate it’s better than coal.)

Legislators could also intervene with laws granting benefits and collective bargaining rights to people like Theodore Hunt. As smart technology expands further into transportation and utilities, some necessary jobs will become more fluid for employers and less rewarding for workers. California Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher has introduced two bills over the past few years to give contract employees workers’ compensation benefits and the right to form and join unions, and Assemblymember Evan Low last session brought up a bill that would guarantee contract workers portable benefits. None have yet made it to the governor’s desk.

“We can’t just say ‘green jobs’,” Getsos said. “We need to say green jobs, good jobs and worker access.”

Those principles might be as consequential to the clean-energy economy as are the protesters’ demands.

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The lawsuit would expand the doctrine of public trust–which is normally reserved for resources like land and water–to the atmosphere.

In August of 2015, lawyers representing 21 young people, aged 8 to 19, filed an ambitious lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Oregon. They argued that the federal government, by allowing and encouraging fossil fuel emissions, had violated “fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty and prosperity”–a burden that would fall heaviest on coming generations.

The lawsuit, spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, a Eugene-based environmental organization, seeks to force the government to phase out fossil fuel emissions. In response, the Obama administration filed a motion to dismiss, as did representatives of the fossil fuel industry, including the American Petroleum Institute. Both motions were denied. In 2017, the new Trump administration took the rare step of petitioning for a “writ of mandamus” to ask that a higher court—in this case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—order the District Court to dismiss the case. That petition was rejected in March, and a second petition was rejected in July, setting the stage for what promises be a monumental trial that will begin October 29.

The case, Juliana v. U.S., takes its name from lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana, a 22-year-old University of Oregon student who once marched 1,600 miles from Nebraska to Washington, DC to demand action on climate change. When she was 15, Juliana co-filed a separate lawsuit, also supported by Our Children’s Trust, against Oregon’s governor that sought the creation of a climate emissions reduction plan. In 2015, an Oregon Circuit Court ruled against Juliana and Our Children’s Trust; they have appealed the decision.

Our Children’s Trust has pending legal actions in nine states on behalf of youth plaintiffs.

At the center of these lawsuits is the concept of the public trust doctrine, which posits that the government has a duty to protect the natural resources that a society needs to survive. But these suits add a twist by expanding the doctrine–which is normally reserved for resources like land and water–to the atmosphere, based on a theory pioneered by University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood.

The legal outcome of the trial is impossible to predict, but advocates for stronger climate action, like professor Wood, are excited about the opportunity the trial presents to explain to the public how the government has known for decades about the dangers of fossil fuels but allegedly failed to act on this knowledge. In a 1965 address to Congress, for example, President Lyndon Johnson said, “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

“It is of paramount importance that the American public understand what government’s role is in causing the climate catastrophe,” Wood said in a recent interview with 350 Eugene. “Because if the American public doesn’t understand how it is caused, it won’t take action towards a solution.”

Jacob Lebel, another of the youth plaintiffs, grew up on a farm in Oregon. “Years from now, Trump and his cabinet—they won’t be the ones dealing with starvation and refugees and resource wars and all that stuff,” Lebel told KQED last year. “We’re the ones who are gonna be dealing with that. As young people, we think about that every single day.”

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“Because the current administration is so anti-science, so anti-environment, so anti-climate, people who weren’t paying attention before are paying attention now.”

Until he resigned last year, Mustafa Santiago Ali served as the Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he’d worked since 1992. Under the direction of the agency’s first administrator of the Office of Environmental Equity, Dr. Clarice Gaylord, Ali helped begin the EPA’s effort to recognize and address the disproportionate impacts of pollution on communities situated closest to industrial polluters, communities where people — often people of color — live in poverty. He worked with the Clinton administration on Executive Order 12898, which established a federal program to address environmental justice in communities of color and low-income communities, and in 2007, he went to Capitol Hill to work as a Brookings Institution Congressional Fellow with Rep. John Conyers. He returned to the agency the next year, and stayed until the Trump administration proposed cutting nearly $2 billion from the EPA’s already meager $8.2 billion budget, and a leaked memo revealed plans to eliminate the Office of Environmental Justice that Ali had helped found. (Congress ultimately rejected the cuts in the current federal budget, passed in March of 2018).

Ali is now the Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice & Community Revitalization for the Washington, DC-based Hip Hop Caucus, a national nonprofit that joins the hip hop community to the civic process of politics, social change and the environment. At the recent Climate Reality Conference in Los Angeles, he spoke on a panel of environmental justice advocates, which included Catherine Flowers and mark! Lopez of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. Ali had audience members join hands and reaffirm their collective power to effect social and political transformation. I spoke with him afterwards in the over-air-conditioned lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Capital & Main: You spent 24 years at EPA, beginning when George H.W. Bush was still in office, and stayed through the second Bush administration, too. How did you weather other more conservative administrations?

Mustafa Santiago Ali: When I started, at the end of [then-EPA Administrator] William Reilly’s administration in 1992, we were really blessed that there was a lot of energy around environmental equity, which became environmental justice. A number of the leaders had gotten together in 1991, through the first National People of Color [Environmental Leadership] Summit in Washington, DC, and put together a set of recommendations before they began to engage with the federal government. One of those recommendations was the creation of an Office of Environmental Equity/Environmental Justice. Those recommendations drove a lot of work that happened in both Republican and Democratic administrations in the early days.

We began to move forward on the creation of the environmental justice small-grants program during the first Bush administration. In the transition to the Clinton administration, we were able to move things forward because an executive order came that I was blessed to be able to work on. Out of that executive order came the interagency working group, which means there are now 17 federal agencies – back then it was 11 — and a couple of White House offices that have distinct responsibility for environmental justice.

There had been successes under all of those administrations. There were challenges in that certain administrations were more tied into business and industry. But all of them made progress before this administration we’re in now.

So even Bush II. They had an office to doctor studies done by scientists within Fish and Wildlife, for instance. But you’re saying there was still progress on environmental justice then?

There was. It was incremental, and I don’t want to oversell it. But without a doubt, it existed. No one ever talked about eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice under Bush.

How hard was it for you to leave?

I had to struggle with it. I prayed, I talked to my parents, I talked to my mentors. There were a couple of times I was going to jump out right at the beginning [of the Trump administration]. Maya Angelou has that great quote about how when someone tells you who they are, believe them. But there’s always that thing, you know, maybe they’ll have a road to Damascus moment. Maybe there’ll be this transition. But it wasn’t going to happen. That was being overly hopeful.

