In the midst of over a year of energy disasters around the world, Californians have been given a reason to celebrate and look forward to a safer energy future. Today Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a historic mandate that will put California back at the forefront of the clean energy movement.

Senate Bill X1 – 2 (Simitian), better known as SB 2X, mandates that providers of electricity in California increase their supply of renewable energy to 33 percent by the year 2020. Iterations of the bill limped along the past three years, once making it all the way to former Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk where it fell victim to his veto pen; other times it didn’t even round up enough votes of support to pass out of the legislature.

This year was a different story.  

These factors made the timing ripe:

   * California’s 2010 election results helped replace some of the legislators who were in the pockets of the polluting industries with new environmental champions who put the best interests of the public first. It also gave us a new governor who sees the connection between support for the clean energy sector and the movement towards economic recovery for the state.

   * Grassroots actions including hundreds of calls and emails from constituents urging support for SB 2X to targeted swing-voting legislators helped demonstrate increasing public support from around the state.

   * The idea of investing in renewable energy became connected with economic recovery, helping garner bipartisan support for SB 2X. A record high of six votes in the legislature came from Republicans whose districts are expected to receive jobs and other economic benefits from the new standard.

The movement towards clean, safe energy also received mounting momentum from the number of recent tragedies that have occurred around dirty energy extraction and production. April, in fact, marks the one year anniversary of the biggest environmental disaster in our nation’s history – BP’s Gulf Coast oil spill.  Here are some of the others:

   * The nuclear crisis in Japan, where the full extent of the damage is still unknown

   * The explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia which resulted in the deaths of 29 workers

   * The pollution of groundwater supplies around the nation as a result of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas

With a laundry list like that, it’s hard to find a reason not to support SB 2X. Aside from being the safe option, though, SB 2X will stimulate one of the bright spots in California’s economy. Investors have been waiting for this kind of green light indicating that California is moving forward on renewable energy. Without the mandate for an increase in renewable energy that SB 2X calls for, investors would be more likely to take their projects and jobs to other states.

Aware of the economic potential of SB 2X early on, labor worked in coalition with the environmental movement to see that Californians be put back to work with the green jobs of the future. Asked about SB 2X, California Building Trades President and CA League of Conservation Voters Board Member Bob Balgenorth said:

“We worked hard for two solid years to get this bill passed, because Building Trades workers understand that a healthier environment and a stronger economy go hand-in-hand. This measure provides multiple benefits for Californians: thousands of megawatts of new renewable energy, the cleaner and healthier environment that will result, and billions of dollars worth of construction projects for tens of thousands of California workers. This great legislation was enacted because the labor and environmental communities worked together, for the benefit of all of us.”

As Governor Brown signs SB 2X into law, let’s not forget that the impacts extend beyond California. This is where environmental legacies stem from. And with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu by the Governor’s side as he signed the bill into law, it’s hard not to hope that our influence will extend to the federal government once again.

California’s clean air and water, pristine coastline, wild open spaces and public health protections don’t happen by accident. They happen because champions for the environment run for office, and once they’re elected, they work to pass laws that protect our natural resources and improve our quality of life.

Today the California League of Conservation Voters released our annual California Environmental Scorecard. The Scorecard is the behind-the-scenes look at the battle to protect the Golden State’s natural legacy and public health, and reveals how the governor and members of the state legislature voted on critical environmental proposals in the 2010 legislative session. Take action and let your legislators know what you think about their 2010 scores: Visit http://www.ecovote.org/

The story of the 2010 Scorecard is as much about how the environmental community stopped multiple attacks on the environment as it is about how we passed strong laws that protect our quality of life. But the story doesn’t end there, because we expect more attacks in 2011 that falsely claim we need to sacrifice the environment in order to improve the economy.

Emboldened by the tough economic climate, anti-environmental legislators introduced dozens of so-called “regulatory reform” bills in 2010 in an attempt to weaken environmental protections. The good news is that, with the help of environmental champions in the state Senate and Assembly, CLCV and our allies successfully defeated the bills that posed the most serious threats to the environment and public health. At the same time, environmental advocates were able to deliver several important proposed laws to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk, including bills dealing with energy storage, recycling, water conservation, pesticides, clean energy jobs, and oil spill prevention.

Schwarzenegger’s 2010 score of 56% factored into an average lifetime score of 53 percent over his seven years as governor. The governor received national recognition for leadership on environmental issues. However, he leaves office with a mixed legacy, having championed some issues-notably, bold solutions to climate change-and having proven less reliable on others, including protecting public health and state parks.

How did your legislator perform on the environmental community’s priority legislation to protect the environment and public health? Learn your legislators’ scores and then let them know what you think! (More after the jump).

