By Keemia Zhang
As one of California’s most influential climate think tanks, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) is actively engaged in shaping state-level decision-making. Working with nonprofit sponsors and legislative staff, its experts provide objective research, data, technical assistance, and drafting language to support key policy advancements across the environmental landscape.
During California’s recently concluded legislative session, CLEE delivered preliminary research and pivotal guidance for multiple bills revolving around housing, greenhouse gas emissions, and cap-and-trade.
Land use and carbon removal
“It’s not about whether it causes traffic at a specific intersection — it’s also about whether it adds more vehicles to the road, because vehicles create air and noise pollution and affect the climate,” says CLEE Associate Director Ted Lamm. “So, the focus isn’t just congestion — it’s emissions.”
The state’s program, Lamm notes, 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,” Lamm says. “The idea is that investment in location-efficient housing offsets the increased VMT from other projects.’
CLEE’s research also helped build the case for SB 79, signed into law earlier this month, which aims to increase housing density by upzoning areas around transit stops.
SB 643, after passing in the State Assembly and State Senate, was vetoed by the governor due to budget limitations. CLEE assisted in drafting the bill, which would have created a $50 million state grant to develop carbon capture pilot projects that decrease atmospheric emissions in the state. It included innovative requirements to ensure these projects provided community benefits in proportion with their design and impact.
“These projects should actually help the communities they’re in,” Lamm explains. “That’s why community benefits were written directly into eligibility criteria.”
However, CLEE Project Climate Director Ken Alex remains optimistic that the center’s proposals will resurface in later legislative sessions.
“It’s unfortunate,” he says. “It would have advanced high-quality carbon removal projects in California, but there’ll be other opportunities.”
Transmission financing and grid reform
Throughout the legislative session, CLEE leaders engaged in discussions and proposals around transmission financing reforms, providing objective analysis on how California can invest in — and lower — the building cost of clean energy transmission infrastructure.
SB 254, signed by Newsom in September, reforms how the state funds and deploys electricity transmission infrastructure by creating a new public-financing mechanism to support large-scale clean energy projects. CLEE produced various provisions and language for the measure.
Alex and Climate Program Director Ethan Elkind also offered significant expertise that informed the state agency participation provisions, and made suggestions to improve financing mechanisms for grid deployment.
“A number of the recommendations that we made ended up in AB 1207 and SB 840, which extended our cap-and-trade program and allocated specific percentages from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund toward targeted areas like wildfire resilience and clean transportation,” Alex says. “The recommendations — particularly around how prices and costs for transmission can be reduced — were adopted pretty directly.”
Looking ahead
CLEE’s team continues to pursue new, innovative approaches to accelerate electric vehicle adoption and expand charging infrastructure.”We’ve been working on approaches around how “California can promote and extend EV purchasing and infrastructure,” says Lamm. “Those efforts will likely be more focused on the next legislative session.”
Meanwhile, notes from CLEE’s latest report on the state’s economic toll caused by the climate crisis are circulating around state legislators’ desks, covering the financial impact of wildfires, extreme weather, and rising insurance premiums, all affecting Californians in real time.
“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.”
This article was made possible by support from the Erin Ziegler Fund, an endowment for the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment within Berkeley Law.