I knew the policies they were moving forward on literally could kill people. I knew that, because even when things are moving in a somewhat positive direction, people are still very vulnerable. And I knew that these folks, they just didn’t care about all of these leaders, these grassroots leaders and others, who sacrificed everything to try and strengthen environmental laws, to try to get real enforcement actually happening. They’ve put into their own reports that they know their policies are going to kill people – especially people of color.

Enforcement of environmental crimes is almost non-existent.

I knew that was coming. They were very clear about what they wanted to do around air pollution issues. And since I led the inter-agency working group, I knew that the cumulative effect is that more people were going to get sick and more people were going to die.

You’ve addressed in your career an overlooked part of environmental justice: the impact of natural and man-made disasters on disadvantaged communities. We saw it in Katrina, in Harvey, and we saw it in Irma and Maria. There are vulnerable people who suffer a disproportionate share of the impacts of these events.

The reason for that — we saw it in Hurricane Maria, all the lives that were lost — is if you don’t have a specific focus and understanding of the additional impacts that happen in vulnerable communities, you can’t protect folks and help them recover. Flint, the BP oil spill, the hurricanes — we can go down the line in terms of disasters. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about low-income white communities, communities of color or indigenous communities. You’ve got to be thinking, What are the additional things we need to do to help those people?

The Trump administration has been trying to weaken many regulations for chemical facilities and hazardous waste facilities that were written to protect the public. That will also affect vulnerable communities when disasters happen.

They’re actually extracting wealth from these communities. Lots of times people think, Oh, these communities in Appalachia. These communities in the Rust Belt. What wealth is there? But when [industries] continue to put these [dangerous facilities] in these communities, housing values plummet, while everyone else’s are going up. So you’re taking wealth from these communities.

In the same way, when people say climate change isn’t real, that means [those communities] can’t invest in renewables. That means that communities in the Rust Belt that really need new jobs never get a chance at them. So once again you are taking wealth away from these communities.

How do you get those people to care — the people in the Rust Belt, for instance, who may not understand how they’re being harmed by these policies? You tweeted a story about people in Kansas whose water had been contaminated for seven years, and the state health department knew about it but didn’t bother to tell them.

That was intentional. It was intentional because sometimes we’ve set up these barriers in our country around environmental justice. That’s a shame. It’s about those black people, brown people, maybe indigenous people, and white brothers and sisters [who] sometimes don’t think they’re going to be impacted also. When we don’t help everybody understand that these impacts affect everybody, then we allow people to put these boxes around it and say, “Well, I care, but that’s something that’s happening to these other folks.”

Even in some of the disadvantaged communities of color, it can be hard to get people to care. People are busy feeding their kids. I heard Van Jones make the point years ago at the Bioneers Conference that you can’t knock on doors in marginalized communities and scream about how the polar bears are dying. How do you reach out to those people who are already stressed just getting through a day in their lives? How do you talk to them about pollution, let alone climate?

I like to anchor my message in what’s going on in people’s lives. Normally I would talk about how 27 million people in our country have asthma. Seven million kids. Most folks of color in the urban setting can relate to asthma. They have kids or grandchildren or nieces or nephews [with] asthma. Then we have a conversation about, Okay, where’s that coming from? How is this situation being exacerbated? It’s because of pollution that’s coming out of these plants and pollution coming from the backs of cars. Then I link them into, “Well, did you know that there’s currently policy being made that’s going to let more pollution come out, so there’s going to be more health impacts?”

Those of us who’ve been working on environmental justice and climate justice for a while understand we’re talking about housing, transportation, the environment, public health and jobs. So I talk to people also about their vote, not only in the environmental context, but in the context of the violence that continues to happen in some communities. And how your vote makes the decision about who’s the police chief, who’s the district attorney. I bring all that together. Then people are like, “Yeah, I got power. And my power’s tied up in my vote. And the vote will determine the resources coming into my community, and who’s leading that process.”

In California the climate fight on the environmental justice front lines and the legislative space are often at odds. It’s frustrating, because as mark! Lopez of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice said on your panel, the frontline communities in the environmental justice fight are where our climate problems begin.

I’ve noticed that [about California]. Legislators can’t do something because of how it will affect business or industry, [but] people in the environmental justice space are saying, “We’re the ones who are going to be affected by pollution first. We’re the ones who have to deal with this first.” [The answer lies in] creating authentic collaborative partnerships.

If we’re in a relationship, it means you care about me, and I care about you. In a good marriage, a healthy friendship, many times you care more about the other person than you do about yourself. We’ve got to get to that. That will get to a greater understanding of how to create a policy that’s truly protective of everyone.

You mentioned that 200,000 people die every year prematurely because of air pollution. Can you imagine if 200,000 people were dying of bird flu?

It would be a public health emergency.

But we don’t move like we would move if it were a public health emergency. How do you convince people who are making the laws that it is?

We’ve got two different dynamics going on. One, we really need to accelerate the creation of renewable energy jobs, to create a just transition for the workers in those industries, and to get new people into that space.

Two, we’ve got to get the money out of politics. We know that’s an even harder fight than getting renewable energy jobs in place. There’s an addiction to that money. I was at Netroots Nation and many of the political leaders who came to that signed the no fossil-fuel money pledge. If you don’t have any accountability to the fossil-fuel world and that money that exists there, then you’re less likely to make decisions based on a monetary thing, and you’re more likely to be basing your decisions on public health.

You say you’re a realist, but also an optimist. What is your cause for optimism right now?

This is an interesting time. I think that our country had to go through this. If we’re going to have real talk, we have to acknowledge that there’s been no administration that’s lived up to what they should be doing on these issues. But now because the current administration is so anti-science, so anti-environment, so anti-climate, people who weren’t paying attention before are paying attention now. Foundations are saying we’ve got to shift our portfolios to better support this work. We have a common destiny that’s tied to this.

Even scientists. I have a science background and it hasn’t always been the case that scientists [were involved in public policy]. There’ve always been good scientists, but it’s not like the larger scientific organizations were saying we need to do more. Now that is happening. For all the craziness the current administration tries to do and does, [it has] also been a catalyst for people saying we’ve got to start honoring each other. We’ve got to start working together. That’s what keeps me going — I see these new relationships forming.

