The California Environmental Quality Act - Ethan Elkind

Ethan Elkind is the Director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law and leads the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative on behalf of the University of California at Berkeley and University of California at Los Angeles Schools of Law. He taught at the UCLA law school’s Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic and served as an environmental law research fellow. He has a background in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), climate change law, environmental justice, and other environmental law topics. In 2005, he co-founded The Nakwatsvewat Institute, Inc., a Native American nonprofit organization that provides alternative dispute resolution services and support for tribal governance, justice, and educational institutions. His book Railtown on the history of the modern Los Angeles Metro Rail system was published by University of California Press in January 2014. Ethan is also a regular host of the weekly call-in radio show “State of the Bay” on the San Francisco NPR affiliate KALW 91.7 FM, airing Monday nights at 6pm PT.

This episode is focused on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which was passed at roughly the same time the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They were signed by Republican icons Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon respectively.  Mr. Elkind speaks on topics including:

• Successes and failures over CEQA's 40-year history
• CEQA's impact on the schedule of new transmission for renewable energy initiatives.
• The trade-offs between public engagement and the extent to which local, county and state permitting processes can slow projects that help and hurt the environment alike.
• How the US has a problem with doing large projects, especially in large transportation projects and how this is described in his recent report, Getting Back on Track: Policy Solutions to Improve California Rail Transit Projects

Transcript

Greg Williams: 0:10

Thanks for joining us for another episode climate money watchdog where we investigate and report on how federal dollars are being spent on mitigating climate change and protecting the environment. We are a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that does not accept advertisers or sponsors. So we can only do this work with your support. So please visit us at climate money watchdog.org To learn more about us and consider making a donation. My name is Greg Williams and I learned to investigate and report on waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. While working at the project on government oversight, or Pogo 30 years ago, I learned to do independent research as well as to work with confidential informants or whistleblowers to uncover things like overpriced spare parts, like the infamous 300 $435 hammers, and weapon systems that didn't work as advertised. I was taught by my co host Dean eraser who founded Pogo in 1981, and founded climate money watchdog with me last year, Dina has spent 40 years investigating and sometimes recovering millions of dollars wasted by the Defense Department and other branches of government, both at Pogo. And as an independent journalist, as an author, and as a professional investigator. Our guest tonight, Ethan Elkind is the director of climate of the climate program at the Center for Law energy in the environment at Berkeley Law School, and leads the climate change and Business Research Initiative on behalf of the University of California at Berkeley, and University of California at Los Angeles schools of law. He taught at the UCLA law schools Frank G. Wells, Environmental Law Clinic and served as an environmental law research fellow. He has a background in the California Environmental Quality Act, climate change law, environmental justice, and other environmental law topics. In 2005, he co founded and I apologize in advance for mispronouncing this name, the Natkwatsvewat Institute, which is a Native American nonprofit organization. And I'm going to pause for a minute and let Ethan actually pronounce that name correctly. Sure.

Ethan Elkind: 2:28

It's Nattkwatsvewat Institute it's a Hopi word.

Greg Williams: 2:31

Okay, thank you. So they provide alternative dispute resolution services, and support for tribal governance, justice, and educational institutions. His book rail town on the history of the modern Los Angeles metro rail system was published by the University of California Press in January of 2014. And Ethan is a regular host of the weekly call and radio show, state of the bay on San Francisco NPR affiliate K L w at 91.7. FM, airing Monday nights at 6pm. Pacific time. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Juris Doctor from UCLA, and has been on the UCLA UCLA law faculty since 2006. So welcome, Ethan. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dina Rasor: 3:25

And I'm Dina Rasor, our executive director of climate money project. And yes, I hired Greg right out of college, gave him his first job. And it's just been so marvelous to be able to work with somebody that you've known for that long. And today's guest I'm really excited about because we've we've done had a lot of people that talk technology, a lot of people who talk about, you know, government, federal and government laws and a little bit in government policy and the infighting and what's bad and what's not. And I was really happy to finally get a lawyer on Well, we had a lawyer on we were talking about sec enquete lawsuits, but then which I had done before, and I'm really happy to have a lawyer and then more about the fact that we're going to talk about California law and and the reason that I'm, like talking about California besides the fact that Ethan I both live here. Greg's in New York. But I really think California has been the one that leads the country on this kind of thing about people don't really realize that when I was in college, which is a long time ago, Jerry Brown was governor the first time the young Jerry Brown governorship not the old Darren Brown, and he put in some pretty amazing things that was like the Energy Star appliances. People don't realize that that was a very you know, Little controversial and radical thing, but it was picked up nationwide and has, you know, done an enormous amount of help of trying to lower electricity needs and whatever. And also he he was the one that said if you put a solar panel on your roof, and pg&e has to buy whatever you don't use, and that was a, that was also pg&e did not like that at all. Pacific Gas and Electric, but they had to do it. And that started the whole solar industry in California way back, I should say, graduated 1978. That's a long time ago. And so California has been leading the nation on this. Okay, Ethan, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. And I know that you have expertise in various areas, we're going to touch on some of them. So if you could explain the si si QCEQA Act, which is the California Environmental Quality Act, and what role what role it plays in California Employment mitigation, and both public agencies in California? Sure, yeah. For some background on that.

