CARB Leadership Splinters Over Critique Of State's "Carbon Offset" Programs Based On California's Forests
While Governor Gavin Newsom was touting California’s climate leadership last week in Brazil at the U.N.’s annual climate summit, a conflict was brewing back home between environmental justice leaders and the state’s lead air pollution regulator. The fallout came this Tuesday, when a top advisor to the California Air Resources Board resigned in protest over what she described as “growing hostility” towards the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, or the EJAC, which provides input to the agency.
Catherine Garoupa, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition and one of the two EJAC co-chairs, wrote in her resignation letter that CARB has increasingly dismissed science and shown a bias toward regulated industries “at the expense of low income communities and communities of color." The final straw was a tense meeting last month where CARB’s Deputy Executive Officer Rajinder Sahota likened a University of California, Berkeley, researcher’s critiques of the state’s forest carbon offset program to President Donald Trump’s attacks on the endangerment finding that allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases.
“That was really the catalyst, but it’s been coming for a very long time,” said Garoupa, who described Sahota’s comments as a personal attack on the scientist in a letter to CARB leadership following the meeting. CARB said they brought in the Attorney General’s Office to conduct an independent review and concluded that the agency’s standards of conduct had not been violated. They said they would continue to support the EJAC, whose members will all reach the end of their terms in March. “We respect Dr. Garoupa’s decision to step down in advance of her term ending this year and commend her for her service,” said spokesperson Lindsay Buckley in a statement. “CARB has made great strides embedding environmental justice into our policies and programs, and we remain steadfast in our support for the committee’s vital work.”
EDIT
The program puts a declining cap on state carbon emissions across sectors and allows companies to buy and trade permits to emit up to the limit. Proceeds from the permit auctions, which have raised about $4 billion annually in recent years, fund climate programs from high-speed rail to wildfire prevention to affordable housing near public transit. The revenues have made the program increasingly popular among politicians and funding recipients, but groups on both sides of efforts to confront climate change have been skeptical of it. The oil industry fights efforts to make the program more stringent and costly, but ultimately prefers it to direct regulation. Trump called out the program this year in an executive order that aimed to block state climate policies, but his second administration has yet to make moves to stop it. And environmental justice groups continue to view carbon trading as a way for companies to pay their way out of reducing carbon emissions, and the associated air pollution, at the source.
EDIT
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112025/california-air-resources-board-environmental-justice-resignation/