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In late July, a CNN story summed up what was becoming a watershed moment. The cable TV outlet reported that “the summer of temperature extremes just keeps going, with record heat waves this month on all four continents that occupy the Northern Hemisphere.”

And yet for all the heat and wildfires, relatively little media coverage has contextualized the situation with a mention of climate change. The watchdog group Media Matters reported: “Over a two-week period from late June to early July, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 127 segments or weathercasts that discussed the heat wave, but only one segment, on CBS This Morning, mentioned climate change.”

Despite the media blackout, many scientists assert that the intense weather is being fueled by climate change. One of the most prominent is Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, the author of the books The Madhouse Effect and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. In a new podcast, Capital & Main recently spoke with Mann about why he believes this summer is a turning point in the battle over climate change.

What follows is an lightly edited excerpt of the podcast interview. Podcast subscribers can click here to hear the full discussion.

David Sirota: What do you say to those who argue that there is no definitive proof that climate change is directly responsible for intense weather systems like the ones we’ve seen this summer?

Michael Mann: It’s sort of in the domain of the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. We don’t question that link. You know, smoking cigarettes leads to lung cancer and other diseases, because it increases the likelihood of those afflictions by such a large amount that we basically equate it with a causal relationship…

We would not be seeing this in the absence of climate change, so the signal of climate change as expressed in extreme weather is now undeniable…We are talking about floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and superstorms, you name it. We have seen unprecedented events in each of those categories over the last year that we would not have seen in the absence of climate change.

When I say that, I don’t literally mean that the underlying weather event might not have occurred. What I’m saying is the extreme nature of that event would not have been observed…What would have been a bad drought becomes a record drought, becomes an unprecedented drought. What would have been a bad wildfire becomes the largest wildfire in California history…

Wildfires aren’t supposed to happen in the winter in California, and what that tells us is that we’ve now evolved into a state where there isn’t a fire season in California anymore, there’s a perpetual fire season.

Which areas of the United States do you think are facing the most extreme and intense consequences of climate change?

Everywhere essentially along the coast of the United States you have increasing coastal threats because of climate change impacts on sea level rise, hurricanes. As you go inland, you look around, you can’t find a region of the country that hadn’t dealt with a thousand-year flood within the last couple of years…

The wildfires in the west, not just California. Essentially the entire Western U.S. has been afflicted with massive wildfires, drought, and a drought in California that’s now the worst in at least 1,200 years, as far back as the paleoclimate scientists are able to go, and heat waves that have basically crossed the entire country this summer. There’s no region of the country that hasn’t dealt with a record or near-record heat wave this summer.

You would be hard pressed to find a region in the country that hasn’t been impacted by one of those extreme weather events, and of course that’s just the U.S. We can say that now about essentially the entire globe. This is the summer where climate change showed its hand.

If the weather and wildfires that we’re experiencing aren’t a wake-up call to the political system about climate change, what will be?

What more do people need to see? We’ve had what I sometimes call the Cuyahoga River moment, that critical moment when a river caught on fire and that captured the public imagination. It led to Richard Nixon establishing the EPA, the Clean Air Acts, the Clean Water Acts. What is that moment in the climate change debate? How many do we need to have?

This summer, many of us who work in this space think that we’ve finally reached the point where it’s impossible for anybody to credibly deny not just that climate change is happening, not just that it’s caused by burning of fossil fuels and the elevation of greenhouse gases, but that it is already a problem.

We are already suffering the consequences. It’s already costing us far more. The cost of inaction is already so much greater than the cost of taking action. What’s playing out in California of course is sort of Exhibit A in that argument. We are now suffering the consequences, toll on infrastructure, human lives and our economy, frankly. What will it take?

The opponents of dealing with climate change seem to prey on people’s fear of change – they portray aggressive action as so radical that it will completely disrupt and destroy everyone’s lives. Are the changes we need to make really that radical and scary?

Not nearly as radical or scary as the critics would like people to believe. It’s going to require change. Remaking the global energy economy, shifting away from a two-century-long reliance on fossil fuels to new sources of energy? Yeah, that’s going to take action. It’s going to require some sort of market incentives, a price on carbon.

We pay a little bit more right now here in Central Pennsylvania to elect to get all of our power from renewables, from wind, and we’re happy to do that. Most people won’t do that just because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s why you need market incentives to guide people in the right direction.

The irony is that there’s a great degree of projection in that sort of argument from the critics, this idea that we have to make great sacrifice, that it’s going to [harm the economy]. They said that when we acted on acid rain, they said that when we acted on ozone depletion. At every juncture, they said, “This is going to destroy the economy,” and the reality is it didn’t destroy the economy. Instead, it actually saved our environment. At every juncture, they’ve made that argument, and it’s always been proven to be false.

The reason I say it’s projection and misdirection is that they don’t want people to focus on the fact that we are making a huge sacrifice right now. If you look at California, if you look at Houston, if you look at Puerto Rico, if you look at Miami Beach, we are making a huge sacrifice right now in terms of the toll that climate inaction is taking, and they don’t want people to notice that. They want to turn it around on its head, to somehow argue that the steps that we need to take to mitigate that damage and risk are somehow the costly scenario, when the costly scenario is not acting on this problem.

I think many people accept that climate change is happening and that it’s a really dangerous thing, but I also think lots of people feel like since it’s already happening, there’s nothing that can be done to combat it. What do you say to folks like that?

I think there are people of good will, who mean well, who really are frightened and really think that we may be close to if not past of the point no return, and are expressing genuine frustration and genuine fear. That having been said, I think they have been happily co-opted by the forces of inaction, by the forces of denial…This sort of despair and this argument, this defeatist notion that it’s too late to do anything, is in some ways every bit as dangerous and paralyzing as outright denial of the problem itself, because it leads us down the same path of inaction.

Ultimately for that reason, it has been convenient for the forces of denial, who are looking to divide the public, to actually amplify those arguments in a cynical way and provide a voice to those arguments that, “Hey, there’s nothing we can do about it, so why enact any policies to deal with the problem?” I do think that it’s dangerous. I don’t think that those making the argument are cynics or have themselves been co-opted, but I do think that the forces of inaction and denial have happily capitalized on this, and have used it as a way to divide the community of people who do care about this problem and do want to solve it.

A recent study raised the prospect of so-called “Hothouse Earth” – or runaway climate change that is far more extreme than anyone predicts. Do you think that’s a possibility?

