Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
A public hearing last month turned into the latest flashpoint between California regulators and a coalition of environmental and social justice activists over how the state should achieve its ambitious climate agenda.
In May, the California Air and Resources Board—or CARB—updated its so-called scoping plan, which acts as a blueprint for how the Golden State will reach a slew of legally binding emissions reduction targets and other climate goals set by executive order. By law, California must reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has also directed the state to become carbon neutral by 2045.
In many ways, CARB’s draft plan offers a bold vision for tackling the climate crisis. But at a June 23 hearing, activists once again voiced their concerns over measures included in the plan that they say significantly undermine its purpose, and threaten to harm the state’s most vulnerable communities.
State officials and energy experts alike have said meeting California’s climate goals would require a massive buildout of renewable energy and a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels. To that end, the updated blueprint proposes several bold strategies, including ramping down statewide oil use by 91 percent over the next two decades, investing in massive public transit expansion projects and committing to planting hundreds of thousands of new trees to help soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But critics say CARB’s plan relies too heavily on unproven carbon removal technologies and includes measures that could worsen air quality in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
In particular, environmental justice advocates point to a proposal in the plan that would not only keep all of the state’s natural gas power plants online through 2045, but would add an additional 10 gigawatts of new gas-fired generating capacity. Each gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the electricity generated by one nuclear power plant, according to state officials.
Recent research has shown that California’s gas power plants are disproportionately located near communities with high, cumulative socioeconomic and environmental burdens. And any new gas turbines are likely to be added to existing plants, rather than building new plants to accommodate them, to avoid the additional cost and wait time associated with lengthy state and federal permitting processes, said Ari Eisenstadt, a campaign manager with the California Environmental Justice Alliance.
“It’s a lot easier to add on to existing power plants, to add additional generating capacity, than it is to permit an entirely new plant,” Eisenstadt said. “In all likelihood, this is going to really impact low-income communities of color in Southern California,” where “there’s already a really high concentration of gas-fired power plants.”
