Notes from yet another long session in the Legislature:

The Senate could wait no longer for the Assembly to get their act together, so they passed a reduced prison package along the Assembly’s lines, one that falls $200 million short of projections and does not have a sentencing commission.  The Governor has announced he’ll sign the bill.  It’s marginally worthwhile for the parole reforms, but really nowhere near what’s needed.  And so the federal judges will in all likelihood order a mass release, and because little is being done to address root causes, the cost of prisons and the population as a whole are both still likely to increase.  The cowards in the Assembly who think they have designs on higher office after this travesty should know that this vote will have importance, but not in the way they think.

The bill to waive CEQA requirements (California Environmental Quality Act) to put a football stadium in Southern California – without an NFL team, mind you – did not get by Darrell Steinberg, despite lots of energy and effort from special interests.  He’s giving the various parties more time to negotiate a settlement.  Sports stadiums are among the biggest corporate welfare projects we have in America.

The much-ballyhooed water deal has been scuttled, as Karen Bass announced she did not have the votes to move it.  The Speaker may ask for a special session on water, and the Governor would probably move that as well.  The middle-of-the-night rush obviously didn’t work, so some transparency would be preferable.

Still waiting on the renewable energy standard bill, which would put California in the vanguard of the nation in terms of its portfolio (33% by 2020).

As state Senator Mark DeSaulnier said to me a few weeks ago, on a majority-vote basis, California remains in the vanguard of the country.  The Legislature is poised to prove that by the end of the session, if they manage to get to the Governor’s desk the most aggressive renewable energy standard in America, with a target of getting 33% of all energy from renewable sources by 2020.  Most stakeholders appear to be on board with this standard, including the utilities, who won’t reach the current RES goal of 20% by 2010 (Southern California Edison Co. is at 15.5%, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is at 11.9% and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. only at 6.1%, as of last year).  They are confident that the transmission grid, helped along by federal stimulus money, will allow them to transfer renewable energy freely enough to reach the 33% standard.  The question, posed today by the LA Times, concerns where that energy will come from.

The main argument is over how much of the new green power must be generated within California’s borders. Another point of contention is which is more expensive: in-state renewable energy or wind and solar power from facilities elsewhere in the West […]

Unlike the current 20% renewable energy law for 2010, the two proposed bills with goals for 2020 have enforcement provisions, including financial penalties for failing to meet renewable energy procurement levels.

They also broaden the requirements to include publicly owned utilities, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

A big sticking point in the debate is how much renewable power the state’s utilities are allowed to buy or generate out of state. The current law has no limit.

The utilities favor that, but labor unions and their allies want a provision in pending legislation that at least 80% of the power be generated in California.

Unions and their supporters say that most of the new power plants should be built in state so that California workers could snag most of the new green jobs and other benefits involved. “If the people of Wyoming receive the jobs, the tax revenue and the infrastructure, what benefit are Californians going to get other than higher electric bills?” said Matt Freedman, an attorney with the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayers’ group. “The question is, ‘Who is going to benefit from the 33% standard?'”

First of all, I can’t believe that the 2006 law has no enforcement provisions.  At the very least, there has to be some incentive to get the utilities to meet the standard, otherwise, as we’re seeing right now, they’ll slow-walk it.  

To answer the man from the Utility Reform Network who asked, “Who is going to benefit from the 33% standard,” the answer is that we all will, both by lower emissions and by setting a marker for other states to follow.  Renewable energy is extremely popular, and if California acts boldly to set a high standard, they will see a residual benefit.  There’s probably a sweet spot in between no limit to out-of-state production and 20%, that can benefit both the environment and job creation in California.  Perhaps a small tariff for importing renewable energy could be created to level the playing field.

Regardless, we’re very likely to see this precedent-setting standard this year.

The bill numbers are SB 14 (Simitian) and AB 64 (Krekorian).

NOTE: These are my prepared remarks for today’s keynote address as the Scripps Seaside Forum, sponsored by the Sustainability Alliance of Southern California, Heartland Foundation-United Green and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

It’s great to be at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, one of our country’s most important research facilities. The work of this institute has led the way in understanding climate change, the effect of the warming oceans and how we can adapt to the inevitable changes in our environment.  

I’m here today to talk to you about the next industrial revolution. The world’s economies are fueled by carbon based fuels that have polluted our atmosphere and set up a warming climate. Now when I talk about the next revolution, I don’t mean the coal-and-oil fueled economy of yesteryear. The irrefutable science of climate change requires that we take a different path, and with sound investments in renewable energy, green technology, and education, we can create a new green industrial revolution that will put countless thousands of our residents back to work.  