James Hansen has been making this argument for a number of years, I think with some credibility. These authors, to me it was just sort of recasting that basic way of looking at the problem. I think it just happened to get a lot of media attention, in part through a provocative headline. It’s real, the threat is real. We have to think about these worst-case scenarios, and if this is true…then it means that not only do we have to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere, we are going to need to find ways to draw it back down, to bring it back out of the atmosphere over a longer time frame, over many decades, if we want to mitigate the higher-end risk here.

What are the most positive things happening in the effort to address climate change?

Probably first and foremost to me, the re-energization of our youth, the fact that the youth of this country are re-engaging with politics. We saw that in the wake of the Parkland High School shooting, but that seems to have taken. We seem to be going through sort of a tipping point now where the youth of this country have recognized that if they want to protect their future, they have to be involved in the political process. I think that could be a game-changer. To that extent, there is room for political progress here if we see younger folks re-engaged with our politics coming out to vote in this midterm election. That could really make a difference.

Then separately from that is just stepping back and taking a very high-level view of what’s going on here. The world is moving on. We moved on in the 19th century from whale oil. We recognized that something better had come along when it comes to providing energy, fossil fuels, and now we’ve gone through that next transition where we realize the dangers and the risks of our dependence on fossil fuels, and something better has come along in the form of renewable energy and the world is moving on…

There’s an exponential trajectory that we’re on right now. We’d like to see the growth even faster, but it is exponential. We’re moving away from a global fossil fuel-driven economy towards a new renewable energy economy, and I believe there’s nothing that can stop that transition.

Now, the problem of course is here in the United States, we have gone from a position of leadership, relative leadership on this issue under the past administration, to a political landscape where the United States is essentially the only holdout in the global community. Trump has threatened to withdraw from the Paris Accord, and if we were to do that, we would be the only country now in the world that’s not committed to Paris.

To some extent the only decision that we will be able to make here in the United States isn’t does the world move on, it’s do we get left behind in that transition. That’s the only thing that we can actually do.

What does our world look like 20 or 30 years in the future, if we are doing what needs to be done to seriously addressing climate change?

I think we can envision a future just in terms of the trends that we see under way, not necessarily just towards electric vehicles. At least in urban locations, we may see the elimination of personally-owned vehicles. We will have a more advanced transportation system, streets filled with Lyft and Uber and automated vehicles potentially.

There are studies that show that if we do that, if we move towards automated vehicles, that sort of system, then that shrinks the footprint of a city down tremendously, because it’s so much area. Take New York. You know how much surface area is used for parking of vehicles. If we can get rid of that, then the populations condense. There’s a smaller spatial footprint. That means less resource depletion…

We will have renewably-driven microgrids. There’s a real question as to whether we will have the sorts of continental-scale power grids that we have today. We may see more decentralized sources of electricity generation. We may all live off the grid, in the sense that we’re not part of a continental-scale grid.

Our food choices, I think we’re going to be healthier in our food choices. I think there’s a movement in that direction.

There are many possible futures, and one can certainly imagine a dystopian future where none of that happens, where we double down on the trends that are under way in the era of Trump, and one can envision a dystopian future like Mad Max, Soylent Green, The Road or Hunger Games. One can’t rule that out, but one can also imagine a utopian future that’s more like the one that I just laid out.

I don’t pretend to know. Predictions are hard, especially about the future, as Niels Bohr once famously said. It turns out it’s not Yogi Berra, it’s actually Niels Bohr, the physicist, who said that. The choice is ours to make, and I’m convinced of that.

Co-published by Newsweek

Brown accused one environmentalist of ‘political terrorism’ when she asked him ‘to stop being Chevron’s stenographer.’

In his two most recent terms as governor, which began in January 2011, Jerry Brown has signed legislation to increase renewable energy standards for utilities, to establish California’s first groundwater regulations and to require state public pension funds to divest from coal. To the country and the world, he’s widely regarded as a climate firebrand. He has stepped into the climate fray ahead of presidents, mayors and other governors; he has traveled to China, the Vatican and Russia to address crowds about the subject. Under his leadership, California joined with the German state of Baden-Württemberg to found the Under2Coalition, a partnership among local governments and nations to keep global temperature rise from ever exceeding 2 degrees Celsius.

But there’s something hinky about Brown’s climate leadership, an inconsistency that environmentalists caution will threaten his legacy. To wit, while Brown warns often in speeches that one-third of the world’s oil reserves must remain untouched to avert climate catastrophe, the governor has not done much to keep California’s reserves in the ground. To the contrary: In 2011 Brown flagrantly axed two state regulators for holding drillers to account for their environmental infractions. In 2013, he inserted last-minute amendments into a bill to regulate hydraulic fracturing and acidizing — dissolving rock with toxic chemicals to access trapped oil. And while he managed to extend California’s greenhouse-gas trading market, cap-and-trade, as far out as 2030, he did so in collaboration with oil lobbyists, who saw many of their demands included in the bill.

‘He talks a good game, but when you look at what you need to do on climate, he is silent.’

When RL Miller, chair of the Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, pointed this out, circulating a petition “telling Brown to stop being Chevron’s stenographer,” Brown accused her and her cohort of “political terrorism.”

“He talks a good game,” says Miller, who also runs the advocacy nonprofit, Climate Hawks Vote. “But when you look at what you need to do on climate — move the electricity over to 100 percent renewable energy, for instance — he is silent.” He has not, in other words, come out in full support of state Senate Bill 100, the 100 percent renewable energy bill currently facing its last hurdle before making it to the governor’s desk: passage in the Assembly.

That Brown’s actions sometimes conflict with his climate credentials isn’t much discussed outside of California. But environmentalists like Miller, plus a wide phalanx of elected officials, national environmental leaders and public interest groups, are trying to change that in the waning days of the governor’s last term. They hope their “Brown’s Last Chance” campaign will pressure the legacy-conscious politician to rein in the oil industry before his time is up in January. They have two specific demands: Stop approving permits for new wells in the state, and declare a phase-out of oil and gas production, with funding for workers to transition into the clean-energy economy — they want both to happen before September 12, when Brown welcomes governments, investors, environmentalists and concerned citizens at the three-day Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

‘Permitting more oil wells next to people of color,’ says Bill McKibben, ‘is not what a climate leader for this day and age would do.’