Ethan Elkind: 6:17

Sure. So it's often referred to by lawyers and those who deal with it as Sequa, just CQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, as you said, and I guess, maybe just to kind of put this in context, why we why it might be worthwhile to talk about Sequa. When we're talking about how we're spending climate dollars, I don't think of the challenge around spending climate dollars as one necessarily of corruption or out outright waste. Although there may be some of that it's more that we have so many layers of bureaucracy, and so many different governmental entities when it comes to deploying this climate cash that we now have from the federal government from two different laws that have passed the infrastructure act, and then this recent inflation Reduction Act, and all the money that California is spending on climate change, it all gets sort of chewed up, and in some ways kind of lit on fire, through all these different bureaucratic processes. And Sequa is sometimes one of those big sort of bureaucratic process where a lot of projects go to die, and a lot of time and money can get wasted. That said, I'm not necessarily an opponent of Sequa, but I'll just sort of describe what it does. And then listeners can make up their own mind. It was actually a nation leading law in and of itself, that California passed actually was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan, obviously no flaming liberal. And the idea was really a good government, one, that before government takes an action, it ought to step back and look at what the likely impacts of that decision are going to be on the environment. So that was really the sort of the principle behind it. And it would force decision makers when they have discretion to look at a number of different alternatives and analyze those impacts as well. And if there were any impacts that were going to be significant on the environment. And that's a legal term, but it's also kind of an intuitive one, then the decision makers in the public sector entities would have to mitigate that those impacts were feasible. So not only was it requiring lawmakers to analyze the impacts, disclose those impacts to the public, but also come up with mitigation measures to avoid those impacts, again, where feasible, and it's a lot of ways it's a public process type statute, it allows the public opportunities to look at what those foreseeable impacts are going to be. And to the delight of many lawyers, it provides an opportunity to sue if the analysis is insufficient or inadequate by the by decision makers. But that was the original idea was just public sector projects. We're going to undergo this analysis, later on courts have dramatically expanded Sequa. So now it applies to any private sector project, because they need a permit, usually from a public sector actor. And so it's basically gotten much bigger than what Governor then Governor Reagan really envisioned. And so nowadays, these environmental impact reports that come out of major projects, they're as thick as a phone book, if not multiple phone books, sometimes the environmental review process can take years and get tied up in litigation for years. And developers basically hate it. It's a mixed record, I think overall stopped some bad projects or improved bad projects. So they're not as bad. But now that we're trying to get a lot of climate friendly projects built, it's really raised the ire of a lot of climate advocates, because they're trying to get transmission lines built to renewable energy facilities or trying to get, you know, wind turbines or solar panels cited or infill development, you know, apartments and your transit and see what can be a stumbling block. So that process can add up and I'll just give you one kind of final anecdote here about Sequa. I was talking to To the head of the California High Speed Rail Authority, which is our kind of present day boondoggle project in California, that's supposed to be anywhere from a 60 to $90 billion project couldn't have been a lot more. But to date, they've already spent $1 billion on environmental review. And that's not even counting all the legal fees to defend the California High Speed Rail authorities environmental review, and I'm not opposed environmental review for high speed rail. I just think that could have been done for a lot cheaper than a billion dollars, which is a really pretty sizable percentage of the project. So I'll just kind of close with that anecdote. And happy to answer questions you have about secret. It's very complicated, but that hopefully gave you the nuts and bolts of it.

Greg Williams: 10:41

Do you maybe want to take a moment to put it in context by comparing it to the National Environmental Policy Act and the environmental impact statements that that requires that? Yeah, a federal law? Yeah, almost at the same time?

Ethan Elkind: 10:56

Yeah, I think that they really sort of went hand in hand, there's a number of states that have their own, they're called Baby knee buzz. So NEPA is the national version of this, as you mentioned, and the big difference between Sequa and NEPA is that Sequa requires mitigation. So NEPA you may find, and this is for federal projects, federally permitted projects, you may find there's a significant impact, but all you have to do underneath is disclose it. That said, that is fodder for a lot of litigation. And NEPA was probably the primary statute that advocates use to stop the Trump administration from a lot of their administrative actions. I mean, the Trump administration had an absolutely abysmal record in court trying to defend their proposed regulatory changes. I mean, they were losing at a clip at one point about 90% of the time. And these were almost all NEPA challenges that they were cutting corners, they were putting forth regulations that weren't justified, and didn't have that proper environmental analysis. And so that procedural hold up really prevented the Trump administration from doing a lot more damage to the environment than they otherwise could have. But there was there was no mitigation required, like in California. The other difference is just that California has its own case law on Sequa. And so its own set of requirements that in some cases are more robust than what you might see at NEPA, where the regulations come out of the White House and the court systems take a look at it and come up with different decisions sometimes and what what's come up with in in California and the California Legislature has modified so you've got multiple times. So there's all sorts of different requirements under Sequa that are different than NEPA, but the basic processes is very similar.

