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| | | | |  | | By Lorraine Woellert and Debra Kahn | PROGRAMMING NOTE: Long Game won’t publish Tuesday, Aug. 30 through Monday, Sept. 5. We’ll be back on our normal schedule Tuesday, Sept. 6.
| | | |  Gas-powered engines are on their way out in California. | Getty Images | Getty Images | SIREN! — New cars sold in California after 2035 will have to be zero emissions. Yep, you read that right. And because what happens in California certainly doesn’t stay in California, the sweeping rule could pave the way for other states to adopt the requirement and transform the nation’s auto market. The ban on new gas-powered vehicle sales — first announced by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom nearly two years ago — also would require automakers to make sure that 35 percent of all new passenger cars sold by 2026 have no emissions, a threshold that would increase to 68 percent by 2030. About 16 percent of new cars sold in California so far this year have zero emissions, significantly higher than the national average of 6 percent. “This regulation is one of the most important efforts we have ever carried out to clean the air,” Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, told reporters. Camille Von Kaenel has the story. Now comes the big test: whether automakers will step up to meet the targets. “If you don’t have enough alternative vehicles available,” the market won’t accept the mandate, V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, told Anne C. Mulkern of POLITICO's E&E News. “It’s a target, it’s intention, but you’ve got to have the vehicles and you’ve got to have the ability to sell them for that to work.” Automakers are pointing fingers, too: “Whether or not these requirements are realistic or achievable is directly linked to external factors like inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage,” John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told Camille and Alex Guillén.
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BlackRock seems to really like fossil fuels, actually. | AP Photo/Mark Lennihan | AP Photo/Mark Lennihan | A $287B BOYCOTT? – Texas pension funds and other state entities could be required to divest from BlackRock Inc. and nine other financial firms after Comptroller Glenn Hegar published a list of companies Wednesday that he claims are boycotting energy companies. It’s the latest in a series of Republican aggressions against asset managers that weigh environmental, social and governance factors in their investment decisions. The list was created under a Texas law that aims to yank state funds from asset managers deemed to be harming the state’s massive fossil fuel industry, Jordan Wolman writes. Hegar’s announcement came just a day after a Florida panel led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, approved a resolution that would require the state’s $200 billion pension system to base investment decisions solely on maximizing financial returns for beneficiaries. Let’s be clear. All of the companies targeted have a fiduciary duty to their clients — that is, a legal obligation to maximize financial returns for beneficiaries. And there’s this: BlackRock and other companies being targeted don’t boycott fossil fuels. The world’s largest asset manager has some $287 billion invested in energy companies, including more than $108 billion in Texas companies. Among its holdings: ExxonMobil Corp., Conoco Inc. Schlumberger Ltd. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. “Elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve,” BlackRock said in a written statement. “Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees, is not consistent with that duty.” On Wednesday, Hegar was tweeting about a historic Texas drought that scientists have attributed partly to climate change.
| | | TRAGIC KINGDOM — In Florida, lawyers for DeSantis asked a judge to throw out a lawsuit challenging the state Legislature’s decision to revoke Walt Disney Co.’s special privileges in the state. The lawsuit was brought by property owners in Orange and Osceola counties against the GOP governor and other state officials. The plaintiffs called the revocation political retribution against Disney for opposing a DeSantis-championed law that bans the teaching of gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through third grade — a law labeled “Don’t Say Gay” by critics. Plaintiffs “have no legal right to prohibit the State of Florida from dissolving governmental entities created by state law,” DeSantis’ lawyers wrote. Andrew Atterbury keeps you up to date from Tallahassee.
| | | MAGICAL DRINKING — In times of drought, politicians' thinking turns to fancy — and this time around is no different. Earlier this year, Utah legislators approved a study of using the Pacific Ocean to refill the dwindling Great Salt Lake via pipeline. It's the latest in an illustrious history of physically, financially and legally implausible schemes to hydrate the arid West. Here's an eye-popping stat: According to EPA, a typical family uses about 320 gallons of water daily, or about 1.3 tons of water by weight. Read more from POLITICO's E&E News' Jennifer Yachnin. GREENER PASTURES — A more sustainable idea: Letting heat-stressed livestock back into the forests. "Silvopasture," a centuries-old land management approach used by Native tribes across the Midwest, could help farmers protect livestock against the kind of 100-degree heat that killed about 2,000 cattle in Kansas in June. It involves "the deliberate integration of trees and grazing livestock operations on the same land,” according to the USDA. “The idea is there is a sweet spot where we can manage pastureland for trees, forage and livestock,” said Ashley Conway-Anderson, an assistant research professor at the University of Missouri who is working to restore silvopasture landscapes at a research farm in the northeast Ozarks. Read all about it from E&E News' Daniel Cusick.
| | | Happy Friday! We'll see you on the 6th — drop us a line in the meantime: Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn, and reporters Lorraine Woellert and Jordan Wolman. Reach us at gmott@politico.com, dkahn@politico.com, lwoellert@politico.com and jwolman@politico.com. Want more? You can have it. Sign up for the Long Game . Four days a week and still free. That’s sustainability!
| | | — U.S. life expectancy is plummeting relative to that of similar countries. Opioids are mainly to blame. — Elon Musk's having children with a colleague is testing the limits of corporate governance norms, Reuters reports. — The new semiconductor chips are super-powerful but also super energy-intensive to make. A large manufacturer in Taiwan will soon use more electricity than the country of Sri Lanka.
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