Such actions would only be in keeping with Brown’s legislative accomplishments, says Bill McKibben, author and founder of the climate nonprofit, 350.org. “He clearly was a climate leader in the early stages of the fight, and that can’t be denied,” McKibben wrote in an email to Capital & Main. “California has moved to cut energy demand and build renewables, and he’s been a part of that. The question is now whether he has the moxie left to embrace the climate movement as it has evolved.” That evolution has included embracing environmental justice. More than three-quarters of new oil wells approved on Brown’s watch are in low-income communities and communities of color, according to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Permitting more oil wells next to people of color,” McKibben says, “is not what a climate leader for this day and age would do.”

Oil wells in California are not granted permits through the state alone. Local agencies participate in the process, as does the federal government. Drillers have to follow a suite of regulations that differ by proximity to aquifers, residential areas and land ownership. Does Brown really have the authority to unilaterally deny an oil company permission to drill on all California lands?

If California stops producing oil, Brown has argued, other states and countries will produce more to make up the difference.

Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, insists that he does. “We’re asking the governor to do things precisely because he has the power to do them,” she says. “[His] administration has issued new permits for 20,000 new wells since 2011. Each of those wells was [at] the discretion of state regulators. They report to the governor, and the governor has to follow the law.” If the state looks at all the risks the well poses and the harm it might cause, pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act, it can decide to reject a permit.

Instead, Siegel says, the state agency in charge of reviewing oil-drilling permits, the Department of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) “rubber-stamps every permit that comes to them from the oil industry,” when closer analysis would reveal them as environmental law-breakers. “It’s actually not only within the governor’s discretion. It’s his obligation to tell those regulators to follow the law.”

In response to the accusation of “rubber-stamping,” DOGGR spokesman Don Drysdale says that “California has some of the most comprehensive and rigorous laws and regulations for oil and gas production in the world.” The Department of Conservation, DOGGR’s parent agency, “has significantly increased its oversight of the industry to safeguard the environment and the public.”

But that’s still at odds with fast action on climate, Siegel says. “There’s no way that any new fossil-fuel development can be compatible with a safe climate.”

‘California’s climate policy will be the blueprint for the next Democratic president and the world.’

Oil is a $111 billion industry in California. Though only 2.7 percent of the state’s GDP, its political muscle is legendary. The industry’s trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, spends millions annually on lobbying the legislature, more than any other group in the state. Individual companies — Aera Energy and Chevron in particular — add in more.

Brown has said many times that California — which burns more oil than any other state save Texas — still imports 70 percent of its oil. If California stops producing oil, he’s argued, other states and countries will produce more to make up the difference. That’s true, according to the Stockholm Environmental Institute, which last February released a report analyzing the climate effects of California’s petroleum industry. “For each barrel of California oil [left in the ground],” an additional 0.4 to 0.8 barrels would be produced elsewhere,” say the study’s authors. At the same time, however, their research shows oil prices would rise, and global consumption would therefore decline by an estimated 0.2 to 0.6 barrels for each barrel not produced.

California continues to export refining byproducts of the state’s particularly heavy, dirty oil, including petroleum coke, a carbon-heavy solid that burns even dirtier than coal. Certain century-old, played-out wells in the San Joaquin Valley yield some of the most carbon-intensive oil in the world — by some analyses, it’s second only to Canadian oil sands in its climate footprint. Refining it into combustible fuel produces a lot of pet coke, which is shipped to other countries, mostly to be used as fuel.

“It’s literally the Koch brothers exporting pet coke from Long Beach,” Siegel says. Two Koch-run companies, Koch Carbon and Oxbow Carbon, operate terminals at the Long Beach port almost exclusively for the export of pet coke and coal. That might soon change, however: India, which until recently imported more pet coke than any other country, on August 17 announced a ban on burning the substance for fuel, citing air pollution concerns.

Perhaps India’s move could move Brown to reconsider oil’s prospects. “California’s climate policy will be the blueprint for the next Democratic president and the world over,” Siegel says, including many aspirationally “green” nations — Canada and Norway, for example — that have extensive oil supplies. “We have to make it a blueprint that actually solves the climate problem.”

And that blueprint cannot include oil. Most climatologists agree that there’s more carbon in already-producing fields to push the world past the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees. At that point, climate catastrophe may be irreversible.

The governor’s office has so far remained mum on the Brown’s Last Chance campaign. But Siegel is “hopeful,” she says, “that the governor will take action. There’s still time.”

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Despite their company’s safety promises, 12 employees working on the demolition of part of the Bay Bridge were lead-poisoned between 2013 and 2016.

Last March, Capital & Main launched an investigative series, “Battery Blood,” which revealed that hundreds of workers at the former Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon, California, had for decades been exposed to lead poisoning. Even worse, the state’s public health department knew about it but failed to act. Now, utilizing data obtained from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), our joint investigation with the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism has found at least 80 companies — including one that recently dismantled parts of the iconic  San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge — continue to have  workers in California who are lead-poisoned at levels high enough to cause birth defects, tremors and a variety of brain disorders.

Once again we found that CDPH routinely failed to refer even the most egregious employers to state enforcement officers who can levy fines and require mandatory changes.

Some of the most extensive problems were found at other car battery recycling plants in working-class areas of Los Angeles. At one plant, Trojan Battery Recycling Company had 174 employees with elevated levels of lead in their blood between 2015 and 2016.

A state safety agency accepted the dismantling company’s explanation that one bridge worker was lead-poisoned because he chewed tobacco.

“It’s beyond upsetting,” Bell city councilman Nestor Valencia said. He lives in one of the roughly 10,000 residential properties contaminated at levels above what is safe for kids by lead emissions from the Exide plant. “You know we need these jobs, but not at the expense of worker health or keeping kids who live nearby safe. This is what state government is supposed to be for, and they are failing us.” Valencia said he was shocked to learn that other nearby plants continue to have lead-poisoned workers.

The Bay Area also has serious ongoing problems. There were lead-poisoning victims among those working on the demolition of the eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Despite promises to keep workers safe from lead, California Engineering Contractors, which received a $200 million dollar state contract to dismantle the earthquake-damaged span, had 12 cases of lead-poisoned employees between 2013 and 2016.

And at Target Masters West, an indoor gun range in the city of Milpitas, there have been more than 25 lead-poisoning cases in the last decade amongst workers who clean and manage the range. Seven cases were reported during 2015 and 2016, the most recent years for which data is available.

The California Department of Public Health has shown a stunning level of reluctance to turn lead-poisoning cases over to Cal/OSHA for enforcement.

Target Master West owner Bill Heskett bristled at the suggestion his workers had been poisoned, asserting that a spate of recent findings by public health experts that lead at lower levels is harmful to human health “isn’t based in real science and has been set by a bunch of clerks with no accountability.” Heskett said that the recent spikes in lead levels at his range were attributable to an employee “who wasn’t following protocols.” The employee was terminated, Heskett said.

In response to the Exide revelations in our March investigation, a bill was introduced in the California legislature by Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose). Assembly Bill 2963 would require mandatory inspections at any workplace where a worker’s blood lead level is at or above 25 micrograms per deciliter. Even at levels as low as 10 micrograms per deciliter, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Controls (CDC), people with prolonged exposure to the neurotoxin are at higher risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease and reduced fertility.

While the legislation has faced stiff opposition from industry groups and only passed out of the Assembly by a single vote, it has stronger support in the Senate and appears likely to make it to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk.

Among AB 2963’s supporters is Senator Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), who expressed dismay that problems at the Milpitas gun range (which is in his district), the Bay Bridge project and elsewhere have been allowed to linger. “If you had a family member or a friend exposed to high blood lead levels, you would want to see immediate action taken to reduce that exposure,” Wieckowski said. “The health and safety of all workers should be the top priority.”

Two Agencies Working in Silos

The problem in California doesn’t appear to lie with finding out about lead-poisoned workers, but with what happens when some state officials get that information.

At battery plants, gun ranges and other workplaces where exposure to lead is common, the state of California requires companies to test their workers for elevated levels of lead. The custodian of that testing information is a division of CDPH called the Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (OLPPP). The division is funded through a small fee on employers in industries that work with lead. In theory, OLPPP provides education to companies and at the agency’s discretion can refer serious cases to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA. The enforcement agency can then determine the cause of problems and issue fines when unsafe practices are found.

“They’ve lost sight of the fundamental mission, to make sure that at the end of the day workers come home to their families safe and sound.”

Our year-long investigation found a stunning level of reluctance on the part of CDPH to turn lead-poisoning cases over to Cal/OSHA for enforcement. Of the eight companies with some of the most persistent problems with lead exposure in California between 2013 and 2016, Cal/OSHA confirmed that it received no referrals from OLPPP for any of them during the last 10 years, and conducted no lead-related inspections at any of the companies. Many of the workplaces have had lead-poisoned workers for decades.

CDPH has declined repeated interview requests and did not respond in time for publication to written questions about its management of lead poisoning cases.

Through the state Public Records Act, Capital & Main obtained communications between OLPPP and California Engineering Contractors (CEC), one of the companies awarded a contract by California’s Department of Transportation to dismantle the Bay Bridge.

Read Documents Related to This Story

In October 2013, OLPPP informed the company that workers on the project would be exposed to lead coating as the steel bridge was dismantled. “Our role is to assist employers in identifying and correcting work practices that can result in employees being over exposed to lead,” the OLPPP wrote in a letter.

Within a year, workers on the project showed signs of elevated blood lead levels. The company asserted in an August, 2014 email to OLPPP that it could bring the situation under control. “We are confident we can get even the highest exposed workers under 10 µg/dl (BLL) with aggressive oversight and support,” wrote CEC safety director Robert Ikenberry.

Despite assurances, the problem of lead-poisoned employees grew worse. By 2015 one worker’s blood lead levels had exceeded 40 micrograms per deciliter, a level deemed “very high” by the CDC.  Michael McKinney, a safety manager for CEC had an explanation, which he provided in an email to OLPPP.  “The employee admitted to us that he was chewing tobacco during work. We feel that this practice is what caused the high lead level,” McKinney wrote.  OLPPP appeared to accept that explanation, and never referred the Bay Bridge project for Cal/OSHA inspection, even when elevated blood levels amongst workers jumped 25 percent the following year.

Mariano Kramer, a former district manager for Cal/OSHA, said that simply accepting emailed assurances from a company with lead-poisoned workers is not acceptable. “There are a myriad of issues which can cause elevated blood lead levels. A trained inspector knows how to identify them.”

In 27 states, workplace occupational lead safety standards are administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a federal agency. In those states, any blood lead level above 25 micrograms triggers an automatic OSHA inspection, through which fines for unsafe conditions can be levied and changes can be mandated. A similar standard would go into effect in California if AB 2963 becomes law.

Kramer said he supports the proposed legislation because it would empower his former agency to more aggressively target workplaces that lead-poison workers.

“But,” he added, “there are cultural issues within both agencies that no law will fix. They’ve lost sight of the fundamental mission, to make sure that at the end of the day workers come home to their families safe and sound.”

This article was produced as a project for the 2017 California Data Fellowship, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.

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The new Safer and Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule would nullify California regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes and its zero-emission vehicle program.

Co-published by The American Prospect

When officials within the Trump administration, on August 2, proposed scaling back Obama-era fuel-economy standards and revoking California’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, they were betting on the chance that courts can’t tell the difference between a law against gas guzzlers and one against carbon belchers. Low-mileage cars and low-emissions cars are often one and the same, they may have reasoned. If you’re requiring a car to emit less carbon dioxide, you’re also asking that it burn less fuel.

That part might be mostly true, although there are emissions controls that have nothing to do with gas mileage. But from a legal standpoint, fuel economy and tailpipe emissions take distinctly different routes to regulation. Fuel-economy standards, known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE standard, as defined in the Energy Policy Conservation Act, forbid states from making their own rules. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration enforces them; states have no control.

The 1970 Clean Air Act, on the other hand, gives California the explicit authority to regulate air pollution, albeit with EPA sign-off in the form of a “waiver” each time the state wants to impose a new standard. Other states can adopt California’s stricter rules (12 of them and the District of Columbia, have). Or states can stick with the standards set by the federal government. Tailpipe emissions of other pollutants from cars and trucks — carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides, for starters — have long been a chief source of air pollution, and California since 1961 has acted to curtail them.

“California regulators were the first to understand how smog was formed, the first to act on how to control that smog.”

That’s one of the reasons why the administration might lose its coming battle with 19 states and a host of environmental groups gearing up to fight the “Safer and Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles” rule, as the Environmental Protection Agency calls its apocalypse-hastening rollback, which would freeze the CAFE standard at 37 miles per gallon instead of aiming toward the 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 that the previous administration had set. It would nullify not only California regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes but also California’s zero-emission vehicle program, which requires carmakers to market a certain number of all-electric or hydrogen vehicles in the state.

But the rollback doesn’t pass legal muster, says Irene Gutierrez, clean-energy attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Among its many legal and factual flaws, the proposed rule seeks to revoke California’s authority over tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases on the grounds that “the environmental problems it addresses are not particular or unique to California.” Yet nowhere does the Clean Air Act mention “particular or unique” as a waiver requirement.

California’s transportation sector puts more carbon-dioxide and its equivalents into the atmosphere than any state but Texas.

“The EPA has not in the past looked at California and said, ‘Prove to us that your ozone problems are worse than any other place in the country,’” Gutierrez says. “It’s not like there aren’t polluted air basins in other states.” When past waivers were granted — there have been more than 50 — it wasn’t because California and California alone had an air-quality problem. It was because California was seen as particularly aggressive about cleaning up its air and, in 1970, was far ahead of the federal government in doing so.

“California regulators were the first to understand how smog was formed, the first to act on how to control that smog,” says Meredith Hankins, a legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. So it allowed the state to forward with what’s known as “technology-forcing” regulation.

“Technology-forcing means regulators aren’t picking the technology, aren’t picking the winners and losers,” Hankins says. “They’re saying ‘You figure it out — you’re the technology experts. All we care about is public health.’”

Climate change is undeniably hitting the state now with a particular and unique dose of fury.

But even if the law said California had to be unique in its suffering from greenhouse gas emissions, it would not be hard to make the case that it is. For one thing, with its glut of cars, California has an urgent responsibility to reduce its contribution to greenhouse gas pollution from cars and trucks. Forty-one percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, according to the California Air Resource Board’s latest climate inventory. The state’s transportation sector puts more carbon-dioxide and its equivalents into the atmosphere than any state but Texas.

Plus, climate change is undeniably hitting the state this moment with a particular and unique dose of fury. “There are 18 fires burning in the state right now, and none of them are contained,” Gutierrez says. Several more have already leveled neighborhoods. One of them, near Redding, in Northern California, burned so hot that it scorched away a layer of earth.

It’s an odd time, then, for the Environmental Protection Agency to be fighting against environmental protection. Especially in California.

California’s climate gas waiver for cars was first denied by the Bush administration in 2008, when then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson made basically the same case: That California does not “need to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions” with respect to greenhouse gas pollution. Six months into the Obama administration, the EPA officially reversed that decision. “Opponents of the waiver have not demonstrated that California does not need its greenhouse gas emission standards to meet compelling and extraordinary conditions,” EPA Administration Lisa Jackson wrote at the time. She also affirmed that “Congress recognized that California could serve as a pioneer and a laboratory for the nation in setting new motor vehicle emissions standards.”

“Trump is trying to rehash those old Bush administration arguments,” Gutierrez says. Trump’s administration is also adding a bonus caveat: that clean vehicles are, by definition, small and unsafe. The proposal claims that canceling out both national fuel standards and California’s waiver will reduce traffic fatalities by 12,700 from 2021 to 2029.

Never mind that it’s possible to produce a substantial, low-emissions plug-in hybrid, such as Chrysler’s Pacifica minivan, just as it is to make a smaller car that pollutes (the 2009 model of the Ferrari F430, for instance, isn’t particularly big, but it packs the same climate wallop as the 2001 model of the hulking Ford Explorer.) Carmakers are getting better all that time at designing more substantial, longer-range and affordable cars that qualify as clean. Nearly every manufacturer has a plug-in hybrid crossover SUV on the line for 2019. Even Ford, which has been slow to the EV game — dutifully churning out “compliance” vehicles just to qualify for the strict California market — has announced a plug-in hybrid model of its crossover SUV, the Escape.

Besides, the goal of saving 12,000 lives rings a little hollow when you consider that heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the leading cause of all annual weather-related deaths in the U.S. The World Health Organization predicts that between 2030 and 2050, 250,000 people will die globally due to climate-related health impacts. Maybe we could all just drive a little more carefully.

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When, on July 18, a brand-new community energy venture unveiled its five-year business plan, advocates for clean energy and environmental justice touted it as a first-of-its-kind coup. East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), a coalition of 11 cities and unincorporated areas in Alameda County, came together last year to find potentially cleaner and cheaper electricity for its customers than their for-profit utility, PG&E, can supply. The group has also promised to nourish the local economy with good jobs tied to renewable energy development, harnessing the county’s abundant wind and solar resources to clean up the air.

But some experts who monitor California’s energy policies have their doubts about EBCE’s ability to deliver power that does not involve a (carbon-free but fish-killing) hydroelectric dam — or even a smokestack — at least in the near future. “The business plan is of little relevance,” says Matthew Freedman, staff attorney with The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a nonprofit that polices corporate utilities and advocates for ratepayers. “The proof is what they actually commit to buy.”

EBCE has come together under the aegis of a 2002 California law that granted local jurisdictions the right to procure their own power, as “community-choice aggregators,” or CCAs. The ideals of the CCA have always involved encouraging more clean energy generated locally, and offering it to consumers at competitive rates. For-profit utilities have been accused of delaying the transition from coal and natural gas to renewables, as well as starving local economies by importing power from out of state.

Yet even for the community energy groups, those ideals have been almost impossible to realize. Community power programs are opt-out — if you live in a place that has one, you’re automatically subscribed — but consumers can still defect if prices spike. Power suppliers have to stay competitive or die.

And some did die early on, victims of both organized campaigns by the large utilities, and a renewable energy landscape that wasn’t quite ready to meet their demands. Even after the price of solar cells began dropping in 2009, inciting a solar boom, labor unions still opposed CCAs on the grounds that the groups weren’t doing anything for new energy development — they were, instead, doing an end run around utilities to buy the same old dirty power. “At present, there is no pathway from a power purchase agreement with [traditional energy] companies to creating local jobs with union-scale wages and benefits,” read a statement from IBEW 1245 in 2013. (Disclosure: IBEW 1245 and the California Nurses Association are financial supporters of this website.)