Dina Rasor: 12:31

Okay, when so we're sort of in a balancing act here. Of course, we're an oversight watchdog oversight organization and everything and we but we I totally understand the bureaucracy, I started with the Pentagon, which is the enemy of and weapons system switches, the epitome of of over researched and staffed and channeled. But there's sort of a balancing act. It's kind of interesting that the environmental movement now is feeling on the other side. What you know, they've been suing for years on things that they didn't think were good. And now they're like, Oh, this is good. And oh, we have all this. These regulations were used against everybody else. And so I think that one of the reasons we wanted to have a podcast with you is, how do you do this balancing act between, you know, looking at what's going on, and using the various acts and the courts and everything else, this balancing act between speed and effectiveness? You know, a lot of times when you have speed, you make mistakes, or you lose my track of money. The PPP program, what was it they lost 40 40 million, I don't know something ridiculous, because it was pushed in quickly. And it had to be because people were dying, and businesses were failing. And this is sort of got that same sort of gotta move, gotta move. Gotta move. We're all gonna get fried, we're all gonna get, you know, flooded. So how do you how in your mind, do you see a good way to balance this so that we get it done as quickly as possible before too much damage is done. But I know when there's just too much money, sharks, all kinds of sharks, not the nice Kumbaya, environmentalists, like they think is all gonna be sharks are circling. I know that from from Pentagon money. So maybe you can give us an idea in your in your your background, how what you think it's a good balancing act? Yeah.

Ethan Elkind: 14:32

Well, I mean, in the environmental context, the trade off is less sort of speed versus waste and more about speed versus public input and public process. But I mean, waste is, of course, a potential outcome, although Honestly, we're nowhere near the point of being able to spend dollars on climate type infrastructure projects at such a rapid rate that they're, that you know, we would make mistakes, we will make mistakes. But I mean, we're talking about transmission lines that take an average of 10 to 12 years to build now, so if we could just shave off a few years from that process like that would be considered a big win. But environmentalists are very split when it comes to, you know, really trying to streamline that the permitting process, because as you mentioned, you know, they've been on the other side of that trying to fight industrial facilities, you know, timber harvesting, clear cut freeways, oil and gas facilities. You know, environmentalists have used environmental laws and these public processes to either stop or minimize a lot of these polluting projects. And now all of a sudden, with the climate crisis, we're trying to get a whole lot of new industrial facilities built, they're just the kind that are, you know, essentially zero emission when it comes to greenhouse gases, we're trying to get large scale solar installations built and wind turbines, onshore and offshore. In California, we're talking about floating offshore wind turbines, we're trying to get, like I say, more apartment buildings built so that people don't have to drive so far. And they won't have as big a houses out in a, you know, former agricultural area that cost a lot of money and energy to heat and cool. So all the stuff we're trying to build now is getting caught up in those same environmental laws are originally designed to stop bad projects, or at least to you know, disclose the impacts and mitigate them. So it is a tough balance. And I think what we've tried to do in California on this, even though there isn't really alignment among environmentalists, some environmental groups are more in favor of streamlining others Absolutely not. What we've tried to do is essentially define the class of projects that we think are environmentally quote, unquote, good, that meet a certain performance standard, you know, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, potentially reducing the amount of driving miles that might be associated with that project. They might include some other metrics as well, cost effectiveness. But if those projects can, or they might be built in areas that we know, we want to see more more building, like more housing in our in our cities, not out in sprawl areas. And then once a project meets those criteria, then they're eligible for all sorts of streamlining, sometimes full exemptions, and we've been doing that for a number of decades. If you're having infill project, a small infill project, you're exempt from Sequa, that's been on the books for quarter of a century now. But also if you're a larger project, so we've actually seen some of these sports stadia and and the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, they met a bunch of environmental criteria, and then they got fast tracked, Sequa review, immediately got it any appeals or any any litigation went to the court of appeals. When we we've done we've taken steps like that, basically, but it's not perfect. And we have a long way to go. And there are a lot of question marks around how effective those processes are.

Dina Rasor: 17:33

Okay, and the other thing that, you know, as part of what you've been talking about, we've had several guests come on, you're talking about the the winzeler, we all renewable, we don't need to do all the other things, but almost to person, they've said the Achilles heel is the transmission, and the grid is not going to be able to handle it. And, you know, that is something that that there, there's also every state has a Public Utilities Commission. And, you know, I when when one thing I heard is when we're going to try to do all the grid connections, be smarter, smart grids, and smarter. So there's somebody has a lack of electricity here and somebody has an excess, we can get it there and whatever. But then there's Texas is not hitched to anybody. And I think they're probably going to change that. But let's talk about the the the also the not just the permitting process, but trying to get all these, you know, I guess there's 50 of them, public utility Commission's and for each state, how you get that in their bag. They're very territorial, and how do you get them to all cooperate so that we have a national grid like we have a national highway?