President Obama understands what’s at stake. Under his stimulus package, California is expected to receive more than $1.5 billion for job-creating alternative energy, energy efficiency, energy conservation, and other energy and climate related efforts. Included in this estimate, the U.S. Treasury and Energy Departments announced that at least $3 billion in competitive grants will be distributed nationwide to support an estimated 5,000 biomass, solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects. Note to Secretary Chu: consider using some of the $3 billion as a loan guarantee, thereby expanding the use of the funds.

Incentives for renewable energy generation and installation are also fueling the growth in green jobs. In just the first four months of 2009, solar installations nearly tripled compared to the year prior. Homeowners, businesses, and government all benefit from the California Solar Initiative (CSI), which provides incentives that reduce the total cost of installed systems by an average of 20 percent. Signed into law in 2006, the CSI aims to install 3,000 MW of new solar power by offering $3 billion in solar rebates over 10 years. Additionally, businesses and homeowners qualify for a federal investment tax credit of 30 percent on renewable energy systems. According to the California Community Colleges Centers of Excellence, the solar industry in California is on pace to produce 40,000 new jobs by 2016.

More over the flip…

We are seeing real progress. Today’s global economic crisis can be combated with a strong commitment to green job growth. Unemployed construction workers with minimal retraining will begin installing solar panels and wind turbines. Today’s college engineering students will be the engineers of the future, designing new renewable power plants. Scientists will find additional resources and demand to research cutting edge renewable energies like tidal, algae, or fusion power. In a very real sense, the future is now.

So where do we go from here? First and foremost, we must recommit resources to education at all levels. The nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California recently found that if current trends continue, California will have one million college graduates fewer than required to keep pace with our economy’s potential growth. As the PPIC explains, “Cuts in education funding work against the state’s long term interests. […] Unless decisions and actions are taken soon to improve educational outcomes for Californians, the state’s future economy and the prosperity of its residents will be compromised.”

California’s future business climate requires a well-educated workforce, yet we are near the bottom in per pupil K-12 spending. When we cut classes, remove extracurricular enrichment, and overstuff classrooms, we deprive our students of the tools they require to succeed in a competitive global economy. From biotechnology to Internet technology, much of California’s economic prosperity depends on a scientifically literate population, yet we are at risk of leaving a generation behind. We can do better.

Higher education is also at risk. I used to say California higher education is on a slow road to starvation, but the pace seems to be quickening with every passing year. Adjusted for inflation, student fees have more than doubled at the California State University and University of California, and more than tripled at our community colleges. In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. This year, higher education only received 10 percent. The result: furloughs of professors and staff, 40,000 qualified students will not enter the CSU system, and more than 2,000 will not enter the UC system. These are the engineers, technicians, teachers, and nurses that we need to grow our economy. Bottom line: the best investment is education. It has a $4.31 return for every dollar we spend. We must reinvest in education, and that is why I support an oil severance charge that would generate more than $1 billion yearly for higher education.

We are at the forefront of a green industrial revolution, and how we respond to this opportunity determines our state’s future. California’s success was based on a robust, entrepreneurial private sector and prudent state investments. Job growth, environmental sustainability, and quality affordable education are interconnected like never before. The federal government is providing us with some of the tools we require to jumpstart our economy. Let’s take the baton and make California the Golden State once again.

John Garamendi is California’s Lieutenant Governor, chair of the California Commission for Economic Development, a University of California Regent, and a California State University Trustee. As a State Legislator, he authored California’s first alternative energy tax incentive.

(Truly an amazing reversal by Governor Hoover on this. – promoted by David Dayen)

What can $100 million buy you? Apparently California’s coastline if Big Oil has its way.

In late January, as chair of the California State Lands Commission, I joined State Controller John Chiang in a two-to-one vote to deny the first offshore oil lease off the coast of California in more than four decades. To permit more oil production off the coast of California, a state seen the world over as a leader in environmental stewardship, would have sent a terrible signal that California isn’t yet prepared to embrace a green economy. The risk of a major oil spill killing marine life, soiling the coast, and decimating marine-based industries and tourism is simply too high for a quick buck.

Sadly, as part of yesterday’s drastic state budget May Revision, California once again faces a renewed push to allow oil drilling off the coast of California. Big Oil has essentially offered to California $100 million dollars to seduce the state into granting the first new oil drilling lease in California since the Santa Barbara oil spill 41 years ago, a spill that covered hundreds of miles of ocean and over 30 miles of sandy beaches with more than three million gallons of crude oil. Learning from history means not blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.

More over the flip…

Furthermore, the $100 million loan must be repaid by forgiving future royalty payments to California. This is an incredibly reckless fiscal policy. To drill ourselves out of a recession with this plan is like drinking sea water to quench our thirst. There may be a little temporary relief, but we’ll regret it later. California should be a leader in renewable energy production, not a producer of a polluting product best left in the 20th century. We are selling the coast for short term gain, long term loss, and possibly long term devastation.

