Climate Change

Follow this blog for updates from CALmatters reporter Julie Cart as Gov. Jerry Brown travels Europe to meet with leaders about climate change.

Unlike blue-state California, deeply crimson Louisiana shuns climate talk as it gets on with the task of battling rising seas.

As the oil industry worked to influence a landmark environmental policy in California this year, it had hired Democratic former legislators to lobby on its behalf.

Delay of a plan for more renewable energy in California could carry a price tag for consumers.

It should come as no surprise that when the California Legislature recently began the process of divvying up proceeds from the state’s cap-and-trade auctions, a cavalcade of local officials, community activists and lobbyists rushed to Sacramento, with hands out. Billions of dollars burning a hole in the state’s pocket has that effect on people, and […]

The very reason Arnold Schwarzenegger called GOP Assemblyman Chad Mayes the “future of the Republican party”—his work on climate change—was what ultimately cost Mayes his leadership post.

An irritated chairman of a state Senate Budget subcommittee says he intends to thwart a recent move by the state Air Resources Board that could give California’s biggest polluters a cushion of more than $300 million. In a sharp rebuke of the board, Sen. Bob Wieckowski said Thursday that he’ll insert language into the 2018-19 budget bill instructing regulators to reduce the free compensation they’re giving oil refineries and other industries covered under cap and trade, California’s signature climate policy.

The state Air Resources Board approved a paragraph, tucked in a 17-page resolution, that will likely mean benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars for oil and agriculture.

The underbelly of cap and trade: Letting industries buy carbon credits or offsets, rather than modernize old equipment, means pollution in many poor communities could get worse.

In California, a deep blue state leading the charge to curb climate change, the question for many Republicans isn’t whether global warming is happening—it’s what kind of policies are best to address it.