Cal­i­for­nia Gov. Jer­ry Brown has been mak­ing the most of Don­ald Trump’s with­draw­al from the Paris accord. Less than a week after Trump announced he would pull the U.S. out of the land­mark cli­mate agree­ment, Brown flew to Chi­na to meet with Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping about their shared efforts to cap green­house gas emis­sions — with or with­out the White House’s sup­port. ​“California’s lead­ing, China’s lead­ing,” the 79-year-old polit­i­cal vet­er­an boast­ed in Bei­jing. Not­ing that trip and Brown’s lead­ing role in a series of joint envi­ron­men­tal efforts with cities and states across North Amer­i­ca, ​“Cal­i­for­nia,” the New York Times her­ald­ed, ​“is emerg­ing as the nation’s de fac­to nego­tia­tor with the world on the environment.”

With Brown evangelizing for climate action, his backing of a watered-down measure has the potential to limit other states’ ambitions. Why would a red or purple state or even a less thoroughly Democratic one pass a climate policy more bold than the one that emerged from California’s liberal utopia?

In the state capi­tol in Sacra­men­to, how­ev­er, a dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive is emerg­ing. Doc­u­ments obtained by In These Times show that California’s fos­sil fuel indus­try is try­ing to rewrite state cli­mate pol­i­cy to its lik­ing. And sources close to the state capi­tol believe there’s a good chance Brown, fresh off sev­er­al closed-door meet­ings with the indus­try, may let them do it. While a bill cur­rent­ly in front of California’s State Sen­ate could pio­neer one of the country’s most ambi­tious pieces of cli­mate leg­is­la­tion, Brown’s admin­is­tra­tion has been con­sid­er­ing an alter­na­tive mea­sure — not yet a bill — that’s laden with talk­ing points that appear to be ripped near ver­ba­tim from a pol­i­cy paper by the state’s influ­en­tial oil and gas lobby.

But why would a cli­mate cham­pi­on like Brown hand the keys to the state’s cli­mate pol­i­cy over to the fos­sil fuel lobbyists?

Where Brown’s loy­al­ties lie

Brown’s fam­i­ly has a long his­to­ry in the oil and gas busi­ness. His father — for­mer Cal­i­for­nia Gov. Edmund G. ​“Pat” Brown — helped Indonesia’s then-recent­ly installed mil­i­tary jun­ta secure $12 mil­lion in loans from a string of Amer­i­can banks in the late six­ties, short­ly after leav­ing office. The same jun­ta also nation­al­ized Roy­al Dutch Shell in the coun­try, and, in return for his ser­vice, Pat Brown was award­ed con­trol of a régime-linked Cal­i­for­nia oil trad­ing com­pa­ny as well as half-own­er­ship of anoth­er oil trad­ing office in Hong Kong. Brown’s youngest sis­ter Kath­leen Brown, a for­mer Gold­man Sachs exec­u­tive, serves on the Board of Direc­tors for Sem­pra Ener­gy, own­er of the state’s largest provider of nat­ur­al gas, the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Gas Company.

In office, Brown has always bal­anced a com­mit­ment to envi­ron­men­tal caus­es with a com­mit­ment to the fos­sil fuel indus­try. ​“On the one hand he parades on the world stage talk­ing about how Cal­i­for­nia is the world leader on cli­mate,” says Liza Tuck­er, a con­sumer advo­cate at the San­ta Mon­i­ca-based group Con­sumer Watch­dog. ​“At the same time, back­room deals are being done all over the place. It’s hypocritical.”

An August 2016 report Tuck­er authored found that 26 ener­gy com­pa­nies and investor-owned util­i­ties donat­ed near­ly $4.7 mil­lion toward Brown’s 2010 elec­tion cam­paign, and indus­try inter­ests donat­ed $4.4 mil­lion to the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty between 2011 and 2014. In total, oil inter­ests have spent over $122 mil­lion on lob­by­ing and elec­tions in Cal­i­for­nia over the last six years.

California’s fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies appear to have invest­ed wise­ly. In 2011, when reform­ers entered the Divi­sion of Oil, Gas, and Geot­her­mal Resources (DOG­GR) — the state’s extrac­tive indus­try reg­u­la­tor — and attempt­ed to bring oil and gas com­pa­nies into reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance, Brown instruct­ed one of his top aides to have them dis­missed. While push­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion to ban new off­shore oil devel­op­ment, Brown moved to pro­tect exist­ing off­shore oil drilling, and has great­ly expand­ed the state’s fleet of fos­sil fueled pow­er plants. His admin­is­tra­tion has also inter­vened to stop local bans on frack­ing. Three months after he and oth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers rebuffed a push by activists to have the prac­tice banned statewide, Chevron donat­ed $350,000 to the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.

