Controversial Amendments Approved To Key Transportation Program Despite Broad Opposition From Frontline Communities And Environmental Justice Advocates

“I feel deceived. I feel abused. I feel disappointed,” said Benjamin Huna, one of dozens of community members and activists from frontline environmental justice communities who gave public comments opposing the 2024 amendments to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standards on Nov. 8. But three days after climate denier Donald Trump was elected, members of the California Air Resources Board were even less inclined to listen.

Huna was reflecting on the stark difference he saw between the original promise of the LCFS and the direction laid out in the new amendments — a difference that in part went against the desires of CARB members expressed last year, even before the amendment rule-making process began, but which they have failed to follow through on. In the end, only two members voted against the amendments.

But Huna wasn’t wrong, as explained in a February comment letter by James Duffy, a retired CARB staffer who formerly oversaw the program.

“The truth is that most of the LCFS provisions and credit generating opportunities that the environmental community wants to eliminate, phaseout, or amend were not allowed in the original regulation,” Duffy wrote. Since its inception, there’s been a “transition from an innovative regulation into a swag bag for venture capitalists, big oil, big agriculture, and big gas, increasingly coming at the expense of low- and moderate-income Californians,” he warned. “The LCFS is an extremely complicated program, which provides powerful special interest groups with a distinct advantage, as they can afford to pay for lawyers, lobbyists, former CARB staff, and research designed to promote their self-interests. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the lower-income consumer of gasoline.”

This was clearly in evidence at the public hearing. Along with ordinary citizens like Huna, were the voices of activists who lived alongside them.

“This new proposal is even worse than the last,” said Raz Rizvi, with Asian Pacific Environmental Network, representing “frontline communities in refinery corridors such as Richmond and Wilmington communities who pay for our addiction to fossil fuels with their health.”

“How many people are telling you, yes, this is amazing! I have to carry this around,” said Inland Empire Sierra Club staffer Jennifer Cardenas, holding aloft an inhaler.

“My community is a predominantly low-income community of color and we’re over-saturated with polluters,” said West Long Beach resident Whitney Amaya, with East Yards Communities For Environmental Justice. “Our communities have been advocating for electric zero emissions for a really, really long time now,” she said. “And what we’re seeing is that our voices are continuously pushed aside.” She also called attention to recommendations from CARB’s own Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC), which CARB staff largely ignored.

Erick Orellana with the Community Water Center also drew attention to EJAC recommendations. “When you ignore them and don’t consider their needs, it just shows that it’s a checkmark,” he said. “It’s just an empty gesture to communities across the state of California.”

“You speak of public engagement,” said Alondra Mateo, with the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice. “Just because you show up doesn’t mean that you listen,”
Meanwhile — illustrating the other side of what Duffy said, a parade of industry representatives focused o

On n their particular interests repeatedly thanked CARB staff for listening to and working with them, even if some of them didn’t get everything they wanted.

Steven Neroli, with the California Farm Bureau, was a particularly noteworthy example
“You’ve done a thoughtful job to find a middle ground,” he said, after offering his thanks to CARB staff. But the so-called “middle ground” he was thanking them for centered on a last-minute multi-decade extension of a provision paying large dairies for capturing the methane that they themselves create — in some cases even making more money from the captured pollution than from the milk itself.

This extension — contained in less than a sentence — was particularly shocking, as it directly undermined CARB board members’ direction at its September meeting, introduced by Diane Takvorian, calling for staff to include a plan and timeline to develop and consider livestock methane regulations within the November resolution. The extension effectively provides a carve-out from those very same regulations. Before voting on the amendments at this meeting, Takvorian sought to undo the staff sabotage, but CARB’s rules would require a 15-day comment period, and additional staff analysis time, running up against the rule-making time limit. Because of this, multiple board members who expressed sympathy with Takvorian’s position nonetheless voted against her motion to eliminate the extension.

Environmental experts have identified a variety of ways that the crediting system can be abused, or is even set up to produce perverse results, but three key failings cited by Dufy seem particularly concerning and easy to explain. The provision Neroli praised was the first.
CARB’s “avoided methane” crediting system gives special treatment to methane captured by dairy digesters, even though it’s identical to methane from landfills and other sources, and ought to be regulated as part of the agricultural sector, where it obviously belongs. As Duffy wrote, “No other industry is treated as if their methane pollution is naturally part of the baseline and then lavished with large financial incentives for simply reducing their own pollution.”

CARB staff’s last-minute changes “essentially grandfather in at least 20 years of avoided methane credit generation for any livestock operation that breaks ground on a methane digester by 2030, even if CARB adopts regulations for the reduction of livestock methane,” the EJAC wrote in an October comment letter. “This exceptionalism is essentially an attempt by CARB staff to legislate and create authority the agency does not have.”

Second, crop-based biofuels — deemed necessary in transition — are “not a sustainable means of reducing GHG emissions and may actually increase emissions as compared to fossil fuels,” and using them “exacerbates tropical deforestation and global hunger,” Duffy noted. In fact, some of the reduced CO2 emissions calculated “results from the most food insecure populations in the world eating less,” Duffy noted. Carbon dioxide is reduced, because poor people are slowly being starved — a fact that disturbed several CARB board members in their discussion of the amendments, but not enough to change their votes.

Third is the problem of pass-through costs to gasoline consumers. In late 2023 it was “a modest 9 to 10 cents per gallon,” Duffy wrote, but in one reasonable scenario costs could rise “to [a] whopping $1150 a year by 2045.” In the past, CARB staff had been transparent in their pass-through cost analysis, he noted, but “in the current staff report, staff disavowed this calculation of pass-through cost and focused instead on total fuel costs to all California consumers,” which obscures the fact that lower-income people without the resources to purchase electric vehicles will be paying far more, while EV drivers will be paying less.

Several board members noted approvingly that LCFS runs entirely on private money, there’s no government spending involved. But these pass-through costs are a de facto gas tax. Consumers are being forced to pay the price for the fossil fuel industry’s long history of misdeeds. As the LCSF process unfolded this year, new research from Rebecca John at the Climate Investigations Center revealed fossil fuel industry sponsorship of climate science starting here in Southern California in 1954, with a Caltech research proposal that “emphasized both the potential impact on Earth’s climate of burning ‘coal and petroleum’” and a new analytic approach which ultimately showed that CO2 levels had been rising since the 1840s — when the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway, largely limited to Great Britain.

Thus, the fossil fuel industry knew 70 years ago that it was externalizing a cost to the entire planet — a cost that will only increase further as pass-through costs rise. It has never been paid to this date. While there have been important court victories to defend rights to a healthy environment, there’s an enormous unpaid debt underwriting all the fossil fuel industry’s wealth in the world. And that debt lies entirely outside the framework of CARB’s modeling and accounting.

From a climate justice perspective, the alternative is clear: Instead of consumers paying those pass-through costs to subsidize the transition to a zero-emission future, the funds should be coming from the fossil fuel industry’s decades of ill-gotten gains. But the 11-2 vote to approve these flawed amendments and the unheeded voices of frontline community members show just how little thought is given to climate justice considerations.