Ali Zaidi on what the US can learn from California

With help from Alex Nieves and Ariel Gans

ZAIDI IN CALI: Ali Zaidi, President Joe Biden’s top climate adviser, is responsible for coordinating between agencies to deliver Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to climate change — an area where California has gone ahead of much of the rest of the country.

We talked to him last week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in LA — before Biden announced plans to sharply increase tariffs on batteries, solar panels, electric cars and other climate technology imported from China that some have argued could slow the energy transition. (“Supply chain risk is climate risk,” Zaidi told the New York Times yesterday.)

He had some thoughts to share about how the federal government is learning from California’s successes and failures as it tackles climate change.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you see California when it comes to the national energy transition? Is it a place that you look to as a model?

I think we’ve learned a lot from the places where California has been able to identify fast breaks, as well as the barriers and hurdles folks have hit here as they’ve chased down their climate ambitions. In the process I think California has forged interesting partnership models that we’ve been able to scale.

I just met last week with someone who won the Goldman prize who’s from here: Andrea [Vidaurre], who organized the Imperial Valley area around heavy duty electrification and reducing emissions from heavy duty vehicles. That partnership between industry, environmental justice, state regulators and folks investing in infrastructure is one that we’ve been able to learn from and help expand.

I think the other big thing for California is just the demand pull and the ability to move the market in meaningful ways. What’s happening with the Port of LA, Port of Long Beach, is actually driving electrification corridors all the way to El Paso and Nevada. There’s a lot that’s going on here, that cascades in terms of impacts all across the country.

What about the hurdles? What are the learnings there?

Over the last five to 10 years we’ve seen California work through integration of battery storage into the grid and helping to manage the duck curve. I think that learning around integration of utility scale batteries onto the grid has been really meaningful for the rest of the country as folks have thought through that.

California, along with a few other states — New York, Florida — had some of the early “make ready” programs around EV charger build out. I think folks hit some barriers along the way. I think that learning has translated meaningfully. And then I think California has met constraints on drought in particular that have facilitated real innovation and creativity that’s had spillover benefit. Programs like the WaterSMART grant program — the Department of the Interior helped scale up some of those in other states.

It’s also been recently reported that oil profits are down in California, one of the only places in the country. Is part of what it means to have these climate successes that the oil and gas industry also doesn’t do well?

There’s a transition that’s playing out around the country on fossil fuels. We’ve seen the market share of electric and hydrogen vehicles, non-petroleum-based vehicles, expand very rapidly in California. And I think that is instructive.

But I think there are a lot of different transition strategies that will be taken across the United States and around the world. And I think energy companies have a choice to make. Do they want to be in the business of protecting an incumbent way of getting from point A to point B, or do they want to be in the business of empowering mobility without putting pollution in the sky? That’s not just a choice in California, it’s a choice all around the world, and different companies are responding in different ways.

What’s your takeaway from Milken?

We’ve been in the decisive decade for climate action — and yet we’re in a moment where there are enough people sitting on pools of private capital that are reevaluating how hard they should be chasing the solutions for a decarbonized economy, or the solutions associated with greater resilience and adaptation. I think that’s not just disappointing from a moral perspective. I think that is potentially risking a massive economic upside.

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HIGHWAY HEADWAY: California’s most controversial highway expansion project is on the move after mollifying California Air Resources Board officials.

The California Transportation Commission unanimously approved the Yolo 80 project and $105 million in funding for it yesterday, capping off an intense fight that at times pitted state transportation and air quality officials against each other. The project would add express toll lanes to a stretch of highway between Sacramento and Davis.

The project first burst into public view last fall when Jeanie Ward-Waller, a former Caltrans official, said she was demoted for raising concerns the agency was understating the plan’s environmental impacts and illegally using road maintenance funds for widening. CARB and environmental groups raised similar concerns, arguing that the project’s environmental reports were flawed and produced major discrepancies in projected truck traffic.

CARB and Caltrans appeared to hash out those differences last month, exchanging letters in which Caltrans and CTC said the discrepancies were the result of different modeling formulas. “No further questions or comments,” wrote Steven Cliff, CARB’s executive director.

Clean transportation advocates aren’t buying that reasoning. “Either the project doesn’t increase truck traffic significantly and is therefore not a compelling project for trade corridor funding,” Carter Rubin, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of state transportation advocacy, wrote in a blog post today. “Or, it does cause truck traffic and Caltrans needs to be forthright with air quality regulators.”

The fight isn’t over. Environmental groups have indicated they plan to challenge the project under the California Environmental Quality Act, and state officials face a discrimination and retaliation lawsuit from Ward-Waller. — AN

BACK ON TRACK: The carbon auction that CARB postponed this week citing “technical difficulties” is back on for next Wednesday, May 22.

WELL, WELL, WELL: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was at Los Angeles City Hall with LA Mayor Karen Bass today, announcing $35 million in federal funding for California to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells. The state plans to use the money to plug and remediate 206 high-risk wells, including many in Los Angeles.

“I’ve seen firsthand, including right here in Los Angeles, the urgent need to address these hazardous sites, many of which are actively leaking oil and releasing methane gas,” said Haaland in a statement.

CalGEM has estimated there are over 5,300 orphan or likely orphan wells across the state with no viable operator. Additional tens of thousands of economically marginal and idle wells could become orphaned in the future, according to a 2018 California Council on Science and Technology study.

Last year the state allocated unprecedented amounts of funding to cap orphaned wells and passed a law to impose costly new well closure requirements on oil companies to prevent well abandonment.

Yesterday, a package of bills aimed at addressing oil and gas pollution cleared appropriations will move to the house floor. Among them were Assemblymember Gregg Hart’s AB 1866, which would require oil companies to submit plans for closing idle wells and accelerate the clip at which the companies must do so. — BB

— Meteorologists are protesting the feds’ decision to move an LA weather observation station from USC to Dodger Stadium.

— Some number-crunching over how much the low-carbon fuel standard will increase gas prices next year.

— Strawberry Day is coming up — we’re changing our berry-storing practices after reading this one.

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