As the nation’s third-largest oil pro­duc­er, California’s fos­sil fuel indus­try has long held sway on both sides of the aisle in Sacra­men­to, despite the state’s rep­u­ta­tion as a pio­neer on cli­mate and envi­ron­men­tal issues. A detailed inves­ti­ga­tion by the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integrity’s Michael J. Mishak found a his­to­ry of long-stand­ing ties between law­mak­ers and the oil and gas com­pa­nies who lob­by them. All the way back in 1915, DOG­GR — now osten­si­bly tasked with reg­u­lat­ing the state’s extrac­tive indus­try — was set up to make it eas­i­er for oil and gas firms to acquire land for drilling. Envi­ron­men­tal­ists allege it serves a large­ly sim­i­lar func­tion today.

Ener­gy and envi­ron­men­tal issues have a his­to­ry of peel­ing off mod­er­ate Democ­rats from the rest of the par­ty, in no small part because of the sig­nif­i­cant lob­by­ing done by the West­ern States Petro­le­um Asso­ci­a­tion (WSPA), an indus­try group that counts Shell, BP, Exxon­Mo­bil and sev­er­al oth­er oil and gas giants among its mem­bers. Like the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute at the nation­al lev­el, WSPA (pro­nounced ​“wis­pa”) is the lob­by­ing arm of oil and gas com­pa­nies in the Amer­i­can West, and has an espe­cial­ly strong pres­ence in California.

“When ener­gy-relat­ed bills pass the [Cal­i­for­nia] Leg­is­la­ture, WSPA and its mem­bers have a hand in how rules are craft­ed and laws are enforced,” Mishak writes. ​“Lob­by­ists pick up meals for reg­u­la­tors at fast-food restau­rants, refin­ery cafe­te­rias, and ocean­front resorts. Oil exec­u­tives and state reg­u­la­tors meet as an ​‘oil and gas work group’ to dis­cuss rulemaking.”

A sim­i­lar dynam­ic appears to be creep­ing into the fight to extend California’s cap-and-trade sys­tem. Brown is clear that he wants some ver­sion of the pro­gram to con­tin­ue. Less clear is whose advice he plans to take. As the Los Ange­les Times has report­ed, the governor’s office is cur­rent­ly meet­ing with sev­er­al stake­hold­ers about cap-and-trade. But the envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice advo­cates who have ral­lied behind SB 775 — the pro­pos­al fur­thest along in the process, favored by advo­cates for its rig­or­ous emis­sions reduc­tion goals and atten­tion to envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice con­cerns — say Brown is giv­ing pref­er­ence in nego­ti­a­tions to fos­sil fuel indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives, who have been reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to the governor’s offices. Accord­ing to sources close to SB775 who wish to remain anony­mous because of the ongo­ing nego­ti­a­tions, doc­u­ments leaked from Capi­tol cap-and-trade dis­cus­sions sug­gest that Brown’s office is sid­ing with indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives, whom his team has met with fre­quent­ly in the last sev­er­al weeks.

The doc­u­ments out­line new cap-and-trade pro­pos­al that would be far more friend­ly to indus­try than SB 775. The pro­posed mea­sures mir­ror calls from WSPA and oth­er indus­try groups to build in sev­er­al loop­holes for oil and gas pro­duc­ers that SB 775 would eliminate.

“They want to elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of direct reg­u­la­tion of their pol­lu­tion,” Tuck­er says of the oil industry’s pow­er play on cap and trade, ​“because that’s going to be more expensive…because of the advan­ta­geous way that the cap-and-trade sys­tem is cur­rent­ly struc­tured, so they can view car­bon trad­ing as a flim-flam where they can keep doing busi­ness as usual.”

“The cap-and-trade leg­is­la­tion is just the lat­est iter­a­tion of this trend,” Tuck­er said, ref­er­enc­ing Brown’s meet­ings with the oil industry.

