Brown makes budget latest battleground on climate change
By Christine Mai-Duc, Los Angeles Times
Gov. Jerry Brown is looking to make good on a promise to curb California’s petroleum use by shifting away from new legislation and instead tucking his fuel-reduction goal inside the state budget.
Oil companies spent millions of dollars in 2015 to strip a controversial climate change bill of its provision slashing petroleum use in half by 2030. At the conclusion of that bruising fight, a defiant Brown stood before reporters in the Capitol and declared war.
The budget the governor submitted to the Legislature last month proposed spending a third of the state’s cap-and-trade funds, about $1 billion, on public transit, promoting electric vehicles and other programs, all with the explicit goal of cutting oil use by 50 percent by 2030. Those dollars were collected through the auction of pollution credits to companies that emit greenhouse gases.