Ethan Elkind: 18:52

Well, the transmission is definitely a big issue. And it's less about trying to coordinate the grid. Texas isn't an island, as you mentioned, its is its own its own grid, but honestly, that's Texas's problem. I don't think that really hurts us a little bit in the sense that extent, we might want to access some of their extra wind energy that they produce, you know, that's off the table. But like, from a California perspective, we're gonna get a lot of wind maybe from Wyoming, or solar from Arizona and Nevada, maybe geothermal from Nevada. So we've got a lot other states to choose from. And it's really more of a problem for Texas. That was one of the issues with their big blackouts that they're not interconnected. But this question about how we better integrate our grid. I mean, it's really just a question of getting those transmission lines built to those prime renewable areas. And that gets held up by all sorts of processes. So for developers, basically the farther they are from the transmission line, I mean, it's an order of like 10s of millions of dollars like every extra mile that they are from from a transmission line with available capacity. So they're looking to build around existing transmit Mission lines. And if we want to see renewable development in places that are what we would call least conflict land, you know, places where environmentalists don't see a lot of endangered species. And Indian tribes don't have a lot of cultural resources, we got to make sure transmission lines go there. But they get held up in part by Sequa. And NEPA. There's a federal role for permitting. But they also get held up by local governments and local governments have to give approval for these transmission lines, unlike, say, like a natural gas pipeline that, you know, the federal government has permitting authority there. So these all get held up by local processes. I mean, just dozens of agencies that have to sign off. And that's why, you know, people celebrate that Nevada can get a transmission line built in about seven years. That's like lightning fast on the transmission world. So this is a real problem for our renewable energy build out. And it's a little bit distinct from the grid, different grid operators coordinating, there is a push in California to try to integrate our grid, California Independent System Operator with other states in the West. But there's a lot of political questions around that, mainly having to do with governance that, you know, Utah joins up with our system, they, they don't want California votes on that grid operator board to swamp them, they don't want to lose sovereignty over their grid unions object, because that might make it easier to build non union renewable projects out of state. So there's a lot of politics that are preventing that sort of grid coordinator role being broader here in the West, like, like it is in the Midwest, and in the Atlantic States

Dina Rasor: 21:37

is also, you know, sort of a it's sort of like a chain, in the sense that it is when you think the grid you think those giant towers that come over the hill, and they have a station and it goes out but and one thing that I'm sort of shocked at in reading up on is that getting it from the big towers down to the individual homes, and the that part of the grid, which you know, pg&e has not been good. I'm I'm sorry, but I could take my camera out in front of my house, and look and show you the various wires that are coming out and wires leftover and everything else. And it looks like a third world country. I mean, you know, where everybody just hitches in? And I've been into a fancy part of San Francisco where they haven't buried the lines. And it's the same way. And I'm like, Why don't they bearing the lines, even just for earthquakes. But that isn't it like a chain that you could have really good grid and you have really good substations and whatever. But the, the getting it out to the people. I've had so many people talk about how just a little bit of a windstorm and everything and we've got, we've got telephone poles that have metal casings around them, because they're probably from the 50s. And they're leaning over an earthquake Gundry. So let's talk about that, too. Because isn't that now you're talking about getting down to individual, individual cities and counties and everything else? And whether and whether they'd be better to bury the lines, which I think it would be and that kind of thing. But it isn't that another part of this that it's such, if you break that link in the chain, the chain doesn't work.

Ethan Elkind: 23:18

Yeah, so what you're talking about is what we call the distribution grid. So the transmission grid when you have the transmission towers, a big steel towers, but then that that's high voltage is kind of stepped down to sort of distribute among neighborhoods. And then you get the wood pole utility poles. Those are what we call the distribution grid. And that's what circulates the power among neighborhoods. And we're actually going to need huge upgrades on the distribution grid, in part because of what we're doing to combat climate change. So people are driving electric vehicles now. And we've got about 16 17% of new vehicle sales in California were zero emission all electric vehicles. So this is really starting to take hold, we know we're going to be phasing out the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035. And that means a lot of electric powered vehicles, imagine all the energy that used to come from importing out of state out of the country, petroleum fuel and refining it. Now all that's going to all the driving that you see around us is gonna be powered by our electricity grid. And that means we're gonna need a lot of upgrades at the local distribution level. And you're also seeing more people having solar panels on their roofs. So they're actually putting electricity back into the wires, the distribution wires, which was not really something that was contemplated when we originally built that distribution grid. People now I'm home batteries that they're discharging, so we're putting a lot of strain on the distribution grid, we need to upgrade it, but it's also a climate resilience issue. You know, just what you're getting at in terms of burying the poles. I mean, they're ugly, so let people want them buried just you know, get them out of sight. But from a climate resilience standpoint, they're sparking wildfires. They're easily knocked down and extreme weather events. So we do want to bury them, you know, for resilience purposes. But what utilities charged Arie these lines is really outlandish, and there isn't a lot of good oversight over what utilities are charging to bury the lines. I mean, I've seen some proposals for you know, I don't have the numbers offhand, but it was pretty eye popping what they were asking for. I mean, I've seen, you know, moving a transmission tower, bearing those lines, maybe about 10 years ago, I think we saw an estimate in my community have something over well over a million dollars per tower to move it. Now, there certainly are costs here. But I believe utilities are patting their their bottom lines and looking to get cost recovered, that they're really not incurring. And it's hard for the regulator to really have the proper oversight. So that's really the big hassle. It's very expensive to bury the lines, we could do it cheaper, but we're not really getting the oversight to get that done.

