‘Nothing Will Be Protected’: How California Environmentalists Killed Green Energy Bill

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This Independent Santa Barbara re-publishes stories from CalMatters.org on state and local issues affecting readers in Santa Barbara County.

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The prospect of massive new power towers towering over California state parks has thwarted the latest efforts to reform the state’s most important environmental law.

The Senate Environment Committee on Wednesday voted to remove provisions from Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia’s House Bill 3238 that would have speeded up reviews of the California Environmental Quality Act in the context of expanding the electric grid, including state parks and natural areas.

Utilities have sponsored efforts to provide relief from CEQA’s bureaucratic delays, arguing they cannot upgrade the electricity grid fast enough to meet the state’s ambitious climate change goals.

While the committee chairman, Sen. Ben Allen, said he supports the bill’s intent to speed up bureaucratic delays, he said he couldn’t stomach the thought of speeding up environmental reviews that could place massive transmission towers over Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in San Diego County.

He called the park “a special place” that he remembered fondly as a child.

“I personally won’t stand for anything if it makes it easier for people to run large transmission lines in the middle of a state park,” said Allen, a Democrat from El Segundo. “The way it’s written, it makes it easier to do just that.”

Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, reluctantly agreed to remove the CEQA provisions from the bill because the committee would not support the measure if they stayed on the ballot.

Garcia was not happy about that. He told the commission that “we are shooting ourselves in the foot” by not making reforms that would speed up the pace so the grid can handle the growth of clean electricity from more wind turbines and solar power.

“I think we’re missing a unique opportunity that requires us to roll up our sleeves,” he told the committee. “It requires us to move beyond our ideological perspectives that CEQA cannot be reformed.”

Advocates say streamlining the state’s permitting process for grid upgrades is urgently needed because California’s sweeping plan to end its dependence on fossil fuels by 2045 would increase electricity use by as much as 68%. That would put a huge strain on the state’s power grid, which is already prone to blackouts. Currently, they say, large-scale grid upgrades regularly take five or more years to plan and implement because of the lengthy environmental impact assessment process.

But major environmental groups have opposed the bill, citing concerns about parks and other sensitive landscapes. The debate is an example of a broader tension plaguing officials in California and across the country as they try to launch more clean energy projects in the face of the climate crisis.

The same policies that have helped environmental groups fight developers and polluters in the past are now often used to delay energy projects needed to transition the country — and California — away from dirty fossil fuels.

Environmentalists fear that expedited environmental reviews will lead to utilities destroying wildlands in their rush to expand the grid. They are particularly concerned about state parks and other undeveloped areas that currently contain smaller poles and power lines that utilities would like to turn into massive, unsightly power towers.

“We know how important it is for our state and the planet to transition to clean energy as quickly as possible,” Kim Delfino, a lobbyist for Defenders of Wildlife and the California Native Plant Society, told the Senate Energy, Public Utilities and Communications Committee last week. “But efficiency should not equal weakening basic environmental protections.”

CEQA reform is not easy

The opposition to Garcia’s bill, which had 12 co-sponsors from both parties, also exemplifies the fierce resistance to even minor reforms to California’s Environmental Quality Act — something that has embarrassed lawmakers and governors for years.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown once called reforming the law “the Lord’s work,” but he was unable to enact significant reforms. His successor, Gov. Gavin Newson, has made cutting green tape delays a priority and has also tried to address CEQA. Last year, his office sponsored a package of bills and created a “strike team” to advance CEQA.

CEQA reform advocates say that since former Gov. Ronald Reagan signed it into law, the law was meant to protect the environment from harmful pollution, but large-scale industrial development is now regularly used to kill or delay for years much-needed projects, from affordable housing to green energy infrastructure.

Currently, CEQA (pronounced “si-kwa”) requires developers to pay for an environmental impact report, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to complete.