The Santa Barbara Oil Spill did have one positive outcome. Many environmental historians suggest that it gave birth to the modern environmentalist movement. We need that enthusiasm again.

John Garamendi is the Lieutenant Governor of California, chair of the California State Lands Commission, and a former Deputy Interior Secretary under President Bill Clinton.

During the Memorial Day break, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers will invite congressional representatives to tour union job-training centers around the country to show them why they are the right choice when it comes to creating a renewable energy work force.

“The IBEW has developed one of the most advanced green training curriculums in the electrical industry and it makes sense that federal and state authorities partner with those who are already doing the work to meet the needs of greening our economy,” said IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill.

From retrofitting buildings to installing wind turbines, new opportunities are opening up in the green energy sector as millions of stimulus dollars are made available for training and investment in the new energy economy.  

But expected rapid growth of those jobs will require tens of thousands of skilled electricians who can safely and professionally install and wire solar panels, wind turbines and biofuel plants, a demand that it is already being met by the IBEW.

The National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee – a partnership between the IBEW and union electrical contractors – unveils its Green Jobs Curriculum next month, which collects more than 70 green training lessons the NJATC has been using into one single curriculum.

The comprehensive program, which covers everything from automated building operations to solar photovoltaics, will be woven into the fabric of current IBEW apprenticeship training and will serve as a resource for more experience electricians looking to upgrade their skills in the growing green jobs market.

“If Congress is looking to invest stimulus money wisely in training a new green work force, they don’t have to look any further than one of our training centers,” Hill said.

Some of the centers that will be open for tours include:

– Pittsburgh Local 5’s 47,000 square-foot facility has trained more than 1,000 electricians since it opened in 2000. This year there have been more 400 applications for the program, the most interest the local has seen in years, said Training Director Bob Gieder.  Next fall, the center will be kicking off a solar installation “train-the-trainer” program to turn out skilled solar instructors to serve Western Pennsylvania.

– Lisle, Ill., Local 701’s 90,000 square-foot facility has received many awards for architectural design since it first opened more than five years ago, but the real action is inside, says Training Director Edward Rossi. Nearly 100 apprentices are getting hands-on experience with solar and wind hook-ups by practicing on solar arrays and wind turbines on site.  

The training centers not only guarantee that the sustainable energy industry will be staffed by the best-trained electrical workers, but they make sure that green jobs are good-paying union ones that will grow the middle class and put our economy back on the road to recovery.

Community colleges across the United States are reporting a surge in enrollment for classes that offer training for green-collar jobs.

But while the average college student ends up more than $20,000 in debt by the time they graduate, IBEW apprentices start making money the moment they are accepted into a five-year program, which combines both classroom and on-the-job training.

“They earn while they learn,” Gieder said. “Where else do you get paid for learning how to do a job?”

“Decent wages and benefits mean that our apprentices can stay in the area and contribute to their community,” Le Sueur, Minn., Local 343 Training Director Andy Toft said. “They become taxpayers, buy homes and cars and make their neighborhoods a good place to raise a family.”

We’ve had less than glowing reviews of the public comments of potential gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, but there has been somewhat less talk about the other leading potential candidate, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  His re-election performance was uninspired and listless, but that’s not a description of his policies.

I have said in the past that the enduring image of Villaraigosa’s leadership is a crane in front of a half-finished building.  Now we are seeing him tested in a time of crisis.  Los Angeles has a close to $1 billion dollar deficit, and he is trying to balance cuts with continued support for labor, and the results have not been pretty.  While Villaraigosa led the effort to add a penny to the sales tax for public transit, he has vowed not to raise local taxes to cover the deficit, and as a result, the mayor will cut salaries for city workers almost across the board by 10%, and  LA Unified will lay off 5,000 teachers this year.

Los Angeles school district officials moved forward Tuesday with plans to lay off more than 5,000 teachers, counselors, custodians, clerks and other employees, but the battle over funding will rage on for weeks — affecting who goes, who stays and what schools and classrooms will look like for students next year.

The Board of Education’s 4-3 vote, after more than four hours of pleading and debate, closed most of a $596.1-million deficit for next year in the nation’s second-largest school system.

“Anger is appropriate and outrage is appropriate,” said school board President Monica Garcia, who voted with the majority. “Nobody wants to do these layoffs.”

While the board, which Villaraigosa effectively bought after a series of election cycles, did spare 1,900 elementary school teachers, the layoffs will be deeply felt, particularly in those ten schools the Mayor personally controls.

In his State of the City speech last week, Villaraigosa denounced Sacramento lawmakers, yet he supports the same failed propositions that will not address the structural problems with state government, and he did nothing, of course, to move forward on any of those while Speaker of the Assembly.  However, he did spend a lot of time in his speech talking about his innovative environmental policies in Los Angeles, which have had an impact.

