[TheClimate.Vote] December 25, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 25, 2019*/

[Students are ready]
*Students want climate change lessons. Schools aren't ready*
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-23/students-want-climate-change-lessons-schools-arent-ready


[basic scripts for a civil conversation]
*How to talk to your family about climate change*
With the climate crisis making more headlines than ever, difficult 
conversations about climate change will be hard to avoid this holiday 
season. So we asked a therapist, a scientist, a policy expert, and a 
psychologist about how to navigate these conversations with relatives 
who might not share your point of view. When that uncle breaches the 
topic this Christmas, how can you respond in a way that could actually 
change his mind?

*We can't just stop using fossil fuels. That's not how the world works! 
Think of the job losses, economic growth, and our GDP."*

Answer by Prof. Dr. Volker Quaschning, expert in renewable energy:
Earning money and creating jobs does not necessarily justify one's 
actions - take for example the burning of the Amazon, which is also 
creating jobs. ‌‌

But let's take a look at how things stand in terms of jobs. In Germany, 
for instance, 20,000 people work in the brown coal industry - that's 
certainly a lot of jobs and livelihoods. On the other hand, over 100,000 
people work in wind energy and over 50,000 in solar. ‌‌

In the last two years, we have cut 30,000 jobs in the wind energy sector 
as the switchover to green energy was largely drawn to a halt. ‌‌

So what we're seeing is a double standard whereby jobs in the fossil 
fuel industries are regarded as much more important than jobs in 
renewable energies. This means that the loss of jobs is simply being 
used as pretext in favor of justifying one's own actions.‌‌

Furthermore, we are creating many more on-site jobs in renewable 
energies than in the importing of oil, coal and gas.‌‌
more at - 
https://blog.ecosia.org/how-to-talk-to-your-family-about-climate-change/


[Follow the Money]
*Fossil Fuel Companies Begin to Acknowledge Climate Litigation Threatens 
Their Bottom Line*
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/12/23/climate-litigation-threat-financial-filings/ 



[rolling tolls]
*Trump is rolling back over 80 environmental regulations. Here are five 
big changes you might have missed in 2019*
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/5-major-trump-climate-rollbacks-you-might-have-missed-in-2019.html


[see the list]
*Regulatory Rollback Tracker*
We are tracking environmental regulatory rollbacks of the Trump 
Administration. The table below links you to pages that describe the 
history of each rule and its current status and rollback efforts, 
including litigation and court decisions. We track open comment periods, 
and link to pages where you can submit comments. We'll be adding rules 
and updating the posts, so check back or sign up for updates. For a list 
of other trackers, click here.

If you have suggestions about the tracker, please email us.

Thank you to our tracker research assistants!
Current research assistants: Katherine Clements, Libby Dimenstein, 
Elizabeth Melampy, James Pollack, Sarah Simon, Qingyang Song, Grace 
Weatherall, and Rachel Westrate
Former research assistants: Leilani Doktor, Ari Sillman, and Majid Waheed
Check for latest chart - 
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker/


[Moving the burden]
*How Sacramento shifted billions of dollars in future wildfire costs to 
consumers*
By JEFF MCDONALD
DEC. 22, 2019 12:46 PM
SAN DIEGO -- San Diego Gas & Electric executives spent 10 years seeking 
permission to charge customers hundreds of millions of dollars for 
company losses due to three backcountry wildfires started by its 
equipment in 2007.
Lawyers for the power monopoly were thwarted at each turn -- first by 
regulators, then by a state appellate court, then the California Supreme 
Court and, finally, by the U.S. Supreme Court when it declined in early 
October to take up the case.

The judges all concluded that SDG&E should not be able to recover $379 
million in damages left over from the Witch, Guejito and Rice fires. 
Investigations showed that the three wildfires were the result of 
negligence and mismanagement committed by the utility -- a finding the 
company never conceded.

In reaching their decisions, the judges relied on what's known as the 
"just and reasonable" standard -- the rule that utilities can only pass 
along to customers those costs that fairly serve consumers' interest. It 
has been a cornerstone of California energy regulation for more than 100 
years.

Under Assembly Bill 1054, which was introduced, passed and signed into 
law within a matter of days over the summer, the legal standards have 
changed.

Now power companies are permitted to get future wildfire damages covered 
by ratepayers as long as they create a wildfire mitigation plan and 
receive a "safety certification" from the California Public Utilities 
Commission, whose regulatory authority dates back to 1911.

"If the electrical corporation has that valid safety certification, the 
electrical corporation's conduct would be deemed reasonable unless a 
party to the proceeding creates a serious doubt as to the reasonableness 
of the electrical corporation's conduct," the bill states.

SDG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison all 
received their safety certifications in August.

*Law takes teeth out of panel, critics say*
The law also says regulators can no longer consider a utility's past 
practices or history of violations when they examine whether fire damage 
can be covered -- a rule change that critics say disarms the utilities 
commission.

"It's eating the chickens and saying that as long as the chickens are 
dead you can't look at who killed them," said Loretta Lynch, a San 
Francisco attorney and former California Public Utilities Commission 
president. "This is as close to a blank check as it gets."