The analyses, sometimes thousands of pages of impenetrable legal and scientific jargon, must consider a range of potential harms to wildlife and people. These include pollution, construction, noise, urban degradation and the impact of the project on recreation. The reports must offer a range of alternatives that will mitigate any potential harm.

If the agency approves the report and the project moves forward, the law allows environmental groups, local organizations and other opponents to review the document for flaws that they can use in a lawsuit. Those lawsuits could take years to get through the courts.

Are state parks in danger?

Garcia’s office said CEQA reviews have become a major obstacle to modernizing the state’s power grid. His office cited one 117-mile power line project in Southern California that took officials five years to review. It included an 11,000-page impact report that evaluated more than 100 “alternatives” for the project. The same project required 70 permits from more than two dozen different agencies.

But a key point of contention for environmentalists was how the bill would exempt power grid upgrades from CEQA requirements on publicly owned lands, particularly California parks.

Garcia’s bill would eliminate CEQA reviews for infrastructure upgrades, which require a utility to take over public land immediately adjacent to an existing “right-of-way” already used for power lines and other energy infrastructure. His office said the actual construction of new transmission towers and other electrical equipment on public land would still require CEQA review.

Environmentalists like Brianna Fordem, executive director of the Anza-Borrego Foundation, feared the upgrade would destroy Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Ford told the Utilities Commission last week that “hundreds of miles of existing rights-of-way” would be “the path of least resistance for hundreds of 200-foot towers that will permanently disfigure our campgrounds, hiking trails, our sacred cultural preserves, endangered wildlife habitats, dark night skies and more.”

“Nothing,” she said, “will be protected.”

The bill passes despite opposition

The bill also sought to codify a settlement reached last year between the state’s three largest investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric — and some environmentalists and clean energy groups. The settlement called for changes to the way the California Public Utilities Commission and other agencies issue permits for electric transmission lines.

That was another point of contention at Wednesday’s hearing. Environmental groups — and Allen — said they were unconvinced by the way the measure, which they said would give environmental reviews a rubber stamp, was written.

The original bill would have made the Public Utilities Commission the lead agency for issuing CEQA permits for electric grid infrastructure projects. The commission would have been required to conduct reviews within 270 days, which Garcia’s office said would shorten the process by up to two years.

Instead of having other state and local agencies conduct separate CEQA reviews of the entire length of a power line project, they would be required to conduct the review only for the section that crosses their jurisdiction. Garcia’s office said that would eliminate up to three years of delays.

Garcia told CalMatters after Wednesday’s hearing that while the parties agreed Wednesday to continue negotiations to codify the settlement, all CEQA provisions have been removed, ending any hopes for reform this year.

“It seemed like the ‘hell no. Not there. Never’ attitude set us back,” Garcia said.

Major utilities in the state have argued that the reforms are necessary to achieve the state’s clean energy goals.

“If we are truly in a climate crisis, then we need to act like we are in one,” Erica Martin of San Diego Gas & Electric told the commission last week. “The current approval process for building electric infrastructure is duplicative, lengthy and expensive.”

The arguments gave the bill momentum ahead of a tense hearing on Wednesday.

It passed the Assembly in the spring, with only one lawmaker, San Ramon Democratic Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, voting “no,” according to the Digital Democracy database. She declined to comment, according to her spokesman.

The Senate Public Utilities and Energy Committee also passed the bill last week without any opposition. The Democratic chairman of the committee, Sen. Steven Bradford of Inglewood, said his experience working for a utility influenced his vote.

He is a former public relations manager for Southern California Edison and said he has seen environmental groups support an energy project and then be “absolutely opposed” to building transmission lines. He said he has seen the same thing happen with the San Diego Gas & Electric project.

“Both of these projects have been delayed by almost five years and have added billions of dollars to their costs,” Bradford told the committee. “At the same time, we’ve set all these arbitrary targets for when we’re going to have this renewable energy, but we’ve failed to build the infrastructure that’s necessary to get the energy to where it’s needed.”