The Republican 5 have demanded a broad rollback of protections in California’s Environmental Quality Act as part of negotiations over a $12.5 billion tax extension. Passed in 1970, CEQA has been used in lawsuits by environmental and community groups over water use, air quality, environmental justice, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of a CEQA rollback would be Chevron, formerly Standard Oil of California. Chevron owns many oilfields throughout the state, and has been seeking to expand the company’s Richmond refinery to allow processing of heavier, dirtier crude oil, yielded by increasingly depleted oil fields.
The refinery expansion was halted in 2009 after a coalition of community and environmental justice groups used CEQA to successfully sue over public health impacts. In 2010, Chevron lost the appeal.
In a precedent-setting decision, the court also found that Chevron needed to provide specific mitigation not only for air quality impacts, but for a projected increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Chevron’s refinery is the single largest point source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The EIR indicated that the expansion could generate almost 900,000 tons of additional greenhouse gases.
Since losing the appeal, Chevron has sought a special legislative exemption from CEQA for the refinery. An attempt in August 2010 failed. Senator Anthony Cannella’s CEQA rollback bill, leaked to the LA Times, has a special exemption for greenhouse gas emissions under CEQA, which would apply to the refinery.
In 2010, Chevron donated almost a million dollars to an independent expenditure campaign that ran ads in Senator Canella’s and Senator Blakeslee’s district, helping both candidates win in swing state Senate races.
California has some environmental problems, which have been sufficiently documented here. However, compared to the rest of the country and certainly the rest of the world, we have a relatively clean environment. There are many to thank for that (btw, thank you), but CEQA is the tool that has been used mostly to keep our state clean.
However, there is a darker side and we cannot ignore. HSP may or may not get built, but the attacks on it are mostly through CEQA. Every good project that runs up against NIMBYistas faces a CEQA threat. CEQA keeps bad things from happening, but it can make good things so expensive, it just doesn’t happen.
Maybe its worthwhile to review CEQA so that it keeps the bad things out but lets good things in. I understand how hard that is, just as I understand how subjective ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be.
High speed rail, wind power projects, UC/CSU/CC construction… there are a lot of people hurt by CEQA being applied against both private and public projects. Any progressive analysis of CEQA reform needs to take the big picture and not just see it as Good Greens versus Evil Evil Chevron.
Ever wonder why California can’t “get things done” anymore? CEQA lawyers are near the top of the list.
CEQA was designed to make building anything very difficult indeed. It gives virtual veto authority to any wingnut with an axe to grind.
Case in point. The San Francisco bicycle master plan (an environmentally sound idea if there ever was one) was held up for 13 years by one lone crazy car advocate and he used the CEQA sledgehammer to do it.
CEQA does not differentiate between a coal fired power plant and a transit oriented, infill, multi family housing development. It makes both projects jump through the same regulatory hoops and gives the NIMBYs the upper hand every time.
There is a reason why we have so much sprawl in California and its because almond orchards and cattle do not file CEQA lawsuits, and so thats where developers choose to build houses. Nobody wants to build in an urban area and spend 7 years in court.
All it does is require that an environmental impact report be prepared by an objective party according to scientific principles.
Thousands of projects are categorically exempt from the CEQA review process. The majority of EIRs conclude that there is “no impact” or determine that environmental impacts can be mitigated.
EIRs become subject to last-ditch legal challenges only when developers fail to build consensus for their projects. Lawsuits only require a judge to rule on the “completeness” or “impartiality” of the report, not to substitute his/her judgment for that of experts.
It’s just one of the many inconveniences that come with living in a crowded sophisticated civilization with limited space and resources.
If you think that legal challenges to EIRs should be reined in, then you probably agree that patients shouldn’t be allowed to sue doctors for malpractice and insurance claimants should be forced to accept arbitration rather than seeking legal recourse.
But Chevron isn’t trying to reform CEQA or the legal system around it. Chevron is trying to buy itself an exemption. That’s just wrong.
I wrote about this back in 2009. CEQA is a terrible way of protecting the environment, because it privileges the “low density and no growth” kind of environmentalism over the more responsible environmentalism that is focused on sustainability and combatting climate change.
SPUR has a good report on the matter and some sensible proposals for a better way of assessing projects that doesn’t simply empower NIMBYs (who should not have a role in project review) and opponents of growth, but that does ensure that projects are assessed for their environmental impact. We need that kind of sustainable planning – not a law that serves to preserve the 1950s.