Dina Rasor: 25:44

So do you think that once you know, I, you talk about, if you do it in the box, and it works, and you know, there's there's going to be a delay, and it's hard to get people to understand that. But I would think that the wind and solar people, once they got all this federal money in their in their, you know, building quickly, and they are it's wind and solar is just exploding. That's why a lot of people say why are we doing things like carbon capture, this is going to this, this is so much cheaper, and it's going to, you know, over over thing, but what do you maybe the what you happen has to happen in very much in America, that's very true, you got to have, you have to have some kind of calamity, or emergency. And I would think that eventually you're going to start just getting, you know, they're going to try to transmit all this stuff. And this, they're just start going to start getting failing grid. And it's scary in California, because you know, you know, the fires and, and, you know, in Florida, I was talking to a friend of mine who was went through the hurricane and she lost electricity for a little while. But the lines were buried, and they were able to go then their new smart lines, and they were able to go and fix that right away. You know, and versus there's gonna be people two, three months, put back pulls back and everything else. So if you think that we're going to have to have a calamity or the fight, or do you think that wind and solar people are going to get hold on the right people? And also what do you think of that that permitting bill that Matt mentioned, tried to get through and everybody screamed and yelled, because he's still going to try to do it?

Ethan Elkind: 27:17

Well, lots of lots of stuff there to talk about. Yeah, sorry. No, no, it's good. Well, first of all, just mention real quick on the on the carbon capture piece, even if we had a full build out of renewable energy, we're still going to need carbon capture and storage. Just because we've got to get to carbon neutrality, and there's certain fossil fuels that are gonna be really hard to eliminate certain industrial sectors, aviation, potentially ocean going vessels is going to be pretty difficult to decarbonize all that and we put so much fossil fuel, or greenhouse gases, I should say, into the atmosphere, that we've got to unwind what we've done. So even if we were to mitigate as much as possible, which, you know, we need to do and we're required to do legally in California, we're still going to need carbon capture. And there's different ways to do it. Some of it is controversial. Some of it really isn't. It's just expensive. But we do need that. But on your point around grid resilience, and you know, our extreme weather events going to, you know, kind of knock some sense into us, it's really not totally clear to me, I mean, you may see in certain communities like that have been devastated by Wildfire, maybe they sort of rebuild, you know, smart from the start and bury those lines, or, you know, Florida the rebuild after the hurricane there, which was definitely a climate, you know, exacerbated event, the Gulf Gulf of Mexico, temperatures were well above normal, which contributed to the flooding there. Of course, we already have had a flood of sea level rise over the last century. So we're already kind of testing your hypothesis to some extent, that if these extreme weather events are going to jolt us out of our current state, but you know, these processes that we have to upgrade our, our grid and our grid resilience are very ossified and gonna be hard to unwind overnight. But the problem is that the climate strategy is actually to electrify everything that we can that includes transportation, you know, the natural gas burning furnaces and stoves in our house, we're trying to electrify all this stuff, and then make sure that electricity is from clean, renewable sources. But if the grid keeps failing, it's gonna be really hard to convince people to drive an electric vehicle or, you know, go get an all electric house. So it's really critical that we solve this problem and invest in grid resilience. There are some technologies out to mitigate that. So if you have a home battery, and battery prices are getting a lot cheaper, that can build in grid resilience for you. Or if you build in micro grids, you know, of communities that have access to batteries. My community just paid a bunch of money for a community center to get solar panels and batteries. So we'll have at least one place in the community that we're the lights are gonna stay on. And you could imagine that you know, in the future that could expand a whole neighborhoods. So I do think technology can be our friend here and solve some of this and the progress that we're seeing in battery technology, I think is really encouraging on that front.

Greg Williams: 30:00

I want to make sure that we, we take best advantage of the expertise that you bring to the table. And so I'm wondering if you can think back over the 40 year history of Sequa. And pick out a couple of examples of where the law really improved the outcome. And then maybe one or two examples of where it got in the way of what might have been a better outcome so that we can have a better understanding of what is good and effective regulation. And where does regulation become a problem?