Even giv­en the Brown fam­i­ly ties and the governor’s his­to­ry of appeas­ing the indus­try, the advo­cates and envi­ron­men­tal­ists I spoke with agreed that Brown’s own record on the envi­ron­ment is decid­ed­ly mixed; sev­er­al of the cli­mate mea­sure he’s backed have been gen­uine­ly inno­v­a­tive. ​“Obvi­ous­ly, com­pared to Don­ald Trump he walks on water,” Tuck­er says. ​“My point is that he could do bet­ter. The state can do bet­ter if he wants to be an exam­ple to the rest of the Unit­ed States.”

What indus­try’s so afraid of

Worth men­tion­ing here is that California’s claims to cli­mate lead­er­ship aren’t just smoke and mir­rors. The state leg­is­la­ture — often with Brown as a key boost­er — has enact­ed a suite of impres­sive envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies over the last sev­er­al years. Employ­ing a mix of reg­u­la­to­ry and mar­ket-based mea­sures, the Gold­en State’s green­house gas emis­sions have steadi­ly declined since 2010 even as its econ­o­my has grown.

Cal­i­for­nia, the world’s sixth largest econ­o­my, now has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to shrink the state’s car­bon foot­print even more dra­mat­i­cal­ly. In an effort to slash the state’s emis­sions to 40 per­cent below 1990 lev­els by 2030 — a goal passed into law last fall by the state leg­is­la­ture — Brown announced recent­ly that he’d like to extend the state’s cap-and-trade sys­tem. The sys­tem was estab­lished in 2006 and ini­tial­ly set to expire in 2020. Brown wants to extend it into 2030 and beyond. The mea­sure is also cur­rent­ly fac­ing legal chal­lenges from cap-and-trade oppo­nents, so part of the idea is to craft a new sys­tem that will be more dif­fi­cult to defeat in either the courts or the legislature.

The most like­ly heir appar­ent to the cur­rent sys­tem is a new one out­lined in SB 775, a bill to extend and alter the state’s exist­ing cap-and-trade mea­sures intro­duced by state Sen. Bob Wieck­ows­ki (D‑Fremont) and state Sen­ate Pres­i­dent pro Tem­pore Kevin de León (D‑Los Ange­les). SB 775 is now sit­ting in front of the state Sen­ate, and, if enact­ed, would rep­re­sent a mas­sive depar­ture from California’s cur­rent car­bon trad­ing sys­tem, as well as a kind of North Star for cli­mate pol­i­cy around the coun­try. That also might explain why the state’s oil lob­by is so eager to coun­ter­act it.

It’s impor­tant to under­stand just how ambi­tious SB 775 real­ly is. Draft­ed with con­sul­ta­tion from a cross-sec­tion of greens, econ­o­mists and envi­ron­men­tal and social jus­tice groups, the bill’s main pri­or­i­ties are bring­ing down the state’s emis­sions and pro­tect­ing the Cal­i­for­ni­ans being worst hit by pol­lu­tion and cli­mate impacts — both now and in the future.

As econ­o­mist Mark Paul, who helped work on SB 775, explains, it’s some­thing of a hybrid between a straight-up car­bon tax and a tra­di­tion­al cap-and-trade sys­tem like the one Cal­i­for­nia has now. Here’s how it would work: Every three months, a set num­ber of car­bon cred­its are auc­tioned off to pol­luters. As in a tra­di­tion­al cap-and-trade sys­tem, each cred­it rep­re­sents the amount of pol­lu­tion a com­pa­ny can emit in that quar­ter, and the price per cred­it is based on sup­ply and demand. How­ev­er, the prices would fluc­tu­ate only between a state-deter­mined floor and ceil­ing, both of which would increase by a set rate every year. The floor would start at $20 per ton and the ceil­ing at $30 per ton, with the floor ris­ing by $5 per year and the ceil­ing by $10, plus infla­tion. The idea is to start low and give firms and con­sumers time to adjust, while also ensur­ing that the ceil­ing ris­es to $120 by 2030 — pur­suant to mod­el­ing on how the price can help meet the state’s cli­mate goals.

Because the cred­its do not car­ry over from quar­ter to quar­ter, firms can­not stock­pile (or ​“bank”) cred­its. As a result, the small car­bon mar­ket cre­at­ed would be less vul­ner­a­ble to the kind of spec­u­la­tion that, applied to sub­prime mort­gages, trig­gered the finan­cial cri­sis. Beyond the poten­tial for reck­less invest­ments, allow­ing firms to accu­mu­late cred­its year after year could mean that even­tu­al­ly com­pa­nies could sim­ply pur­chase thick stacks of cred­its with­out doing much of any­thing to bring down emissions.