2010 California Environmental Scorecard Highlights:

Governor Schwarzenegger 56% (leaves office with 53% average score)

Senate average: 59%

Senate Democrats: 91%

Senate Republicans: 6%

Senators with 100% score: 12

Highest Scoring Senate Republican: Blakeslee, 21%

Lowest Scoring Senate Democrat: Correa, 30%

Assembly average: 64%

Assembly Democrats: 94%

Assembly Republicans: 7%

Assemblymembers with 100% score: 30

Highest Scoring Assembly Republican: Fletcher, 19%

Lowest Scoring Assembly Democrat: Huber, 43%

Perfect 100%:

Senators: Alquist, Cedillo, Corbett, DeSaulnier, Hancock, Kehoe, Leno, Liu, A. Lowenthal, Pavley, Steinberg, Yee.

Assemblymembers: Ammiano, Bass, Beall, Blumenfield, Bradford, Brownley, Carter, Chesbro, Coto, de Leon, Eng, Evans, Feuer, Gatto, Hayashi, Hill, Huffman, Jones, Lieu, B. Lowenthal, Monning, Nava, J. Pérez, Ruskin, Salas, Saldaña, Skinner, Swanson, Torlakson, Yamada.

The California Environmental Scorecard is an important tool for environmental voters, who for nearly 40 years have helped CLCV deliver on our mission to hold elected officials accountable to their campaign promises to protect California’s families and natural heritage.

With the introduction this year of a new interactive, online Environmental Scorecard, CLCV is making it even easier for voters to communicate with their elected officials about their environmental performance.

Please know the score and take action today! Visit http://www.ecovote.org/

The Union of Concerned Scientists has officially come out AGAINST Proposition 16.

The two-thirds vote requirement sets a problematic precedent for a community’s desire to raise and spend funds for an approved purpose.  For the specific purposes outlined in the ballot initiative, the two-thirds vote requirement would effectively prevent local communities from having a choice as to who they purchase their electricity from.  Today, this choice, or the threat of such a choice, could have a positive impact on the behavior of the regulated investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in a number of areas, including rates and increasing investments in local sources of renewable energy.  

The environmental community in California has said that we need to move away from the 2/3 vote toward a simple majority vote on state budget and related revenue matters.  This proposed constitutional amendment goes in the opposite direction.  

Local governments rightfully fear that if this initiative passes, opponents with the sufficient financial resources to mount a public campaign will try to restrict local government’s ability to issue other types of revenue bonds.  

While publicly owned municipal utilities (POUs) can’t guarantee more or less renewable energy than the IOUs, most California POUs have a voluntary green power option that ratepayers can opt into to promote additional development of renewables.  The California IOUs currently do not have such an option and don’t appear to be moving any time soon in that direction.  

While the initiative exempts the 2/3 vote requirement for bonds that would go to 100 percent renewable power, it would still require a 2/3 vote for any combination of renewable and non-renewable energy-even if a newly proposed community choice entity committed to a portfolio of, for example, three-quarters renewables.  

The recent desire and community support for creating new Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) entities for retail electricity purposes, along with the periodic attempt by some communities (e.g. Yolo County) to expand existing POUs, has led PG&E to put this proposition on the ballot to thwart, once and for all, the ability of communities to move toward a limited or full-blown public power option.  

It is relevant to note that all the local jurisdictions that have been promoting the CCA or public power expansion have made renewable energy a top priority in their plans to take over part of the electricity service in their communities.  Not surprisingly, the jurisdictions that are most interested in the public power option, each have relatively progressive elected leaders who have publicly indicated strong commitments to increasing renewable energy.  

Of course, these commitments don’t guarantee that more renewable energy will be produced or used, but we do like to encourage every utility to increase their percentage of renewables as much as possible, and these local elected leaders have expressed a strong desire to create portfolios of energy that have a higher percentage of renewables than the IOUs would be required to procure.  Showing encouragement to elected leaders at all levels of government to promote more renewables can be a positive strategy.  

Please vote NO on 16.

Senate Democrats have sent a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger asking him to reconsider his veto of the renewable energy standard and subsequent executive order.  The strongly worded letter has about as much currency as the eleventy billion-dollar bill, but it does explain why the Governor’s hypocritical action is a bad deal for California.

Respectfully, an Executive Order does not have the force and effect of law. Additionally, such a proclamation will only cause confusion and uncertainty to California’s energy markets, jeopardizing California’s role as the world leader in renewable energy development and green jobs.

As you noted when you signed AB 32, the landmark “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” administrative actions are no substitute for a statute that is permanent and enforceable.