Ethan Elkind: 30:29

Yeah, and there are some groups that have catalog sequence impacts a lot of these kinds of good anecdotes, interesting anecdotes, I mean, Sequa, has been responsible for stopping a lot of misguided freeway expansion in California. And we would have bulldozed a whole bunch of neighborhoods in downtown San Francisco and part of Los Angeles. And Sequa really helped stop that it's put on pause a lot of oil and gas production, near schools and hospitals in Kern County, stopped some, you know, clear cutting projects and this year in Nevada. And there's a lot of examples of that it also helped spur a deal to Save the Redwoods on the coast. And California has been a lot of environmental good that's come out of this process, a lot of deals that have been cut, I think on the sort of horror story side, I'll give you an example that now would not happen. we reform the last incident. So this is an out of date example, but shows you kind of what we were dealing with. There was a proposal to put a bus rapid transit line and in San Francisco and Van Ness Avenue, which is a heavily traveled corridor, voters approved it, the money was allocated. And in, you know, this is about 20 years ago, the voters approved and then about 10 years ago, as they're working through the process, they discovered that the bus rapid transit line was going to slow down automobile traffic and a couple intersections, which is kind of like seems like the point, you know, you want to delay automobiles so that a bus filled with people can pass through more quickly. But that actually triggered a full environmental impact report under Sequa. That delayed the project by almost 10 years. This is a bus rapid transit project that, you know, is an environmental good, it's an equity project, you know, lower income people are the ones dependent on transit. So that's an example where Sequa really want to ride. There's a lot of examples of some really good housing projects that have been sued, and diminished as a result of Sequa. So I throw those examples out there. And then just real quick, Dina, you had mentioned the mansion permitting bill that didn't pass. I actually never got into the details on it. I think, you know, my sense is that if it was sort of tilted towards fossil fuels, there was enough good stuff in there for for renewables. I do think this permitting reform issue, even if Republicans take over the Congress, which seems somewhat likely now that there's going to be bipartisan appetite for streamlining permitting, some of that's going to be bad, because it's going to streamline for fossil fuels. But I think if we can do some streamlining for transmission lines to renewable energy zones, that would be a real positive and, frankly, really urgent that we get this done.

Greg Williams: 32:55

So I think he may be under estimating our appetite for the nitty gritty details of what does and does not work with a regulation. So I'm curious what about the law was changed to avoid the kind of outcome that you just described? And maybe starting with, as I understand it, Sequa requires impact reports, in cases where there appears to be significant significant environmental impact, I wouldn't have thought that that slowing automotive traffic down and a few intersections would would meet that requirement. And so it would be interesting to understand how was triggered that case and how the updated legislation avoids that circumstance?

Ethan Elkind: 33:35

Well, I'm so glad to hear you want to nerd out on this, because I think this is one of the more

Dina Rasor: 33:40

fascinating changes and the ultimate nerd doubts. We want to know the details. Yeah.

Ethan Elkind: 33:44

So this was a really good change, I think actually illustrative of a lot of what I've been trying to explain about we're trying to streamline Sequa for the good projects, and why it was a little bit outdated. So the reason why this Van Ness bus rapid transit project got held up was because under the transportation impacts analysis of Sequa so you looking at a new project, how's it gonna affect transportation that used to be defined as how much are you going to delay automobiles in the vicinity of the project is called level of service, where an A means automobiles are just floating right through and D or F means or just stop and go traffic in the vicinity of the project. So that was how Sequa required developers and public sector decision makers to analyze transportation impacts, but you get this counterproductive result because, you know, a lot of infill projects, whether they're transit, like a bus rapid transit line, or you know, an apartment building in downtown San Francisco, of course, it's going to help create a little bit of congestion in those city blocks around there. But overall, in terms of the impact on the transportation sector writ large, it's a huge win, because the alternative to building the apartment building for residents in downtown San Francisco is that those residents would have to move farther out of the city and then they would be driving in or they might be sprawl area and pushing out more development into open space and agricultural land. So this is a really a narrow way to think about it. You know, if you imagine if if stopping traffic was a reason to stop development, I mean, we never would have built new york city like New York City streets are pretty congested. But that's kind of the point you're in a city. And it's a lot better that we have in New York City from a per capita greenhouse gas emission standpoint, then all those 20 million people sprawled out LA style, you know, across the landscape, that would be an environmental nightmare. So so what happened was legislature passed a law that changed that analysis from instead of the immediate traffic congestion audit delay in the area now looking at overall vehicle miles traveled that is generated by the project VMT vehicle miles traveled. So by that measure, a project like the bus rapid transit line is reducing overall driving miles within the region, even if it's creating some delay for a few drivers at some intersections. And so now you get a free pass, you actually don't have to mitigate at all for transportation impacts. And that's not an area that has to be analyzed under Sequa. For those projects that reduce overall vehicle miles traveled. And so that's a big win for for infill type projects, and those in good areas we want to build, where it's come up against a lot of opposition and the people who hate it, or the sprawl developers can because you know, they're building these big subdivisions way out on farm converted farmland somewhere. In the old days, they had no traffic impacts, right, because they're not the middle of nowhere. So there's no congestion. So they would just skirt by under the old system. But under the new system, they're now having to account for the fact that they're putting residents 4050, sometimes 90 100 miles away from their jobs. And those residents are driving, you know, I mean, you can see these super commuters in California, they're driving sometimes three hours a day round trip. And that's a huge amount of traffic and congestion and air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. And all that gets captured by vehicle miles traveled, and all of a sudden the sprawl developers have to account for that and mitigate, which is very expensive. And they're really upset about they fought the implementation of this law for a long time. They're still crying about it. But I think it's been a really big change in how sequence down and it's really helped a lot of very meritorious invalid projects, get their sequence reviewed, done a lot faster.

