Sacramento staggers toward the end of the 2025 session
Janet Cox, CEO, Climate Action California
The nuttiest week ever in Sacramento…isn’t over yet. Climate Action California’s Capitol Team is mobilized in the Capitol, in close touch with our policy teams who are bleary-eyed from reading late-breaking bills that can run to hundreds of pages. As the last days fly by we’re seeing some climate-related bills pass, but the big ones are likely to get votes either in today’s marathon floor sessions or on Saturday morning. Here are a few updates, after much revising this post as the news comes in.
First—some good news:
- The bill we sponsored, AB 368 (Ward), urging the Energy Commission (CEC) to evaluate the Passive House Building Standard, passed the Senate and is on the Governor’s desk! Read our letter urging the Governor to sign our bill.
- SB 30 (Cortese) also passed. It will prevent entities from selling or giving away the most polluting retired or decommissioned diesel locomotives. The Air Board (CARB) has a program designed to take these engines out of service over time, and it’s important they don’t keep polluting somewhere else.
- Another important bill we worked on, SB 279 (McNerney), is also with Governor Newsom. This bill makes it easier for farmers and small community composting operations to turn local waste into compost—helping to create healthy soil that sequesters carbon and reduce methane emissions from landfills.
Next, COMPLICATED news:
With apparent certainty that the 2025 legislative session will be extended past its midnight Friday deadline, three extremely important (and very long) energy bills and the two Cap and Trade reauthorization bills were amended and published between 5:22 am and 10:21 am Wednesday. (And we thought midnight Tuesday was the last possible minute!) This means that these bills will be eligible for votes between 5:22 and 10:21 Saturday morning. We learned yesterday that the legislature will be in session starting at 9:30 am Saturday, and HOPE to be done by 1:30 pm. Staying in session into Saturday is RARE.
Climate Action California supports all of these bills…but this has been a challenging process, severely complicated by the fact that much of the bill language is the result of political horse-trading.
Cap and Invest (formerly known as Cap and Trade): the biggest horse. Both incoming President pro Tempore Monique Limón’s SB 840, and Asm Jacqui Irwin’s AB 1207 were amended to make substantive changes to the the program, which put a stronger focus on emissions reductions…although not soon enough! The Senate bill (now before the Assembly) apportions allocations from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (proceeds from the auctions), and requires the Air Resources Board (CARB) to evaluate and report on the offsets protocols to “reflect the best available science.” The Assembly bill (now in the Senate) reauthorizes the program until 2046 and requires CARB to
design the regulations, including distribution of emissions allowances where appropriate, in a manner that transitions support from gas [utilities] to electrical distribution utilities…to minimize ratepayer impacts and…achieve the maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions…[and] ensure that activities undertaken to comply with the regulations do not disproportionately impact low-income communities.
We have compared the language with our current draft position on Cap and Trade, and we support both bills. They are urgency statutes, requiring 2/3 votes in each house to pass.
The Pathways Initiative: The good parts of SB 540 (Becker), joining California to a short-term multi-state energy market with benefits for both the climate and California electricity ratepayers, have been amended into an Assembly bill, AB 825 (Petrie-Norris). This was necessary due to some poisonous amendments added to the Senate bill committee. CAC strongly supported SB 540, and we strongly support AB 825. Thanks to some strategic rule-waiving, the bill was heard yesterday in the Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee. Read our coalition support letter.
SB 254 (Becker), 10 ways to save energy and lower electricity bills, has been majorly amended; it still does 10 big things. Here is Senator Becker’s current summary. This bill will be heard in Assembly Utilities and Energy today; here is our letter in support.
SB 237 (Grayson) disappeared for awhile and has resurfaced with some of the provisions of the Governor’s proposed bill enabling oil drilling around the state without environmental review. SB 237 limits such drilling to Kern County, by far the biggest oil producing county in the state—pocked with 36,000 wells including more than 24,000 idle wells (as of 2022). Oil productivity in Kern has been declining year over year. The bill applies the 3200-ft buffer between oil/gas operations and sensitive sites to all new and revised wells, even in Kern, and increases protections against spills and pipeline breaks. It allows the Governor, in consultation with CARB and the Energy Commission, to suspend the requirement that California refine and sell our special low-emissions gasoline if prices spike, in line with a proposal from Union of Concerned Scientists. CAC supports SB 237 because we see it as an important step toward weakening the power of the oil lobby in California. Assembly Natural Resources Committee will hear the bill today at 11 am.
And frustrating news
As of this writing, harms to CEQA delivered by an extortionate budget process (passage of SB 131) stand. A couple of last-minute trailer bills, SB 158 and AB 145, include partial fix language and are floating around in budget committee hearings, but don’t seem to be getting traction. Meanwhile, late last night, Asm Damon Connolly and Sen. Catherine Blakespear introduced a comprehensive repair bill, AB 1083. The bill has a passel of co-authors already, and the authors are collecting moredrive, intending to pass it in 2026.
Finally, the craziest news
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the Governor is considering having the state purchase a stake in the Valero refinery for somewhere between $80 million and $200 million. I am happy to report that no such bill has been introduced, so it may be that prospects of passing SB 237 have made such a move seem unnecessary. It would have made for a fun hearing, though.
Thanks for reading! And stay tuned…
