With help from Alex Nieves
YEAR IN REVIEW: Hello, reader. It’s California climate wrapped time. We only started publishing in August, but it’s been a heck of a year. Are you ready? Here’s a rundown of the state’s greatest climate hits:
SOLD ELECTRIC CARS: Fully one-quarter of new car sales in California were zero-emission in 2023. That’s up from 19 percent last year. California is so far ahead of the rest of the country on EVs that it contributed a third of nationwide sales, which made up 8 percent of all new cars this year.
The state also shifted its clean vehicle rebate program to focus exclusively on low and middle income buyers, but it’s falling short of its EV charger goals. We’re not doing so hot on reducing car use either: The public transit system had to be bailed out in the face of ongoing ridership loss this year, and a top Caltrans official blew the whistle on her agency’s funding of highway expansion projects. — BB
SUMMONED THE RAIN: California got lucky (mostly) last winter with the parade of storms that dumped a record snowpack in the mountains and buckets of rain across the state. While some communities suffered serious damage, it ended up being mostly the big flood that wasn’t. Reservoirs filled up and remain higher than average even today. Farmers and water managers sent runoff into the ground, replenishing some of the wells that had gone dry.
The overall abundance eased pressure on the dwindling Colorado River, giving California enough breathing room to strike a short-term deal with Arizona and Nevada to reduce their take of the river. The agreement put off the crisis for a couple more years. — CvK
RAKED THE FORESTS: With fewer big fires to deal with this year than in the past few years, California’s firefighters went to work chopping down and burning off overgrowth. The efforts are part of a slow-but-steady increase in forest management — including prescribed burning — that Cal Fire is embracing to lower risk. Nearly 34,000 acres have seen some sort of forest treatment since July of this year. — CvK
DODGED BLACKOUTS: A healthy portion of luck kept California out of blackout trouble this year. In February, energy planners put out a scary report finding that if multiple emergencies happened at once — such as a not-implausible combination of extreme heat, drought and a loss of transmission due to wildfires — the state could be short 10 million homes’ worth of electricity (10 gigawatts).
But there weren’t even any really close calls. Mild weather kept demand from skyrocketing, and last winter’s heavy rains provided a hydropower cushion. California accelerated battery storage to accommodate more than 6 million homes’ worth of electricity and is adding more fast. — WV
CUT SOLAR: California slashed reimbursements for rooftop solar by roughly 75 percent in April, leading to a sharp slowdown in new installations and more than 11,000 job losses, according to industry estimates. The California Public Utilities Commission also voted to reduce compensation for solar generated on top of apartment complexes that split the benefits among tenants, arguing that solar is being too generously subsidized at everyone else’s expense.
It’s all pointing to an ongoing debate over the costs and benefits of the green transition. Expect it to keep cropping up over the next year in other industries like hydrogen, carbon capture and offshore wind. — WV
CRACKED DOWN ON FOSSIL FUELS: California took some initial steps toward getting some corporate accountability around here. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills to require large corporations to disclose their carbon footprints and climate-related financial risks starting in 2026. (Though he also made gestures at watering them down.)
On the fossil fuel front, the California Energy Commission launched a new division that’s analyzing the oil industry and deciding whether to enact penalties for price gouging. And the state brought its heft to the court fight against fossil fuels, suing five oil companies with allegations of deception and demands for compensation. — BB
BUT ALSO DIDN’T: Last year, California passed a law banning oil wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools and hospitals. But it never went into effect. The industry qualified a ballot initiative to overturn the rule, effectively blocking it until after the 2024 vote. New well permitting did slow significantly this year, to just 25 wells as of mid-November, compared to over 550 last year. But approvals to repair existing wells kept pace with previous years, including in the buffer zone, where the state approved 766 rework permits, according to the environmental group FracTracker. — BB
TOOK A HARD LOOK IN THE MIRROR: The state is getting more sober about what it will take to meet its goal of transitioning the electric grid to 100 percent renewable sources by 2045. California’s grid planner said the state will need to add 7,000 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid every year — seven times more than was called for just three years ago. That means building green power plants at unprecedented speeds and figuring out how to seriously speed up the glacial process of building new electric lines to accommodate all the new power.
New electric lines will need to be built at four to 10 times current rates. Newsom and lawmakers have passed changes this year to limit California Environmental Quality Act legal challenges and speed up permitting processes, but advocates say much more work is needed. And it’ll be expensive: An analysis this fall from Southern California Edison put the cost of tripling large-scale renewables and building out the grid to accommodate them at $370 billion. — WV
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LATE NIGHT TRAIN: Gov. Gavin Newsom got to take a few more swings at Ron DeSantis on his “Late Night with Seth Meyers” appearance last night. He also got the chance to defend California against Republican criticism, including California’s beleaguered, delayed high-speed rail project.
Meyers channeled Californians’ confusion over the project: “Look, I want high-speed rail in the country. I don’t understand why we don’t have it,” he said, recalling the plan approved by voters in 2008 to build a line from San Francisco to LA with $33 billion by 2020. “Now it’s 2023. And guess what. It’s more than $33 billion.” (It’s $128 billion, in fact.)
Newsom pointed to the $6 billion California got last week from the Biden administration for high-speed rail. He blamed lawsuits and the permitting process for the delays. But he also took some responsibility.
“I inherited a lot of these things — no excuses, I own it,” Newsom told Meyers. “And we’re moving forward.” — BB
WOMEN IN WATER: Dozens of women (and some men) pressed into a small room at the edge of a big annual conference on the Colorado River in Las Vegas yesterday to launch the North American Women in Water Diplomacy Network. The network is modeled after initiatives in Africa and Asia to increase women’s leadership in “water-insecure regions.”
The event was a sign of the changing times — both within the Colorado River Water Users Association, where men still outnumber women and which has long held a “spouses” mixer at the sidelines of its annual conference and within North America, where dwindling water supplies from climate change are turning the West into the newest water-insecure region.
The network has a two-year plan, seed money from philanthropy and major water agencies as well as partnerships with more than a dozen government bodies, research centers and consulting firms, according to Elizabeth Koch, a senior manager at the Environmental Law Institute who is supporting the group. — CvK
DON’T LOSE LYOU: Environmental groups are pushing Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) to retain Joe Lyou on the California Transportation Commission, which hands out billions of dollars annually in state transportation funding.
Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air and an appointee of former Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood), is termed out at the end of the year. Groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Planning and Conservation League urged Rivas in a Tuesday letter to reappoint him, citing his role in blocking funding for the expansion of the 710 Freeway last year and his work with marginalized groups.
COMING TO CARB: Newsom on Thursday appointed Hazel Miranda, a former deputy legislative secretary in his office, to the California Air Resources Board as chief of staff and policy adviser for Chair Liane Randolph. Miranda has had two previous stints at state agencies, serving as legislative director in the California Public Utilities Commission’s Office of Government Affairs and advising Energy Commissioner Andrew McAllister.
NEW COASTAL COMMISH: Susan Lowenberg, president of industrial real estate firm Lowenberg Corp., has been appointed to the California Coastal Commission. Lowenberg sits on the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy board of trustees and is a former chair of the San Francisco Planning Commission.
— A climate-conscious Californian is feeling schadenfreude over Kentucky’s floods.
— In case you didn’t know California’s handed out too many water rights, here’s a fancy New York Times interactive feature about it.
— Cal Fire could soon get its long-awaited seven military transport planes from the Coast Guard for fighting wildfires.
