NEW GROUND: Ken Alex (left) and Ted Lamm helped the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment advance several state bills. Photo by Darius Riley

Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) delivered vital guidance for several new bills revolving around housing, greenhouse gas emissions, and cap-and-trade in California’s last legislative session. Working with nonprofit sponsors and legislative staff, center experts provided research, data, technical assistance, and drafting language to support key policy advancements.

In the land use and carbon removal arena, AB 130 lets developers mitigate transportation impacts by funding transit-oriented affordable housing projects through a mitigation “bank” that helps facilitate vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reductions when they cannot occur at a project site.

The concept builds on work CLEE has developed since a 2013 bill that first instituted VMT as an environmental impact metric. The center is providing initial technical guidance to the governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation for AB 130’s bank program, which aims to direct all funds for mitigating those impacts into location-efficient affordable housing in walkable areas less reliant on cars and more reliant on transit.

“It’s about adding development and housing capacity without adding more vehicles to the road,” CLEE Associate Director Ted Lamm says. “The idea is that investment in location-efficient housing offsets the increased VMT from other projects.”

CLEE assisted in drafting SB 643, which would have created a $50 million state grant to develop carbon capture pilot projects that decrease atmospheric emissions in California — and ensured community benefits in proportion with their design and impact. While the bill was vetoed because of budget limitations, CLEE Project Climate Director Ken Alex believes the center’s proposals will resurface.

“It would have advanced high-quality carbon removal projects in California, but there’ll be other opportunities,” he says.

Throughout the legislative session, CLEE provided analysis on how California can invest in and lower the building cost of clean energy transmission infrastructure.

SB 254 reforms how the state funds and deploys electricity transmission infrastructure by creating a new public-financing mechanism to support large-scale clean energy projects. Alex and Climate Program Director Ethan Elkind helped shape the state agency participation provisions and improvements to financing mechanisms for grid deployment.

Their suggestions also ended up in AB 1207 and SB 840, which extended California’s cap-and-trade program and allocated specific percentages from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund toward targeted areas.

“The recommendations — particularly around how prices and costs for transmission can be reduced — were adopted pretty directly,” Alex says.

CLEE continues to pursue innovative approaches to accelerate electric vehicle adoption and expand charging infrastructure, and notes from its latest report on the economic toll caused by climate impacts are circulating around legislators’ desks.

“Usually the coverage focuses on the cost of climate response, like renewable energy projects, but not on what climate change itself is already costing people,” Alex says. “That’s an important message for legislators to bring back to their constituents.” — Keemia Zhang

The Center for Law, Energy & the Environment continues to grow in size and influence beyond its expanding impact on state legislation. Just a few examples:

• The staff has quadrupled over the last 10 years
• Recently facilitated development of 2040 Sustainable Battery Vision, endorsed by 23 NGOs, to improve the global supply chain for electric vehicle batteries
• Last year hosted 12 lunch and learn events engaging students and practitioners in discussions of current policy topics and career pathways
• Its “Climate Break” podcast offers weekly episodes, each about 100 seconds long, sharing potential climate solutions

This article was made possible by support from the Erin Ziegler Fund, an endowment for the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.