Environmentalists

The strange political bedfellows created by efforts to save spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest just got even stranger.

Already Republican members of Congress were allied with animal rights activists.
They don’t want trained shooters to kill up to 450,000 barred owls, which are outcompeting northern spotted owls, under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan approved last year that would unfold over three decades.

Now, timber interests are aligning with environmentalists in favor of culling the owls.

Some logging advocates are afraid nixing the plan will slow down timber harvesting. Roughly 2.6 million acres of timberlands in western Oregon managed by the Bureau of Land Management are governed by resource management plans contingent on the barred owl cull going forward, according to Travis Joseph, president and chief executive of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing mills, loggers, lumber buyers and other stakeholders in the region.

The area can produce at least 278 million board feet per year under current plans, “with the potential for significantly more,” Joseph said in a mid-October letter to Congress.

If the cull is scrapped, he said, the federal agency likely will need to restart Endangered Species Act consultation for the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened. It’s a process that could take years. According to the letter, it would create “unacceptable risks and delays to current and future timber sales.”

Timber production goals laid out by the Trump administration also could be jeopardized.

Momentum to stop the cull gained ground this summer when Sen. John Kennedy, a conservative from Louisiana, introduced a resolution to reverse the Biden-era plan.
That move reflected an unlikely alliance between some right-wing politicians and animal rights advocates who say it’s too expensive and inhumane. Some Democrats have also opposed the cull, and companion legislation in the House has bipartisan backers.

The stakes are high. Many environmentalists and scientists maintain that northern spotted owls will go extinct if their competitors aren’t kept in check. Barred owls — which originally hail from eastern North America — are larger, more aggressive and less picky when it comes to habitat and food, giving them an edge when vying for resources.

Last week, Politico’s E&E News reported that Kennedy said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked him to stand down from his effort to stop the owl-killing plan. The legislator told the outlet he would charge ahead anyway.

“I don’t think the federal government ought to be telling God, nature — whatever you believe in — this one can exist, this one can’t,” Kennedy told E&E. “The barred owl is not the first species that has ever moved its territory and it won’t be the last.”

Kennedy did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said they could not respond to the inquiry because of the government shutdown.

“It’s strange that a Republican in the south is taking on the owl issue, specifically, when its consequences will impact western Oregon BLM timber sales,” Joseph said in an interview. “It will lead to lower revenues for counties, it will impact jobs and it will put the spotted owl on a trajectory towards extinction.”

The stance aligns in part with that of environmental groups like the Environmental Protection Information Center and Center for Biological Diversity, which have supported culling barred owls to help the beleaguered spotted owls in their native territory. It’s an unexpected overlap, given environmentalists’ long history of fighting to protect old-growth forests in the region the owls call home.

Tom Wheeler, chief executive of EPIC, said it’s possible that culling barred owls could lead to a bump in timber harvest on the BLM land in western Oregon but overall it would lead to more habitat being protected throughout the spotted owls’ expansive range. The presence of spotted owls triggers protections under the Endangered Species Act. If the cull boosts the spotted owl population as intended, it means more guardrails.

“It puts us in admittedly an awkward place,” Wheeler said. “But our advocacy for barred owl removal is predicated not on treating the northern spotted owl as a tool against the timber industry and against timber harvest. What we’re trying to do is provide for the continued existence of the species.”

Many Native American tribes support controlling barred owls in the region. In a letter to Congress last week, the nonprofit Intertribal Timber Council said barred owls threaten more than the spotted owl.

“As a generalist predator, it poses risks to a wide range of forest and aquatic species that hold varying degrees of social and ecological importance to tribes, including species integral to traditional food systems and watershed health,” wrote the council, which aims to improve the management of natural resources important to Native American communities.

Since 2013, the Hoopa Valley tribe in Northern California has been involved with sanctioned hunting of the owls and has observed the spotted owl population stabilizing over time, according to the letter.

However, groups like Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Human Economy argue that the plan to take out so many barred owls over a vast landscape won’t work, aside from the high owl death toll. More barred owls simply will fly into where others were removed, said Wayne Pacelle, president of both groups.

That makes habitat key — and the prospect of losing more to logging in western Oregon devastating, according to Pacelle.

To stop the owl-culling plan, both chambers of Congress would need to pass a joint resolution and President Trump would need to sign it. If successful, the resolution would preclude the agency from pursuing a similar rule, unless explicitly authorized by Congress.

The plan already faced setbacks. In May, federal officials canceled three related grants totaling more than $1.1 million, including one study that would have removed barred owls from over 192,000 acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties

Florida’s top emergency official asked a federal judge on Monday to resist a request by environmentalists to halt an immigration detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz in the middle of the Florida Everglades because their lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.

Even though the property is owned by Miami-Dade County, Florida’s southern district is the wrong venue for the lawsuit since the detention center is located in neighboring Collier County, which is in the state’s middle district. Decisions about the facility also were made in Tallahassee and Washington, Kevin Guthrie, executive director for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in a court filing.

“And all the detention facilities, all the buildings, and all the paving at issue are sited in Collier County, not Miami-Dade,” Guthrie said.

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit in Florida’s southern district last month, asking for the project being built on an airstrip in the heart of the Florida Everglades to be halted because the process didn’t follow state and federal environmental laws. A virtual hearing was being held Monday on the lawsuit.

Critics have condemned the facility as a cruel and inhumane threat to the ecologically sensitive wetlands, while Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials have defended it as part of the state’s aggressive push to support President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has praised Florida for coming forward with the idea, as the department looks to significantly expand its immigration detention capacity.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.

In an early episode of the TV series “Lost,” the plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island are running low on water. A fight breaks out, until emerging leader Jack Shephard admonishes everyone to work together.

“If we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone,” he says.

California lawmakers contemplating our climate future ought to take that lesson to heart.

Senate Bill 540 would help establish a regional electricity market capable of tying together the American West’s three dozen independent power grids. Supporters say it would smooth the flow of solar and wind power from the sunny, windy landscapes where they’re produced most cheaply to the cities where they’re most needed. It would help California keep the lights on without fossil fuels, and without driving up utility bills.

That may sound straightforward, but the bill has bitterly divided environmentalists. Welcome to the Wild West of energy policy.

Some consider regional power-trading a crucial market-based tool for accelerating climate progress. Others see it as a plot by greedy energy companies to enrich themselves.

Those divides didn’t stop the Senate from unanimously passing SB 540. But amendments demanded by skeptical lawmakers are now threatening to derail the bill in the Assembly — even as Gov. Gavin Newsom threw his weight behind the concept Wednesday.

Critics warn that SB 540 would result in California yielding control of its power grid to out-of-state officials and the Trump administration, who could force Californians to pay for coal-fired electricity from Utah and Wyoming. They also worry about market manipulation driving up electric rates.

Those fears are understandable. I also think they’re misguided.

California by itself can’t stop the planet from heating up. The Golden State’s decades-long campaign to slow the wildfires, floods and heat waves of the climate crisis has been predicated on the conviction that eventually, other states and nations will follow along — even oil bastions and MAGA hothouses.

In other words: If we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.

Fortunately, even in the wake of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting clean energy incentives, solar and wind power are still cheaper than planet-warming coal and fossil gas. Which is why Michael Wara, a Stanford energy and climate scholar, isn’t worried that SB 540 will leave Californians drowning in dirty power. In a regional market, solar and wind will usually outcompete coal and gas.

“Any energy source that requires fuel to operate is more expensive than an energy source that doesn’t,” he said.

The 20-megawatt Maricopa West solar project in California’s Kern County.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

California also needs to prove that a grid powered entirely by clean energy is affordable and reliable. The state’s rising electric rates are already a big concern. And although the grid has been stable the last few years, thanks to batteries that store solar for after dark, keeping the lights on with more and more renewables might get harder.

Regional market advocates make a strong case that interstate cooperation would help.

For instance, a market would help California more smoothly access Pacific Northwest hydropower, already a key energy source during heat waves. It would also give California easier access to low-cost winds from New Mexico and Wyoming. Best of all, that wind is often blowing strong just as the sun sets along the Pacific.

Another benefit: Right now, California often generates more solar than it can use during certain hours of the day, forcing solar farms to shut down — or pay other states to take the extra power. With a regional market, California could sell excess solar to other states, keeping utility bills down.

“This is about lowering costs,” said Robin Everett, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.

When I wrote about a past regional market proposal in 2017, the Sierra Club was opposed. It believed a regional market would throw an economic lifeline to Utah and Wyoming coal plants owned by Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp company by giving them access to new markets — including California — to sell their power.

Eight years later, things are different. High costs are driving coal toward extinction. Solar and wind cost even less. Sierra Club staff now say California should be less worried about opening new markets to coal and more worried about averting blackouts or high utility bills that could trigger an anti-renewables backlash.

“Otherwise we’re going to see more and more gas, and a push to keep coal online,” Everett said.

But here’s where the politics get tricky.

Although the Sierra Club endorsed the Pathways Initiative — the detailed regional market plan on which SB 540 is based — it hasn’t endorsed the bill. That’s because many of the club’s volunteer leaders still hate the idea.

They’re not alone.

SB 540’s opponents include the Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and Consumer Watchdog. (Full disclosure: My father-in-law, an energy lawyer, has advocated against the bill.) Eight chapters of 350.org and 73 chapters of progressive group Indivisible stand opposed. So does the Environmental Working Group.

On the flip side, supporters include Climate Hawks Vote, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, the Union of Concerned Scientists and two chapters of 350.org.

Loretta Lynch, who led the state’s Public Utilities Commission during the early-2000s energy crisis, thinks SB 540 would open the door for more market manipulation, giving energy companies legally sanctioned tools to thwart climate goals and force Californians to pay for expensive fossil fuels.

Her warnings have resonated with activists frustrated by California’s investor-owned utilities, which keep raising electric rates and recently helped persuade officials to slash rooftop solar incentives. Indeed, SB 540’s supporters include Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and trade groups for major power producers.

“They want no guardrails or limits on how they can fleece California,” Lynch said.

Montana’s coal-fired Colstrip power plant.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

It’s a compelling narrative. But most energy experts who have studied the bill aren’t convinced.

For one thing, electricity sales have changed dramatically since the energy crisis, with more oversight and fewer last-minute trades limiting the potential for shenanigans. Unlike with past regional market proposals, California would retain control of its grid operator, with only a few functions delegated to a regional entity. And California’s grid is already subject to federal regulation, meaning Trump could try undermining state policy at any time.

Labor attorney Marc Joseph, who helped lead the charge against previous regional market bills, described Lynch’s talking points as “good arguments against a thing that is no longer being proposed.”

“We’re in a different place because it’s a fundamentally different thing,” Joseph said.

Joseph represents the politically powerful International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. After years of fighting regional markets, IBEW is now a vocal supporter. What changed, Joseph said, is that SB 540 would safeguard state climate goals, thus making it a valuable tool to advance solar and wind farms — and create good-paying jobs.

Even with IBEW’s support, though, it’s not clear if SB 540 will reach Newsom’s desk.

To secure support in the Senate in May, Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), the bill’s author, added amendments to assuage concerns about California giving up too much control of its grid. Ironically, many of the bill’s key backers now say they’re opposed unless the amendments are removed or tweaked.

Why would they say that? Because California is the biggest electricity user in the West, and other states won’t join a regional market unless they’re confident California will participate — and the amendments would make it easier for the Golden State to bail. Out-of-state utilities don’t want to waste time and money committing themselves to a California-led market only to lose California, and thus many of the economic benefits.

That’s especially true because those utilities have another option. Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool, which operates the electric grid across much of the central U.S., is recruiting Western utilities to its own regional market. Already, utilities based in Arizona, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest have agreed to join.

Arkansas isn’t leading the West to a clean energy future. California can try — or it can close itself off to the world.

Living together is no guarantee. But dying alone is definitely worse.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

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The California Public Utilities Commission failed to abide by state law when it slashed financial incentives for residential rooftop solar panels in 2022, environmental groups argued before the California Supreme Court Wednesday.

The commission’s policy, which took effect in April 2023, cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending power they don’t need to the electric grid by as much as 80%.

In arguments before the court, the environmental groups said the decision has stymied efforts to get homeowners and businesses to install the climate-friendly panels.

The commission violated state law, the groups argued, by not considering all the benefits of the solar panels in its decision and by not ensuring that rooftop solar systems could continue to expand in disadvantaged communities.

More than two million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal set by a 2018 law of using only carbon-free energy by 2045.

On the other side of the courtroom battle were lawyers from Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, arguing that the commission’s five members, all pointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, had followed the law in making their decision.

In briefs filed before Wednesday’s oral arguments, the government lawyers sided with those from the state’s three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Mica Moore, deputy solicitor general, said at the hearing in downtown Los Angles that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in “a cost shift” of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This was raising electric bills, she said, especially hurting low-income electric customers.

The credits for the energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid are valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commissioners have voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested.

The environmental groups and other critics of the commission’s decision have argued that there is no “cost shift.” They say that the commission failed to consider in its calculations the many benefits of the rooftop solar panels, including how they lower the amount of transmission lines and other infrastructure the utilities need to build.

“The cost shift narrative is a red herring,” argued plaintiff’s attorney Malinda Dickenson, representing the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group and the Protect Our Communities Foundation.

Moore countered by saying the commission doesn’t have to consider all the possible societal or private benefits of the rooftop panels.

For example, even though the rooftop panels could result in conserving land that was otherwise needed for industrial scale solar farms, the government lawyers argued in their brief, the commission was not obligated to consider that value in its calculation of the amount of costs the rooftop panels shift to other customers.

The government lawyers also said the commission had created other programs beyond the electric bill credits to help disadvantaged communities afford the solar systems.

The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid.

During the oral arguments, the seven justices focused on a legal question of whether a state appeals court erred when it ruled in January 2024 against the environmental groups and said that the court must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters.

“This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission’s work,” the appeals court concluded in its opinion.

The environmental groups argue the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission’s decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies.

Moore told the seven justices that the appeals court had made the correct decision to defer to the commission.

Not all justices seemed to agree with that.

“But we’re pretty good about figuring out what the law says,” Associate Justice Carol Corrigan said to Moore during the proceeding. “Why should we defer on that to the commission?”

The justices will weigh the arguments made by both sides and issue a decision in the next 90 days.

The big utilities have for decades tried to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities’ sale of electricity.

On another front, the state’s three big utilities are now lobbying in Sacramento to reduce credits for Californians who installed their panels before April 15, 2023. The commission’s decision in 2022 left the incentives in place for those panel owners for 20 years after their purchase.

Early this year, Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier), a former Southern California Edison executive, introduced a bill that would have ended the program for all solar owners who installed their systems by April 2023 after 10 years. In face of opposition and protests by solar owners, Calderon amended the bill so it would end the program — where credits are valued at the retail electric rate — only for those selling their homes.

Calderon said the bill would save the state’s electric customers $2.5 billion over the next 18 years.

On Monday, Roderick Brewer, an Edison lobbyist, sent an email to Assemblymembers, urging them to vote for the bill known as AB 942. “Save Electricity Customers Billions, Promote Equity,” he urged in the email.

The Assembly voted 46 to 14 to approve the bill on Tuesday night, sending it to the state Senate for consideration.

The timing of the vote surprised opponents of the bill. They expected a vote late this week because of rules that allow more time for bills to be reviewed after they are amended. Calderon amended the bill late Monday.

Nick Miller, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, said Calderon had asked for a waiver of the rules so that it could be voted on Tuesday night.

Such waivers, Miller said, are “not uncommon.”

HONOLULU — Environmentalists are challenging in court President Trump’s executive order that they say strips core protections from the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and opens the area to harmful commercial fishing.

On the same day of last month’s proclamation allowing commercial fishing in the monument, Trump issued an order to boost the U.S. commercial fishing industry by peeling back regulations and opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.

The monument was created by President George W. Bush in 2009 and expanded by President Obama to nearly 500,000 square miles in the central Pacific Ocean.

A week after the April 17 proclamation, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them a green light to fish commercially within the monument’s boundaries, even though a long-standing fishing ban remains on the books, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Honolulu.

The first longline fisher started fishing in the monument just three days after that letter, according to Earthjustice, which has been tracking vessel activity within the monument using Global Fishing Watch.

The Department of Justice declined to comment Friday.

The lawsuit noted that commercial longline fishing, an industrial method involving baited hooks from lines 60 miles or longer, will snag turtles, marine mammals or seabirds that are attracted to the bait or swim through the curtain of hooks.

“We will not stand by as the Trump administration unleashes highly destructive commercial fishing on some of the planet’s most pristine, biodiverse marine environments,” David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said in a statement. “Piling lawlessness on top of lawlessness, the National Marine Fisheries Service chose to carry out President Trump’s illegal proclamation by issuing its own illegal directive, with no public input.”

Designating the area in the Pacific to the south and west of the Hawaiian Islands as a monument provided “needed protection to a wide variety of scientific and historical treasures in one of the most spectacular and unique ocean ecosystems on earth,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit added that allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion harms the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous people of the Pacific.

Johnston Atoll is the closest island in the monument to Hawaii, about 717 nautical miles west-southwest of the state.

Kelleher writes for the Associated Press.