Directing the California Air Resources Board to implement an RPS program is a fundamentally flawed approach. The CARB is not an energy agency; it is an air quality regulatory agency. There are numerous provisions of law which impair the CARB’s ability to implement a renewable portfolio standard. Assigning this new responsibility to the CARB will not result in new renewable energy being built soon–it will only lead to litigation, regulatory confusion, and delay.

In our view, it is essential to green businesses and the renewable energy investment community which bring jobs and capital into California, that California’s 33% RPS be statutorily established and not subject to the whims of changing administrations.

There’s only one reason that Schwarzenegger gave the CARB the ability to implement a renewable energy standard – so he can go on talk shows and crow that he’s instituted an environmental achievement.  Except, as is explained here, it won’t.  It will get tied up in court challenges and confusion, without a clear mandate for the standard or penalties thereto.  

Schwarzenegger has responded to this by calling the Legislature’s bill “protectionist,” and saying that if we get water from the Colorado River, we should be able to get renewable energy from other states as well.  The difference is that a commodity is not the same as a job.  The twin goals of a renewable energy standard are to spur the usage of renewables as a means to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to build a green-collar economy that will create millions of new jobs.  Schwarzenegger would rather give those jobs away.  And given the perilous state of the economy here in California, we simply cannot afford that.

Job losses in the public sector will prolong the economic pain in California through 2010 even as a recovery gets under way nationwide, two forecasters predict.

Jeff Michael, a forecaster at the University of the Pacific, said Tuesday that California’s recession will be over before the end of the year. But the cutbacks in state and local government, along with the continuing fallout from the mortgage meltdown, will make 2010 feel like another year of recession, Michael said in UOP’s latest quarterly forecast.

Similarly, the newest UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts a sluggish recovery because of the weak public sector. UCLA senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg is more optimistic than Michael about the housing market, and says California will outperform the U.S. economy starting in 2011.

Yet both economists say Californians can expect continued high unemployment for a couple more years or so. The unemployment rate is currently 11.9 percent in California and 11.8 percent in greater Sacramento.

And yet here is Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoing the only major bill that would produce any semblance of an economic recovery for California.

The establishment in Sacramento has manned the barricades, battened down the hatches and gone on the offensive to prove their own worth.  They sent their best man in the media, George Skelton, out to prove that no, despite your lying eyes, the California Legislature had a real banner year.  After all, they managed to bring suffering to the lives of hundreds of thousands of state residents with consensus and bipartisan elan!

The current Legislature, regardless of Duvall and despite ideological polarization, has had a better year than it’s getting credit for.

Its main accomplishment was keeping the state afloat amid a flood of red ink, created primarily by the toughest economic times since the Great Depression. OK, so it did use some bailing wire and chewing gum! The bills got paid, even if briefly with IOUs.

With great difficulty and pain — at least for Democrats — the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed programs by roughly $30 billion. They also struck a major blow against “auto-pilot” spending by permanently eliminating all automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, except for K-12 schools. And they summoned enough courage to temporarily increase taxes by $12.5 billion.

In the end, they found a way to restore health insurance for 660,000 low-income kids.

The tax increases hit the more vulnerable elements of society disproportionately, of course.  They actually found that way to restore children’s health insurance by lowering industry taxes and increasing the co-pay and deductible burden on the low-income families themselves, while reducing the covered care.  And anyone who adds cutting $30 billion in programs and eliminating COLA as an accomplishment is a bit of a social deviant.  But there are probably no lengths to which Skelton will go to defend the palace walls from the rabble who think, based on the evidence, that the system is horribly broken.

Steve Maviglio wisely steers clear of the more horrific achievements of this year’s Legislature, and offers a slightly more defensible outlook of the ’09 Legislative session.  Still, there’s a lot unsaid:

Looking back, getting the measures on the May ballot was a significant early success that required 2/3 votes. And toward the end of the session, in addition to the renewable energy bill, Speaker Bass pushed through measures on childrens health and domestic violence that won broad bipartisan support. (The Speaker also got a standing ovation, and she appears to have strengthened her support in Caucus. Compare that to the ouster of the two Republican leaders).

Okay, so the grand water deal didn’t get done. Big deal. Nothing like that has been done for a generation. Perhaps Senate President pro Tem Steinberg set the bar too high when he said he’d get it done. In any case, all parties agree that they got close and can pick up the pieces and get it finished in short order.

So for all those crying for major reforms, put it all into perspective. Sure, improvements could be made, and things could have been better, but this is not reason for drastic action. Far from it.

