California’s climate cowardice

After decades of undisputed climate leadership, California regulators and politicians are bending the knee to Big Oil — buying the manufactured panic of petro-criminals and selling our future as collateral. The clean energy revolution was born in California — and if Big Oil has its way, it’ll die in California, too.

Earlier this year, in the earliest days of Trump’s pointless war in Iran, large oil and gas companies approached the California Air Resources Board with a lie and an ask: Gas prices were high, they said — wasn’t that evidence of California’s inability to support a functioning carbon market? Shouldn’t that justify gutting the pesky pay-for-pollution programs that ate into their profits?

With Big Oil’s propaganda in their ears, CARB — and every elected leader in Sacramento who should have known better — folded.

Nevermind that gas prices were only up because of Trump’s war of choice. Nevermind that if the oil giants had wanted to keep prices down, they could have. There was money to be made, and, as is its way, Big Oil shamelessly went after it — at the expense of California’s first-in-the-nation Cap and Invest program.

Cap and Invest is the cornerstone of California’s decarbonization policy. It operates on a simple idea: polluters have to pay for their emissions and the money generated is used for public transit, electricity rebates, community air pollution reduction programs, and affordable housing. In its 13 years on the books, Cap and Invest has driven over $30 billion into those programs. Last fall, it was extended through 2045 — a major win for communities most impacted by climate change, and for our path to net-zero.

But Big Oil, predictably, would rather pollute without penalty.

The war in Iran presented Big Oil with an opportunity to push for exactly that. Big Oil pointed to the spike in gas prices as a reason they deserved a break from Cap and Invest’s penalties. Their lobbyists conveniently left out the fact that since 2015, Big Oil has charged Californians an unexplained “Mystery Gas Surcharge” of, on average, $0.41 per gallon — adding up to roughly $59 billion dollars. No environmental regulation, state, or federal tax explains this extra charge.

The picture gets even worse when you look solely at gas stations owned by the name-brand oil companies like Chevron and Valero, which have been charging Californians an exorbitant $0.75-per-gallon premium. Texas-based Chevron is posting record profits and crying poverty. They take us for fools.

In late May, CARB adopted rules that surrender our climate future to Big Oil’s demands. The new rules dilute and delegitimize the Cap and Invest market to the tune of up to $2 billion of unrealized revenue per year that goes directly to local communities to reduce pollution and lower prices — all to boost the already skyrocketing profits of Big Oil. It reeks of corruption. It hurts vulnerable communities. And it runs counter to logic. As I wrote to CARB and Governor Newsom earlier this year, the volatility of fossil fuel prices is an argument to move away from them — not to subsidize them, or to give CPR to what should be a dying industry.

All signs point to this being the moment to double down on climate leadership: solar is cheaper than ever. Batteries are better than ever. Wind power will never get stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. Shepherding along the clean energy transition is precisely what Cap and Invest was intended to do. Why, then, are our leaders choosing to abandon the leadership position California worked so hard to earn? The answer is as obvious as it is disappointing: Big Oil’s propaganda and money.

The people that should be winning us our future are choking with the game on the line.

This story is so much bigger than a single regulatory battle. It’s a story of structural corruption, of corporate capture, of how, when given the choice, our leaders have sold out their constituents and our climate future. This is how the world’s most profitable industries buy their way out of trouble: they give money to politicians, deploy armies of lobbyists and rig the system for themselves. It is almost cartoonishly unfair: Big Oil price gouges Californians at the pump with one hand, and successfully lobbies to pilfer transit funding with the other. The contempt these bigwigs feel for Californians just trying to scrape by — just trying to get from point A to point B — is endless. It’s shameful.

By surrendering what should have been a straightforward climate win — the 20-year extension of Cap and Invest — at the last minute, under self-interested pressure from unmistakably bad actors, CARB has willingly jeopardized California’s long-standing status as a climate leader — and the broader climate agenda. If a one-time, fossil-fueled lobbying blitz can successfully defang California’s flagship climate program, what’s going to stop Big Oil from running the same playbook again and again?

We can — and must — demand better. The legislature still has a say in how Cap and Invest revenues will be allocated. Contact your elected officials to tell them that they have a responsibility to put affordability, people, public health and our state’s future ahead of corporate greed. Let them know that you are not happy that the community funding they have fought so hard to protect is being siphoned off by Big Oil. Tell them that the stakes are nothing less than our collective future — and whether our government serves Californians, or corporations.