Greg Williams: 37:14

It does seem like it's still vulnerable to the hopefully, increasingly, we're decreasingly valid assumption that vehicle miles traveled are correlated with with pollution. I mean, if you Yeah, you know, a mile driven by an electric vehicle that served by wind and solar is very different from a vehicle mile, you know, of a, you know, an old 1970s, leaded gas, classic car.

Ethan Elkind: 37:43

That's true. And that's actually one of the arguments you hear from the sprawl developer as well, all the vehicles are going to be electric. So why do we even have to do this, but first of all, air pollution is measured under a separate area of Sequa. So there's air quality impacts and greenhouse gas emissions. So So that's analyzed separately under sequence still have to be mitigated. But the thing about vehicle miles traveled is it's not just the source of the fuel for the vehicles, because if you have a lot of traffic congestion that creates other quality of life impacts, so no one really likes to have overall traffic in your region increase. So that's one aspect. Secondly, if people are driving long distances, there is still an environmental footprint there. I mean, as opposed to people not having to get a vehicle. And being able to walk, I mean, a vehicle, even if it's electric, there's a lot of energy inputs to build the vehicle. And the electricity right now is not 100% carbon free. So you do have some impact from those vehicles other obviously much better to have an electric vehicle than an internal combustion engine vehicle. But the other thing I'd say is that if you're in a community where people are driving long distances, that means their houses are way out from the city center, which means you have a very inefficient development pattern, which means you're converting open space and farmland into sprawl. And that open space in farmland otherwise serves as a carbon sink. It's also so that you're getting rid of the opportunities to sequester carbon. And then the other thing is that you're probably going to have bigger homes that are in these outlying areas. In California, the interior of the state is much hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. So that means it's a lot more energy to heat and cool the homes if they're bigger, and they're in the interior. And then on top of that you got a big water footprint, because water takes a lot of energy to transport and treat. And if you have a lot of outdoor irrigation from big homes and a sprawl area, that's going to have a whole energy footprint associated with the water which also is getting more scarce in a UN Climate Change era California here. Okay. Go ahead, Greg.

Greg Williams: 39:38

I was gonna ask you if we can have one more example of of what you regard as an important positive technical change in the last 10 or 20 years in Sequa. It in here again, you know, we often speak in terms of the the negative aspects of of oversight, but at the end of the day, Dina and I are here because we believe in good government and the Good things that government can do. And so part of what we're looking for from, from your visit are examples of how we can continuously government better. Yeah,

Ethan Elkind: 40:11

actually, I think the one of the more exciting reforms as CFO actually is not to SQL itself, it's to the process that would trigger Sequa. So seek was only triggered if a decision maker has discretion. If they don't have discretion, it's it's considered ministerial review, you basically have a set of standards, and a project either meets the standards or doesn't, if it meets the standards, then it gets approved, there's no discretion, there's nothing for a secret challenge to attach to in that situation. And so what California has done is made more decisions ministerial by law, and basically told local governments, you no longer can give yourselves discretion over all these projects. If a project is in an infill area, and it's got a certain amount of affordable housing attached to it, it's ministerial. And so that takes Sequa out of the picture completely doesn't solve all the problems, you still have other long protracted permitting processes and maybe restrictive zoning, etc. But that's one reform. Also, just recently, just this summer, actually, the legislature passed a law that gives the California Energy Commission permitting authority over large renewable energy facilities, which used to be held up at the county level in many counties, you know, they wanted to extract all sorts of community benefits. And, and they were, you know, really kind of tacking on a lot of requirements and costs in this project. So the state has actually just removed permitting authority. Now, not exactly a SQL reform, but gets at some of these some of these issues.

Dina Rasor: 41:37

Okay, and in the little time we have left, I'm going to ask a more general question. And that is, the US government does have a problem doing large projects, especially large transportation projects. You know, every time I go to Europe, I get fast trains. And I, I My understanding is the permitting process is much simpler, and whatever. But you know, China has high speed rail, you know, Europe has high speed rail, I just, I'm sort of why is it? What is it in that large transportation kind of project? Is it the permitting is it, you know, I know California has been a total fail, then the Central Valley, they're finally going to make it from Bakersfield and Fresno, or something like nobody's going to use it. So I've been dreaming about my two and a half hour high speed train to to LA in a long time. But why is it that we can't seem to do those high speed things in general? I mean, at high speed, larger transportation and complicated projects like that, in general, when we did the federal highway system, you know, of course, that was back in the 50s.