“We’re not inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing a mar­ket for the envi­ron­ment,” Paul says, adding that the log­ic behind hav­ing a cap at all (rather than sim­ply a price) is to reg­u­late the amount of total pol­lu­tion com­ing out of the state’s indus­tries. If prices stay at the ceil­ing — as the peo­ple behind the plan expect it might — then it would oper­ate more or less like a fixed price for emit­ting carbon.

Unique­ly, SB 775 enjoys the sup­port of sev­er­al envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice groups, many of which tend to oppose mar­ket-based mea­sures as laden with loop­holes for big pol­luters and scant on pro­tec­tions for vul­ner­a­ble groups. I‑732, Wash­ing­ton state’s car­bon pric­ing scheme that was on the bal­lot there last Novem­ber, failed in part because near­ly all of the state’s pro­gres­sive and envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions saw it as too regres­sive and gen­er­ous to polluters.

The team behind SB 775 were eager to avoid those mis­takes and brought grass­roots part­ners in rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly on in the process. Aside from its attempt to tamp down on car­bon trad­ing, much of what sets it apart from sim­i­lar schemes has to do with what the bill would do with the rev­enue it gen­er­ates, and how it would elim­i­nate com­mon allowances for polluters.

Typ­i­cal­ly, cap-and-trade sys­tems — includ­ing the one now in place in Cal­i­for­nia — allow big pol­luters to pur­chase some­thing called car­bon off­sets, where­by a firm can ​“off­set” its own pol­lu­tion by, say, pur­chas­ing a grove of trees to suck up a rough­ly equiv­a­lent amount of car­bon from the air. One big prob­lem with off­sets, envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice cam­paign­ers argue, is that they tend to be far away from the places where pol­lu­tion is hap­pen­ing, often in oth­er states or coun­tries. In addi­tion to let­ting com­pa­nies off the hook in terms of their car­bon emis­sions, off­sets also mean that com­mu­ni­ties close to car­bon-inten­sive, smog-pro­duc­ing indus­tries see lit­tle improve­ment in their qual­i­ty of life.

“It’s great if somebody’s get­ting some wet­lands improved in Wis­con­sin,” Wieck­ows­ki says of off­sets, ​“but that doesn’t real­ly help out Californians.”

Anoth­er major change out­lined in SB 775 is how it would use the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed from the price put on car­bon, which under the cur­rent sys­tem goes toward a smat­ter­ing of green infra­struc­ture projects around the state. As it’s writ­ten now, the new sys­tem would divide the rev­enue up into three cat­e­gories: invest­ment in infra­struc­ture in dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties; invest­ment in research and devel­op­ment for low-car­bon tech­nolo­gies; and div­i­dend pay­ments to all Cal­i­for­ni­ans that increase annu­al­ly. This stands in con­trast to the kinds of rev­enue-neu­tral car­bon pric­ing and trad­ing schemes float­ed in Wash­ing­ton and enact­ed in British Colum­bia, where rev­enue is fun­neled into tax breaks for the car­bon-inten­sive com­pa­nies affect­ed by car­bon pricing.

A recent analy­sis coau­thored by Paul projects that a $49 per ton car­bon tax at the nation­al lev­el would yield a $479 div­i­dend pay­ment per Amer­i­can per year. That can be extrap­o­lat­ed to SB 775, he says, to indi­cate that Cal­i­for­ni­ans would receive $479 in annu­al div­i­dends by 2023, two years after the law goes into effect.

Cru­cial­ly, the bill also does not include mea­sures to elim­i­nate exist­ing reg­u­la­tions. Right-wing and lib­er­tar­i­an econ­o­mists — who account for most of the peo­ple writ­ing about car­bon pric­ing, Paul points out — see pre-empt­ing exist­ing reg­u­la­tions as a nec­es­sary com­ple­ment to enact­ing a car­bon price.

How­ev­er, so-called ​“com­mand and con­trol” reg­u­la­to­ry mea­sures have account­ed for the vast major­i­ty of California’s emis­sions reduc­tions in the last decade. ​“Reg­u­la­tions, not car­bon pric­ing, have been the main dri­ver of California’s car­bon reduc­tions to date,” Vox​’s David Roberts writes in his exhaus­tive explain­er on SB 775. ​“In fact, they have been so effec­tive, and car­bon reduc­tions so much cheap­er than expect­ed, that there hasn’t been much work left for the cap-and-trade pro­gram to do. Near-term emis­sion goals are being reached with­out its help.”

