“Prior to the passage of AB 1493, nobody thought about carbon dioxide emissions as carbon pollution,” said Michael Wara, policy director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at StanfordWoods.
Russell Long was sitting in his office at the corner of Broadway and Sansome when he realized the world was doomed.
But could he stave off a torrent of oil-friendly federal policies by transforming California into a bulwark of environmental regulation? It was a bold idea — and an improbable one. Long didn’t have the deep pockets or the broad influence of a Sierra Club or NRDC. He had a staff of 10. But its anniversary also comes at a moment when the nation’s highest court has curtailed the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions from power plants, threatening to drag the U.S. further behind in meeting its climate targets.
But then, someone told him to run it by Fran Pavley, a freshman Assembly member and former school teacher from Los Angeles County, whose grassroots victory over better-funded opponents caught many by surprise. She was new in town and might be swayed. Pavley was convinced. “Everything they said was true over 20 years ago – it's even more true today,” she said. “Everything accelerated faster than anyone predicted.”Long was in. He drafted language for a bill that went for the jugular of the auto industry. His pitch, said Pavley, was that under federal law, the state of California is authorized to enforce more stringent air standards reflecting the unique climatic conditions in the state. Namely, smog.
This was a time before Teslas whirred through city streets. Long envisioned running his Volkswagen Beetle on Canola oil. There was also fear that if the bill failed in California, the Bush administration would hold it up as a beacon of liberal policy gone haywire, an excuse to double down on his oil-extractive agenda.
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