Ethan Elkind: 42:47

Yeah, this is such an important question. And I think when I think of all the infrastructure that we need to get built, you know, I think this is really the big question mark, for the United States and for California, specifically, is are we actually able to build anything big anymore, because most of our big infrastructure was built in the middle of the last century, we haven't really built much recently. And this is a major problem. And you don't see this in Europe, this is not just a question of, oh, China's one party rule. They don't respect property rights and individual rights, so they can build stuff. And it does make it much easier for China. But Europe is a democracy. And they're able to build things much cheaper. I was just talking to someone from the Netherlands who works with cities to build bike infrastructure to simple bike lanes. He said all of his clients in the United States, he can't believe the cost figures he's getting. But as a rule, they're 10 times more expensive than any project that he has worked on in any European city. And that, you know, just for simple things like bike infrastructure, they can't do prefabricated barriers, everything's got to be custom made, and there's multiple levels of review. So that's just one example. But high speed rail is on the other end of the spectrum, you know, the original estimates for high speed rails, we would have it by now supposed to be done by 2020. This was voter approved in 2008. And those estimates weren't random. They were based on the experience of building high speed rail around the world. But here in California, we can't get it done, that money has largely evaporated. And we just did a study on this about why California cannot build rail transit projects as cheaply as other advanced democratic economies around the world. And you know, there's there's a bunch of reasons, but I would say the biggest factor was two factors. But the biggest one is our decentralized system of governance, which has gotten much worse since the middle of the 20th century. Every county, every city, they get a veto potentially over projects, they've got a permit these projects, there's multiple agencies now that get a sign off, the agencies are not coordinated and talking to each other. There's so many hoops to go through. And then you've got the environmental review on it, which provides opportunities for any homeowners group to sue or labor union to sue anyone who wants to leverage over the project. So it's all of these bureaucratic processes with a dissent. socialized system that has really thwarted the US in California specifically. And then secondly is that we have just an expertise problem in the US, because our sort of expertise has been building auto oriented infrastructure, you know, when a city all of a sudden decides they want to build a new modern rail transit line, they don't have any experience in doing that. Everyone's reinventing the wheel, you know, for the first time. And so there's a lot of startup mistakes, the contractors come in these big construction contractors are able to take advantage of newbies, you know, at these transit agencies that don't know what they're doing. So I would say those are probably the two biggest factor is we don't have a sort of good expert governance system to get it done. And we don't have an efficient governance system to get these projects built. So it's a disaster.

Dina Rasor: 45:46

So it sounds like we should contract out to the Europeans and make them. But you know, when you think about it, the EU is sort of the federal government of Europe. And then there's all these countries for years that Ward and couldn't get along and couldn't do stuff. But they all managed to learn how to high speed trains going across their borders. So and you said you did a study on it. Now my appetite is what unleaded I'd like to take a look at it, maybe we can have you come back, and we we go, we nerd out on that I'm ready, I'm ready to nerd on out on that. Because I don't, I think the high speed trains could be a huge, you know, anybody who has to drive down five, just go to LA holiday knows that. It sucks.

Ethan Elkind: 46:29

So well. And you know, we actually did try to bring Europeans over to help build high speed rail, but they're not familiar with our system, they, you know, their whole system is different. The transit agencies there have master permitting authority, you know, they're not hijacked and held hostage by local governments along the route. So they can do things like build around the clock, or, you know, in the evenings and get the projects done a lot faster. They also don't have the same environmental review system. Because you know, the courts there have much more power to adjudicate these decisions. So you don't get these protracted citizen suits that go on and on. But it's primarily about more centralized, permitting authority. And if you do want to read the report, it's called getting back on track. We released it, January this year policy solutions to improve California rail transit projects. And we and we actually did a bit of a numbers analysis, a database, looking at just how much more expensive California projects are than other projects from from similarly situated countries around the world.

Dina Rasor: 47:28

Well, I hope you come back. And we do a nerd out on that, because I think that that's this is these are very fundamental problems that people don't talk about. And you know, you can have all the solar and wind you want. But if you can't get it anywhere, it's the same thing. I'm concerned about carbon capture as the huge amount of co2 pipelines they want to build on the country and pipelines are not popular. So if they get this stuff out, how are they going to transport it? You know, there's, there's just a lot of big questions. And so I really appreciate you being on and I think that we'll take a look at that. And if you don't mind, we'd like to have you bet sometime in the future. Come back, and we talk about that.

Ethan Elkind: 48:08

Absolutely. Anytime.

Greg Williams: 48:11

All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us. And thank you very much to our listeners for joining us for another episode of Climate Money Watchdog.

Ethan Elkind: 48:20

Thank you