Villaraigosa denounced the “politics of no” as he called for a green technology hub along the west side of the Los Angeles River to attract new jobs and start-up companies.

“We need to build a future in which clean technology is as synonymous with Los Angeles as motion pictures or aerospace,” said the mayor, appearing at the Harbor City factory of Balqon Corp., which manufactures electric big-rigs for use at the city’s ports […]

As a centerpiece of his speech, Villaraigosa reintroduced his plan for a “green” industry corridor just east of downtown that would serve as a spawning ground for environmentally conscious businesses. The speech echoed Villaraigosa’s message during his recent reelection campaign, when he promised to make Los Angeles “the greenest big city in America.”

Over the last four years, Villaraigosa has pushed the Port of Los Angeles to replace up to 17,000 diesel trucks with cleaner-burning models. And at the Department of Water and Power, he has pressed officials to expand the utility’s reliance on renewable sources of energy — primarily wind, solar and geothermal power.

And that agenda could be scaled up to offer a new economic future for California.  Villaraigosa selected longtime green activist David Freeman as his environmental deputy, and as a result you’ll probably see some form of solar initiative along the lines of Measure B, which was defeated in March, come into law.

So there are glimmers here.  But I will personally never forget Villaraigosa leaving town in 2006 for an 18-day Asian trip in the middle of the Schwarzenegger-Angelides race, and neglecting to even endorse Angelides until late in the campaign (and even then, not in Los Angeles).  The Mayor has a few good ideas, has been less successful with the follow-through, and on the big structural issues has offered no vision of reform.

We still have no movement candidate in this race.

Yesterday’s adoption by the California Air Resources Board of a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is really worthy of praise.  Ignoring the bleatings of neo-Hooverists and apologists for polluters who insist that concern for the environment is a “job-killer,” the board, led by Mary Nichols, put forward 31 rules designed to cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.  This will force innovation and provide a boost to the economy and the burgeoning industry of green technology, as the Governor noted in his remarks.

The Modesto Bee has a look at some of the plans.

INDUSTRY:

• Impose an emissions cap on utilities, refineries and other large industrial sources of greenhouse gases.

• Allow those large polluters to gradually lower emissions by participating in a cap-and-trade market.

TRANSPORTATION:

• Put into effect a 2002 California law requiring automakes to produce cleaner vehicles. The Bush administration has blocked the law, but state regulators expect President-elect Barack Obama’s administration will back it.

• Require fuel companies to reformulate fuels so they are a combined 10 percent less carbon-intensive by 2020.

• Give local governments incentives to curb urban sprawl and reduce how far people drive to work or school.

• Require cargo and cruise ships to turn off their engines while docked.

ENERGY:

• Require utilities to generate one-third of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal by 2020.

• Strengthen energy-efficiency standards for appliances, as well as for existing and new buildings.

The fact that a renewable standard, cap and trade, green building, smart growth and development, energy efficiency and clean fuels are all combined into this large agreement is very hopeful.  While the political sector is a mess, this is truly one area where California can become a model for the nation.  And while there will be up-front costs, those can be mitigated by expected federal attention to renewable energy and green jobs, which could allow consumers to be eligible for federal tax incentives to implement these ideas.  What’s more, as Nichols argued, this is a big-picture savings over the long term.

But Air Resource Board chairwoman Mary Nichols said California’s plan would save its residents and businesses money in the long run.

“We believe that California, again and again, has pushed for higher levels of efficiency in our electric sector, our buildings and appliances, and time after time it turns out efficiency measures have not only saved us money but leaped our economy ahead,” Nichols said after the vote.

A board report found that the average household would save $400 a year by driving more fuel-efficient vehicles and living in more energy-efficient homes. And already, private investors have given more than $2.5 billion this year to new companies that have sprung up in California, in part to respond to the state’s environmental goals, said Bob Epstein, co-founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs.

“Our president-elect has called for stimulating our economy,” said Bill Mcgavern, director of California’s Sierra Club. “I think he and the Congress will be looking to the state of California, and these measures can serve as a model for the rest of the country.”

This is one area where we can be proud to be Californians.  The SacBee has more.

I do some work for No on Prop 7.

On Thursday, I headed over to Berkeley for a press conference at the Sierra Club against Props 7 & 10.  Also there were the CA League of Conservation Voters, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. All four of these groups are opposed to the two environmental measures on the ballot, Prop 7 and Prop 10.

Unfortunately, these two measures were not sufficiently vetted.  Prop 7 could discourage renewable development with poor siting mechanisms and a risk of shuttering small renewable producers. Prop 10 is a massive giveaway to natural gas interests, and Swiftboater T. Boone Pickens.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian, certainly no friend of the utilities, also reluctantly came to the decision that both of these props were losers. Join the Calitics Editorial Board in voting No on Props 7 & 10.