Sara Gersen

Senior Attorney, Clean Energy Earthjustice seeks a Senior Attorney to join our growing team of lawyers who work to accelerate a shift from coal- and gas-fired electricity generation, and to advance clean energy throughout the coun...

Come work with me! Earthjustice is the best place to be a public interest environmental lawyer and our clean energy team is hiring!

earthjustice.org/job/senior-a...

After LA fires, could it be cheaper and faster to rebuild without gas? The city waived its all-electric building requirement in an effort to fast-track recovery after the January fires. A new report argues that’s the wrong…

To fast-track recovery after wildfires ravaged Los Angeles County in January, Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive order exempting replacement structures from the city's all-electric building requirement.

A new report argues that’s the wrong approach:

Explainer: Using ISRs to fight air pollution from mega facilities

This new report by Brennon Mendez and Cara Horowitz in the Pritzker Brief series from @law.ucla.edu focuses on how to use Indirect Source Rules to fight pollution from mega facilities.

Berkeley Policy Aims to Cut Pollution From Homes, and Targets the Moment You Sell (or Buy) | KQED The new policy requires that one- to four-unit buildings undergo upgrades that reduce planet-warming emissions around the time a structure is sold.

Berkeley continues to innovate with first-in-nation time of sale ordinance to cut pollution from existing buildings. Still lots cities can do to end reliance on fossil fuels!
www.kqed.org/news/1203655...

Yeah, whether this makes sense depends largely on what the purpose of the program is. Is the LCFS an offset program or a California fuel program, as CARB generally claims? IMO, CA is squandering scarce resources on paper credits when we need to truly modernize the state's transportation sector.

No, the program is supposed to decarbonize CA transportation fuels and transform the market. You can't do that by buying offsets for out-of-state reductions in other sectors. It would be just as misguided to give electric utilities a pass from RPS compliance by buying carbon offsets.

No. Californians are paying a lot of money to clean up the state's transportation sector and they're not getting what they pay for. Fixing the LCA doesn't fix that problem.

There are also big Qs about whether there's any climate benefit from using methane from factory farms instead of fossil gas. We don't know how much biomethane is produced to take advantage of these kinds of subsidies and the biomethane supply chain is even leakier than the fossil gas supply chain.

I assume the people who buy the biomethane are in Missouri. It's hard to argue that the CA subsidies are causing fossil gas displacement - if you check out the full WaPo article, it gets into how the CAFO already captured biomethane before the LCFS subsidies.

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Companies that sell fossil methane in CA buy paper credits from factory farms in Missouri. These credits give the fossil fuel industry the right to pretend they are selling biomethane in CA for the sake of claiming huge subsidies. It might seem too stupid to be true, but that's how the LCFS works.

YouTube video by Washington Post Universe California’s pig fart program helps out-of-state farms more

This Washington Post video touches on a lot of profound problems with California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, but it oversimplifies one key thing. The cow gas is not delivered to CA. It does nothing to reduce the climate impact of the fuels we use here. 1/2 www.youtube.com/shorts/j5kms...

Demand for these manure gas credits is about to skyrocket because of bad federal policy. The federal government is allowing the fossil fuel industry to reap big tax subsidies for producing hydrogen, provided they buy these paper credits to recharacterize their fossil fuels as "renewables."

I replaced my gas water heater with a heat pump model at the beginning of March and now have about a month of data on my home's fossil fuel usage after the water heater upgrade. Now, my SoCal home is zero-emissions most days, unless we're burning gas to dry laundry. 🏘️⚡🔌💧

This is an important case. Big ups to Earthjustice colleagues (@candyoungblood.bsky.social), @sierraclub.org, @industriouslabs.bsky.social ( @evangillespie.bsky.social ), and Peoples Collective 4 EJ.

The zero-emissions shift is happening and we will go to court to defend our right to clean air.

Thank you @benallenca.bsky.social & Sen Stern for asking @californiapuc.bsky.social for answers on costs of building back with gas, ways it can facilitate all-electric construction, and role of gas line fires in complicating firefighting. We need a proactive PUC to enable thoughtful rebuilding.

Column: The Los Angeles fires are no excuse to slow down on clean energy State and local officials seem to be rushing to rethink climate policies. It's a terrible idea.

Why are Karen Bass & Gavin Newsom rushing to rethink clean energy rules in the wake of the L.A. fires?

Rebuilding homes with gas furnaces won't be any cheaper or faster. If anything, all-electric homes are the best thing for everyone. My @latimes.com column: www.latimes.com/environment/...

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Today, Sierra Club and @ceja.org protested SoCalGas’ request to charge customers $266 million to design a hydrogen pipeline system. The CPUC has told SoCalGas multiple times recently it can’t make customers pay for Sempra’s new lines of business that don’t directly benefit us. But here we go again!

Earthjustice President Abbie Dillen said it best:

People want policies that safeguard clean air and clean water and protect them from climate-fueled extreme weather. The President's job is to protect the people, not corporate interests.

Luckily, the statute requires New Mexico's clean transportation fuel standard to reduce the carbon intensity of fuels "used in the state," so the state's environment department must nix these book-and-claim accounting shenanigans in the final rule.

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Will the New Mexico Clean Transportation Fuel Standard become a giant straw that sucks money from New Mexicans to California's refineries and Wisconsin's dairies for fuels that provide no in-state benefits?

One big loophole that is unique to the New Mexico draft is letting all fuels take advantage of "book-and-claim" accounting. Companies that continue business-as-usual and sell fossil diesel in NM could claim a subsidy by buying paper credits from companies that supply renewable diesel in California.

These oils are sold in a global commodity market, interchangeable with palm oil. So, one straightforward fix would be to assume that increasing demand for any crop oil has the same land-use impacts as increasing demand for palm oil, which is too carbon-intensive to claim a subsidy.

NM's proposal would also rely on CA's decade-old assessment of the climate benefits of crop oils, which neglects deforestation risks. A recent EPA study found that emissions from increasing production of these biofuels could be even worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

The special treatment for manure gas is even *less* justified in New Mexico than in CA because livestock operations there generally don't store manure in the types of lagoons that generate methane for capture. Commodifying methane just encourages them to switch to dirtier practices to make CH4.

Just like in CA, NM proposes to treat gas from livestock manure as "carbon negative", lavishing bigger subsidies on fuels made from ag waste than any other fuels. This is a big market distortion that rewards fueling with manure gas with about 4x the subsidy you'd see for electric fuels.

Right now, we need states to lead on climate. Sadly, New Mexico's draft Clean Transportation Fuel Standard won't truly deliver the emissions reductions required by law because shabby carbon accounting rewards biofuels for reductions that only exist on paper. We filed comments on how to fix it!

Good question for the bluesky brain trust. I believe there's no need for fuel producers to calculate their CI under the RFS and all renewable fuels generate one RIN for each 1 gallon equivalent.

The over-subsidization of manure gas in our climate programs is the product of industrial agriculture's relatively recent political victories at CARB. I think it's important people understand it's not the result of some longstanding or inevitable consensus.

Good article on the new rules for the federal hydrogen tax credits. My one quibble is with the suggestion that manure methane has "long been treated as 'carbon negative.'" The LCFS has only treated manure gas as a magical "carbon negative" fuel since 2018.