The legislation's main feature is the creation of a $21-billion 
insurance pool that can be tapped by utilities to pay wildfire damage 
claims. Such claims already have pushed PG&E into bankruptcy and 
resulted in bond-rating downgrades for SDG&E and Edison.

The fund is designed to allow power companies to maintain their 
profitability and creditworthiness while the state confronts the rising 
threat from wildfires.

Those costs will be shared equally between the major utilities and their 
customers, although the $10.5 billion paid by consumers will be financed 
over 15 years through a new $900-million annual fee that will actually 
cost $13.5 billion in total.

The pooled-insurance plan will not replace private insurance that 
utilities already purchase -- and charge to ratepayers. Following the 
2007 firestorm, SDG&E's insurance policies picked up about $1 billion in 
damages.

For the new insurance pool, residents, businesses and commercial users 
will all pay the same rate: about an extra half-cent for every kilowatt 
hour of electricity they consume. For typical homeowners, who use an 
estimated 500 kWh of per month on average, the extra cost will be about 
$2.50 a month.

In the SDG&E service territory, which covers about 4,100 square miles of 
San Diego County and a portion of southern Orange County, the cost of a 
kilowatt-hour in summer was just over 27 cents before AB 1054 was signed 
into law.

State officials plan to issue billions of dollars worth of bonds to fund 
the insurance pool and begin paying claims to eligible fire victims. 
There is no guarantee that the fresh pot of money will be enough to 
cover all fire claims over the 15 years.

The legislation sped through the statehouse as an emergency matter and 
was immediately signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, with full support 
from the utilities, Wall Street investors and labor unions.

The governor's office said doing away with the "just and reasonable" 
standard helped consumers by providing clarity for utilities and their 
investors.

Newsom aides said during a briefing that the legislation places a cap on 
the amount of money ratepayers can be assessed for future fires. It also 
makes sure utilities meet specific requirements before they can access 
the fund, they said.

*Consumers pay for future fires*
The new wildfire law takes this unusual step: For the first time, 
consumers are being required to pay for wildfires that have not yet 
happened.

In explaining its support for the legislation, SDG&E said proper 
management of the electrical grid was critical to the utility's "culture 
of operational excellence" and exceeded the company's legal and 
regulatory requirements.

"AB 1054 provides further incentive for utilities to be prudent managers 
by requiring them to obtain a wildfire safety certification as a 
condition to access the statewide wildfire recovery fund," company 
spokeswoman Zoraya Griffin said in an email.

"The creation of the wildfire fund provides improved certainty that 
those who are impacted by utility-related wildfires are compensated," 
she wrote. "The fund also serves as [a] safety net for ratepayers, 
protecting them from increased rates due to wildfire claims."

*Some consumer groups have serious misgivings about the law.*
"Our view, basically, is that the prior legal [and] regulatory framework 
did work and yield better results," said Edward Lopez, executive 
director of the San Diego nonprofit Utility Consumers' Action Network, 
which opposed the regulatory change.

Lopez cited the long-running SDG&E effort to recover $379 million out of 
some $2.4 billion in total expenses from the 2007 firestorm as an 
example of the longstanding reasonableness standard working well. The 
utility recovered about $2 billion from insurers and two companies it 
sued after the fires.

"Customers were not assessed costs that resulted from imprudence and 
negligence," Lopez said.

With the new law, California is alone, or nearly alone, in automatically 
considering utility-caused wildfire costs to be reasonable unless a 
third party can prove there are "serious doubts" about a company's 
actions leading to the damages, experts say.

"All states have a version of the California general rate case process, 
where the utility's costs for those operations, safety activities, etc. 
are reviewed and approved," said Lynch, the former utilities commission 
president. "To my knowledge, the vast majority of states use a 
negligence standard in those reviews -- meaning if the utility's actions 
were negligent, then the ratepayers do not pay for any costs resulting 
from that negligence."

The revised legal standard is being challenged by San Diego lawyer 
Michael Aguirre, who has sued state officials to try to overturn the 
law. The claim accuses the state of protecting utilities at the expense 
of ratepayers.

"The governor's office brought in finance people to solve the problem of 
catastrophic wildfires," Aguirre said. "They didn't bring in people that 
know how to stop fires."
McDonald writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-22/sacramento-shifted-future-wildfire-costs-consumers 



*This Day in Climate History - December 25, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
The New York Times reports:

    "A plunge in oil prices has sent tremors through the global
    political and economic order, setting off an abrupt shift in
    fortunes that has bolstered the interests of the United States and
    pushed several big oil-exporting nations -- particularly those
    hostile to the West, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela -- to the brink
    of financial crisis.

    "The nearly 50 percent decline in oil prices since June has had the
    most conspicuous impact on the Russian economy and President
    Vladimir V. Putin. The former finance minister Aleksei L. Kudrin, a
    longtime friend of Mr. Putin’s, warned this week of a 'full-blown
    economic crisis' and called for better relations with Europe and the
    United States."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/world/europe/oils-swift-fall-raises-fortunes-of-us-abroad.html

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