Cam­paign­ers also cau­tion against see­ing mar­ket-based mech­a­nisms as a sil­ver bul­let, and warn not to use them to replace tra­di­tion­al reg­u­la­tions. ​“The fun­ny thing about cap and trade and car­bon pric­ing is that it ends up get­ting a lot of air­space and atten­tion,” says Amy Van­der­wark­er, co-direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice Alliance. A coali­tion of grass­roots groups around the state, her group works large­ly with com­mu­ni­ties impact­ed by oil and gas. ​“Cal­i­for­nia has a whole range of strong reg­u­la­to­ry poli­cies on the books that are achiev­ing the major­i­ty of our green­house gas emis­sions, around 80 per­cent of them. Those reg­u­la­tions are absolute­ly crit­i­cal,” she says.

Con­verse­ly, one of the four pil­lars of the Cli­mate Lead­er­ship Council’s (CLC) car­bon div­i­dends plan, co-authored by Rea­gan Trea­sury Sec­re­tary James Bak­er III and Sec­re­tary of State George Schultz, is a ​“sig­nif­i­cant reg­u­la­to­ry rollback.”

“Much of the EPA’s reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty over car­bon diox­ide emis­sions would be phased out, includ­ing an out­right repeal of the Clean Pow­er Plan,” they sug­gest. ​“Robust car­bon tax­es would also make pos­si­ble an end to fed­er­al and state tort lia­bil­i­ty for emit­ters.” It’s a goal they share with the oil and gas indus­try, mem­bers of which (Exxon­Mo­bil, Total, Shell, BP) have signed on as ​“cor­po­rate found­ing mem­bers” of the CLC. California’s oil and gas lob­by — name­ly, WSPA — now hopes a sim­i­lar­ly-mind­ed one can beat out SB 775.

When oil com­pa­nies write policy

So if not SB 775, what is the pol­i­cy that California’s oil lob­by would rather advance? WSPA has been cir­cu­lat­ing a wish-list of rec­om­men­da­tions for the cap-and-trade program’s exten­sion via the law firm Lath­am & Watkins LLP since ear­ly April, obtained by In These Times. Brown’s admin­is­tra­tion has, in closed-door meet­ings, been con­sid­er­ing an alter­nate cap-and-trade pro­pos­al that close­ly mir­rors WSPA’s rec­om­men­da­tions, accord­ing to sources who received the pro­pos­als and pre­fer not to be named because of the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the nego­ti­a­tions. Two doc­u­ments, view­able here and here, appear to have been writ­ten by the governor’s office and are being cir­cu­lat­ed by Brown’s staff, the sources say. A third—the one that most close­ly resem­bles the lan­guage in WSPA’s wish­list—is sus­pect­ed by advo­cates to have been draft­ed direct­ly by WSPA. That document’s exact usage in cap-and-trade nego­ti­a­tions remains unclear.

The three pro­pos­als echo the WSPA’s wish­list in rec­om­mend­ing that the state hand over exclu­sive author­i­ty for reg­u­lat­ing green­house gasses to the Air Resources Board, the statewide air qual­i­ty reg­u­la­tor, and tak­ing that abil­i­ty out of the hands of the state’s air qual­i­ty dis­tricts. They also includes a much low­er and more grad­u­al­ly ris­ing price cap. The pro­pos­al sus­pect­ed to come from WSPA rec­om­mends spe­cif­ic reg­u­la­to­ry roll­backs for oil refineries.

While sev­er­al envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice groups have seen the leaked pro­pos­als, their exact ori­gins remain unknown. So far the doc­u­ments do not yet include either a spon­sor or a dock­et num­ber, although they fea­ture calls to:

Sig­nif­i­cant­ly roll back the author­i­ty of local air pol­lu­tion con­trol dis­tricts to reg­u­late the state’s oil refiner­ies, and build in spe­cif­ic pro­tec­tions from com­mand and con­trol-style reg­u­la­tions for oil and gas companies.

Main­tain pol­luters’ abil­i­ty to pur­chase offsets.