East  Bay activists were acutely aware of these factors when they started lobbying for a community choice program in the county. “One of our demands was not to use ‘renewable energy certificates,’” says Jessica Tovar, lead organizer with Oakland’s Local Clean Energy Alliance. Renewable energy certificates, or RECs, are green-labeled kilowatts sold on the electricity market independent of actual generation. Because they’re not investments in new renewable generation, RECs don’t spur the development of new wind and solar projects. (They might not even originate from renewable generation at all — on the mixed-up electricity market, you can’t tell a coal electron from a wind one.) “We emphasized from the beginning that we wanted to have actual local renewables produced in the county.”

That demand was part of the organization’s “unity position,” says Tovar, along with the Alameda Labor Council and the California Nurses Association. “Oftentimes the environmental and social justice movements don’t work together,” she says. “It was a big deal for us to be able to ask for those things, working together, at the time.”

EBCE, which has supplied electricity to non-residential consumers since June, and will begin serving residential customers in November, has agreed only to buy renewable energy certificates if they prove necessary to its financial health. It’s hard to know exactly what that means. Until the CCA has the credit rating and assets to sign long-term contracts for new projects with local energy developers, it will have to rely on electricity from existing facilities throughout the West. Such purchases often involve some kind of environmental trading mechanism that can disguise dirty energy as clean. One of EBCE’s options offers “carbon-free” power, which in this case, means power from large hydroelectric plants in the Pacific Northwest or Canada.

“The carbon-free angle is worse than meaningless,” Freedman says. “We’ve seen Northwest utilities that have abundant electricity supplies send a clean resource [to a CCA] and then backfill with a dirty resource to meet their existing demand.” The amount of hydroelectric in EBCE’s resource plan, Freedman says, “is staggering.”

Tovar isn’t happy with the carbon-free option either. “We know better and want to do better,” she says. Doing better just takes time.

Freedman doesn’t dispute that. “When a CCA starts up it needs to have a product to sell on day one,” he says. “New clean energy infrastructure takes time to design and implement.”

If all goes well, Tovar sees EBCE paving the way for other energy innovations, such as shared solar, solar cooperatives and microgrids — small, self-contained distribution networks that can interact with the grid or “island” and operate on their own in a crisis. She and other clean-energy advocates hope to see rooftop solar and battery storage become accessible to low-income households and renters, through shared and community projects made possible by the CCA.

Those are all towering asks, and Tovar is careful to note that none of them will become reality if energy decisions get made in a bubble. Consumers have to participate, too. “We call it energy democracy,” Tovar says. “It requires us all to play advocates for the kind of energy we want to produce.”

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When Assemblyperson Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) learned about Capital & Main and USC’s Center for Health Journalism investigation into how hundreds of workers at the former Exide Battery Recycling Plant near downtown Los Angeles became victims of lead poisoning, he created a modest bill to try and ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

Among our report’s revelations was the fact that the California Department of Public Health was aware of thousands of troubling blood tests revealing high levels of lead, but failed to tell the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) about the problem.

Kalra’s bill, Assembly Bill 2963, requires that the Department of Health inform Cal/OSHA when workers have seriously elevated blood levels and Cal/OSHA performs inspections.

The bill has had clear sailing until now, easily passing in the Assembly Labor Committee in March and winning unanimous approval from Democrats on the Appropriations Committee last week. But as the worker-protection measure headed to a crucial floor vote this week, a coalition of industry groups, one of which includes the iconic Disneyland Resort, worked the halls of the Capitol to kill the bill. The lobbying effort nearly prevailed: AB 2963 passed by a single vote Wednesday evening and now faces what is certain to be a battle in the California state Senate.

So why would Disneyland, which hosts thousands of kids every day, be part of an effort to defeat a bill that simply requires reporting of blood-lead levels high enough to produce heart disease and serious brain disorders? A May 29 letter endorsed by 15 industry groups, including the Battery Council International, the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Hotel and Lodging Association (which includes a Disneyland Resort vice president on its board) argues that California’s current system to protect employees, depending largely on voluntary compliance, is working just fine.

The letter states: “Perversely, AB 2963 would transform this existing well-functioning public health program into an enforcement program that creates an allegation of a serious violation where none exists in Cal/OSHA law and the workplace may not even be the source of exposure.”

The bill will be costly, the opposition letter also says, with an estimated price tag of $267,000 to implement and requiring Cal/OSHA to hire one or two additional inspectors.

“That’s a small price to pay” said Bill Allayaud, California Director of Government Affairs for the Environmental Working Group, which is trying to keep moderate Democrats from being swayed by the industry lobby.

“The California Chamber of Commerce and their allies are misrepresenting what the bill does and convincing industries like the hotel industry to lend their name to the fight, even though this bill would have zero impact on hotels,” Allayaud said. “The law focuses on workplaces where lead is in heavy use, like firing ranges and battery recycling facilities where workers are actually being impacted by a dangerous neurotoxin.  Besides, I can’t imagine [that] parents who visit a resort like Disneyland would want their kids anywhere near lead if found at the levels that would have employees testing at the alarm bell level. Who wouldn’t want an OSHA inspection in that case?”

Suzi Brown, vice president of communications at Disneyland Resorts, said that the “California Lodging Association is just one organization that we are involved with. As you can imagine we are involved with many trade organizations.” Brown said that Disney vice president Elliot Mills, who sits on the association’s board, was not present for the vote to oppose AB 2963. “To somehow link Disney to this in a specific way is not accurate,” she added. “And to somehow position this that we are not concerned about worker safety is flawed as well.”

At the March California State Assembly Labor and Employment Committee hearing, Kalra introduced his bill by reading a letter from former Exide lead smelter Alvin Richardson (who struggles with lead poisoning symptoms we documented in our investigation) and his wife, LaShawn. “We read a recent investigative story, and it was very hurtful to learn that Cal/OSHA excused the high lead levels that Alvin and the other Exide workers were constantly exposed to,” the letter said. “People shouldn’t be treated like they are disposable. That’s not what America or California is supposed to be about.”

Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) was moved to vote yes. “My district’s right next to the Exide plant, and it’s had an impact on my community and my residents,” he said. “And if this is something that could have prevented what happened at Exide, we should have been doing this a while ago.”

AB 2963 needed Jones-Sawyer’s vote again on Wednesday to barely pass it out of the Assembly. Whether the bill makes it to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk is dependent on how well the arguments of the California Chamber of Commerce and other industry voices opposing the bill go over in the Senate.

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