President Joe Biden arrived in California last week and announced a $600 million drive to help coastal communities cope with rising sea levels.
Just days earlier, a report of a sharp rise in sea temperatures was released, startling scientists who were unsure whether the rise was due to natural phenomena and how much to global warming.
The president also spoke about $2.3 billion aimed at making the country’s power grid more resilient, including $67 million for California to protect power lines from extreme weather and natural disasters.
This comes on the heels of an unsuccessful attempt to include comprehensive permit reform in the deficit ceiling agreement to speed up the expansion of power transmission lines.
Supporters of the proposal, including Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, say that without accelerating grid construction, it will be difficult — perhaps even impossible — to bring more clean energy generated at remote wind and solar farms to populated areas in the future bring to.
In another climate change warning, scientists said the Himalayan glaciers are melting faster than ever before due to global warming. No, the President has not announced funding for glacier protection on the trip.
Gloomy news about global warming is constant. The timing of these latest developments may have coincided with the President’s visit, but they underscore the grave challenge facing Biden, Gov. Gavin Newsom and others in their bid to slow climate change.
Biden appeared with Newsom at the Lucy Evans Baylands Nature Interpretive Center and Preserve in Palo Alto Monday before heading to various fundraisers for the campaign.
“Resilience is important,” Biden said in announcing the shoreline funding. “I have visited many places across the country that clearly demonstrate that climate change is an existential threat to humanity.”
He spoke about climate-related investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill — and how he fended off Republican efforts to thwart them during recent debt ceiling negotiations.
“Not only have we protected some of the climate money and clean energy regulations. We protected everyone,” Biden said.
But the White House couldn’t agree with Republicans on changing environmental regulations to streamline the permitting process. Some environmental groups also opposed the changes, particularly those proposed for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
While the Debt Agreement included provisions to accelerate some infrastructure projects under NEPA, it did not pave the way for accelerating large-scale transmission line construction.
That was the aim of the BIG WIRES Act, which was part of the Debt Deal discussions but was ultimately left out. The legislation was written by Peters and Senator John Hickenlooper, D-Colo.
“Our work to reform the outdated way we authorize and build energy projects is just beginning,” Peters said in a statement after the deal was reached without his bill. “This debate has put a spotlight on our climate reality: we cannot achieve our climate and clean energy goals without comprehensive permitting reform.”
Newsom has his own proposal to authorize a cleanup for California, but has expressed frustration at opposition from dozens of environmental groups. Many are usually his allies but have criticized his plan to expedite the permitting process under the California Environmental Quality Act.
“This is ridiculous,” Newsom told the New York Times. “These people write reports and protest. But we have to build. You can’t take climate and the environment seriously without reforming the state’s permitting and procurement processes. . .”
“I made the climate laws last year and the same groups celebrated that. But that doesn’t mean anything if we can’t deliver. That was the what; that’s the how.”
Without such changes, Newsom said, California could lose hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for clean energy programs to competition from other states.
Despite years of talks, efforts to fundamentally change CEQA have been unsuccessful. Even some who support the goals of the state’s core environmental law say it drags out the permitting process and has been abused to impede development, gain leverage in contract negotiations and block competitor projects.
But CEQA has also been used to stop numerous malicious projects.
While proponents of the streamlining proposals say they include adequate environmental protections, critics don’t think so.
Biden’s sweeping permit push angered some environmentalists, but they were outraged that the debt agreement allows for expedited processing of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a gas-carrying pipeline pushed by Senator Joe Manchin, DW.Va.
Climate activists were also not pleased with the earlier approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project in Alaska in March.
Still, in the week leading up to his California trip, Biden received early re-election support from four of the country’s largest environmental groups — the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and NextGen America.
“They have done far more than any other government in history to address the climate crisis and advance clean energy solutions and environmental justice,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters, told CNN.
Biden has enacted sweeping climate legislation and poured at least $370 billion into clean energy and electric vehicles, the Times noted. His government has also proposed tough regulations on pollution from cars, trucks and power plants, aimed at bringing the country’s emissions down to their lowest levels in decades.
This apparently made it easier for environmentalists to accept the trade-offs on fossil fuels.
Tweet of the week
Goes to Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci), former political writer for Politico and the San Francisco Chronicle.
“(Judge) Kagan worried about ethics of free bagels when (Judge) Thomas accepted lavish trips from billionaire: report | Salon.com. (May 11)”