Not include a price floor on the price of per­mits, and much more grad­u­al­ly esca­late the ceiling

Con­tin­ue issu­ing free allowances to pol­lut­ing industries

A source close to the cap-and-trade fight, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty giv­en their ongo­ing work with the governor’s office, reports that the new lan­guage sur­faced after Brown and one of his top aides, Nan­cy McFad­den, had been meet­ing reg­u­lar­ly over the last sev­er­al weeks with emis­saries from the state’s extrac­tive indus­try, includ­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives of WSPA and Chevron. The source says that ​“every time you walk past [the governor’s offices] you see the oil indus­try com­ing in and out.”

Again, it’s still not known who wrote the draft pro­pos­al lan­guage, or how exact­ly they’re being received in Brown’s admin­is­tra­tion. Beyond the lan­guage of the pro­pos­als, how­ev­er, SB 775 back­ers are con­cerned about the lack of trans­paren­cy sur­round­ing Brown’s deci­sion-mak­ing on cap-and-trade. The Los Ange­les Times last week report­ed that ​“the governor’s office has been devel­op­ing draft pro­pos­als” for a cap and trade replace­ment ​“and cir­cu­lat­ing them in the Capi­tol,” though none have been released to the pub­lic, and no one I spoke with had seen alter­nate pro­pos­als beyond those described above. ​“If the gov­er­nor is push­ing oth­er pro­pos­als, we sim­ply haven’t seen them,” the source said. ​“There’s no trans­paren­cy in what the governor’s doing. Nobody knows what the gov­er­nor is doing.” Wieck­ows­ki told In These Times that he has also not met with the gov­er­nor, though he did meet with Nan­cy McFad­den. Brown has also been invit­ed to sev­er­al meet­ings with SB 775 stake­hold­ers host­ed by Wieck­ows­ki and de León; no rep­re­sen­ta­tive from his office has attended.

Accord­ing to Van­der­wark­er — whose group con­sult­ed on and is push­ing for SB 775 — this would be noth­ing new. ​“Our expe­ri­ence has been on car­bon pric­ing in par­tic­u­lar it has felt like Gov. Brown’s main nego­ti­at­ing part­ner has been big oil. The pro­pos­als their office has put out,” ref­er­enc­ing the doc­u­ments described above, ​“are much more in line with their inter­ests than the inter­ests of the envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice community.”

Advo­cates fear that the lan­guage will soon find its way into a Sen­ate or Assem­bly bill that enjoys Brown’s pub­lic bless­ing, and that the chances for get­ting SB 775 passed with a Brown-backed mea­sure on the table are slim to none. Asked about SB 775, a spokesper­son for Brown’s office told In These Times, ​“We do not com­ment on pend­ing leg­is­la­tion,” but reaf­firmed the governor’s com­mit­ment to pass­ing an exten­sion of the cap and trade program.

Van­der­wark­er wor­ries that the office will pri­or­i­tize speedy pas­sage — even if that means com­pro­mise with indus­try — over a bill with teeth. ​“It appears that the Brown admin­is­tra­tion is more inter­est­ed in get­ting a deal done this year than actu­al­ly get­ting a pol­i­cy in place that is able to help achieve our 2030 tar­gets,” she says.

The costs of a missed opportunity

SB 775’s future remains uncer­tain. The Cal­i­for­nia Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice Alliance and oth­er grass­roots groups intend to con­tin­ue talk­ing with leg­is­la­tors as well as hold­ing reg­u­lar can­vass­es and phone banks to ensure the bill comes to a vote and is enact­ed. Wieck­ows­ki says he’ll con­tin­ue meet­ing with dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers about the bill, includ­ing both envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice and indus­try groups, in an attempt to mete out a solu­tion that sees SB 775 passed into law.

Beyond cur­tail­ing California’s abil­i­ty to cut down its own emis­sions, the oil industry’s rewrit­ing of cap-and-trade could have trou­bling impli­ca­tions on the nation­al and glob­al stage. With Brown evan­ge­liz­ing for cli­mate action, his back­ing of a watered-down mea­sure has the poten­tial to lim­it oth­er states’ ambi­tions. After all, why would a red or pur­ple state or even a less thor­ough­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic one pass a cli­mate pol­i­cy more bold than the one that emerged from California’s lib­er­al utopia?

As Van­der­wark­er puts it, ​“It’s hard to imag­ine how we can main­tain this idea of California’s cli­mate lead­er­ship if we pass a pol­i­cy that amounts to such a big give­away for big oil.”

After this sto­ry was pub­lished, the gov­er­nor’s office wrote In These Times to com­plain of what they termed ​“inac­cu­ra­cies, innu­en­do, mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tions and bogus con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries” and elab­o­rat­ed as follows: