Bill aims to keep emission-reduction efforts local

Legislation to use California’s crackdown on global warming emissions as a lever to attack industrial air pollution is to be debated in the state Assembly this week.

The bill, AB 1404, is an opening salvo in a struggle that has been brewing since 2006 when California passed a sweeping law to control greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. At issue: whether low-income neighborhoods that suffer disproportionately from dirty air can benefit from regulations to control climate change.

“This may be the single most important opportunity to clean L.A.’s dirty air in my career,” said Assemblyman Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), a co-author of the bill whose district includes a cement plant and chrome plating facilities and is criss-crossed by six freeways.

A report released last week by researchers at USC and UC Berkeley, notes that poor people, Latinos and African Americans would suffer disproportionately from intensified heat waves, droughts and floods that are expected as the Earth warms.

“People of color will be hurt the most -- unless elected officials and other policymakers intervene,” said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a UC Berkeley associate professor and co-author of the report.

African Americans living in Los Angeles have a projected heat-wave mortality rate nearly twice that of other L.A. residents, according to the report. And in many of the neighborhoods that suffer the worst air quality in the nation, including those in L.A. and the San Joaquin Valley, the population is predominantly Latino.

Public health groups want to force companies to spend their money close to home by retrofitting their facilities. In addition to slowing global warming, greenhouse gas cleanup would reduce the particulates and toxic gases that cause cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

But companies want to avoid some cleanup expenses through “offsets” -- paying for cheaper projects to reduce greenhouse gases elsewhere in California or in other states and countries.

For example, a refinery in Los Angeles could pay a rancher in Northern California to reforest range land because trees absorb carbon dioxide. Or a cement plant in Riverside County could compensate a company in Asia for controlling methane emissions from a pig farm.

The California conflict echoes a parallel fight in Congress, where a bill allowing industry to use extensive offsets is to be debated in the House this summer.

Under preliminary guidelines adopted by the California Air Resources Board, up to 49% of greenhouse gas pollution from power plants and other industrial facilities could be reduced through offsets. But AB 1404 would limit offsets to 10% of emissions and assess fees to fund careful verification of offset projects.

Phony offsets, in which companies pay for projects that in fact do not reduce emissions, have been the subject of investigations in the United States and abroad.

“The oil industry wants to place these offsets offshore in Brazil or Indonesia where California regulators can’t verify if they are real or permanent,” De Leon said. “But companies shouldn’t be able to buy their way out of controlling their pollution here in California.”

The legislation is backed by more than 60 California public health groups and labor unions who see it as a way to maintain pollution-abatement jobs in California.

“We shouldn’t be outsourcing our public health and air quality benefits to other states and countries,” said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, Sacramento lobbyist for the California Lung Assn.

Thirty California counties fail to meet federal health standards for fine particulates, the most dangerous of lung-damaging pollutants.

But industry groups oppose the bill, saying it will limit their flexibility in meeting greenhouse gas targets. “An arbitrary limit . . . would result in higher costs for energy and infrastructure providers that would be passed along to state and local governments,” the Western States Petroleum Assn., the California Chamber of Commerce and other business groups wrote in a letter to legislators.

The political sensitivity of the issue was underscored May 22, when the Air Resources Board appointed a 16-member committee headed by Stanford Economist Lawrence H. Goulder to make recommendations on the design of cap-and-trade regulations.

In a letter to the board, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week signaled his opposition to handing out free allowances to emit greenhouse gases, as in proposed federal legislation. Instead, he urged the board to consider “returning the value of allowances back to the people, including through an auction of allowances and distribution of auction proceeds in the form of a rebate or dividend.”

According to the “Climate Gap” researchers, offering fewer free pollution permits to oil facilities, which are mostly located in low-income neighborhoods such as Wilmington in Southern California and Richmond in Northern California, would be particularly effective in cleaning up unhealthy air.

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margot.roosevelt @latimes.com