Of course, the renewable bill is veto bait, as are many of the other major bills pending the Governor’s signature.  And the domestic violence bill didn’t pass the Senate, so, um, that doesn’t count.  The prison bill offered decent parole reforms but stopped well short of a real solution.  Everyone keeps saying the water bill will happen but the two sides remain far apart, and the fact that they’ll have to go into overtime to reconcile it kind of proves the point, no?

But Maviglio tips his hand with the line “this is not reason for drastic action.”  Of course he would say that.  He’s profited well from the status quo.  Anything that messes with it could hurt him professionally, and what’s more, could stop the endless blaming of outside factors to account for stunning failure.

There is no shame in stating that this was a failed legislative session.  Just about everyone in California would agree with you, particularly the ones who are suffering the most from the destruction of social insurance caused by the most heartless cuts.  Simply put, the Great Recession dominated legislative activity, and the conservative veto from various 2/3 requirements restricts the Legislature from fulfilling the expressed will of the people through their votes (NOTE: This does not only come into play with the budget; late last Friday Republicans blocked over 20 bills that required 2/3 votes for one reason or another, probably because they knew they could get away with it).  That’s not something to explain away, it’s actually something to fight, every single day until the problem is rectified.

Skelton and Maviglio may want to tell themselves all is well, but the public knows better, and they’re going to demand major structural change.  Those who think that the Legislature can still be a force for good in the state can get aboard and provide the best ideas to break the supermajority gridlock and get the state moving again.  Or they can defend their narrow interests.  Their defense will fail, and it would be a shame not to see them on the right side of history.

As Jim Evans, Communications Director for Sen. Steinberg, notes, the Governor is poised to veto a bill he championed, which would mandate the highest renewable energy standard in the nation, requiring utilities to get 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.  But it’s far worse than just a veto.  Schwarzenegger wants to then set the standard himself by executive order.  You can see why this would please him – he would be able to say that he boldly moved the state forward in the renewable energy space, while vetoing the bill from the Legislature that would do the same thing.  And he wold significantly weaken the standard in a variety of ways.

The order presumably would set no limit on how much of the green power could be imported from other states.

Environmentalists who have been told about the governor’s still-evolving plans said Schwarzenegger also was considering directing the California Air Resources Board to look at broadening the state’s definition of renewable energy sources to include large hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy plants.

Critics questioned whether Schwarzenegger’s order would be binding once he leaves office at the end of 2010. The validity of the order would be subject to a variety of potential legal challenges, they predicted.

So Schwarzenegger would allow utilities to outsource all the green jobs that would be created if power needed to be created on California soil, ruining the one area of potential economic recovery in the bill.  He would put the standard on shaky legal ground, open to litigation and an unclear mandate.  And he would hand a gift to the nuclear power industry by twisting arms at the Air Resources Board to change their definition of renewable energy.

This isn’t just short-sighted, it’s downright criminal.  A high renewable standard could spurn all kinds of economic activity, but without a limit on importation, that activity will just go elsewhere instead of California.  This is an effort of questionable legality for Schwarzenegger to reward corporate cronies with lower purchasing prices for green energy at the expense of California jobs.

Astounding.

SB14, which would set a first-in-the-nation standard that utilities must receive 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, passed the Legislature late last night.

“Increased development of renewable energy in California has tremendous potential as an economic development tool. These are clean, green jobs that belong in California. SB 14 sets a clear target with a real deadline, and then makes it as easy as possible to bring renewable energy on line.

In light of the state’s ambitious new carbon emission targets, SB 14 will give energy agencies the flexibility they need in order to meet those goals. Current law “caps” the amount of renewable energy that the Public Utilities Commission may order utilities to buy or build at 20 percent. This bill would remove this cap and require utilities to acquire 33 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020.”

This would make California’s renewable energy standard one of the most aggressive in the world.  The Governor, feted in magazines and national media as an environmental leader, has vocally backed the 33% standard in the past.  But power plant generators have pressured Schwarzenegger to veto the bill.  And according to the LA Times, he will.

The Senate did manage to pass the energy bill, which would raise to 33% the amount of energy the utilities must get from renewable sources. Final approval by the Assembly of some minor amendments was expected.

However, a high-ranking administration official said late Friday that the governor may not sign the bill, SB 14 by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), because of provisions limiting the amount of energy that could come from outside California. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the bills were not yet on the governor’s desk.

That would really be the icing on the cake to the worst Governorship in California history.  The one issue on which he staked his legacy, and he is likely to veto the bill most likely to drive the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly because it would keep too many jobs in the state.  Adding a renewable energy standard and mandating a majority of that energy be generated in state, is probably the only bill passed this year that looks to expand the local economy.  And because of that, Schwarzenegger will veto it.

And the same magazines will put him on the cover with the slogan “The Greenenator” and talk up his environmental credentials.