Action Alerts

Tell California’s leaders to fund electric transportation, not big polluters

What's At Stake

California is using one of its major climate programs to funnel billions of dollars in subsidies to dirty combustion fuels. It just doesn’t make sense. Adding insult to injury, Governor Newsom is cut hundreds of millions of dollars from critical zero-emissions programs in the state budget. We can’t keep giving billions away to fossil fuels and dirty combustion in the Low Carbon Fuel Standard(LCFS). Help us convince the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Governor Newsom to change course.

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The LCFS was built in 2009, back when we still believed corn and soy bean oil were the solution to our transportation problems. The LCFS program works by requiring producers of higher-carbon fuels, like oil refineries, to buy credits from producers of fuels that are supposedly lower in carbon. In practice, the LCFS program funnels most of its $3 to 4 billion in revenues each year to benefit some of the most polluting fuels: crop-based biofuels that have been linked to deforestation and biogas from large factory farms. These fuels are undermining our climate goals while enriching the state’s largest polluters, including oil and gas companies, and industrial dairies that worsen the pollution crisis in communities that are already faced with dirty air and water.

CARB knows this – it heard it from Earthjustice supporters like you during the last comment period and at the public hearing it hosted – yet it still failed to accept the reality that combustion fuels, no matter how they are produced, are not a climate or air quality solution. California has admitted that we cannot meet federal, health-based air quality standards with further combustion. The LCFS should provide preferential treatment for transportation investments that reduce air pollution by pulling cars off the road or removing combustion entirely. 

It’s urgent that CARB reverses course and reforms the program because, unlike in 2009, we have the zero-emissions technology we need to replace combustion entirely. LCFS revenue should go towards clean and equitable solutions like public transit and zero-emissions transportation — not towards the biofuel industry’s pet projects and false climate solutions. Tell CARB and Governor Newsom it’s time to reform the program for a zero-emissions future. 

Ploughing most of the LCFS’s billions in revenues into combustion fuels is unacceptable for a state that prides itself on climate leadership. Tell CARB and Governor Newsom it’s time to prioritize effective climate action and clean air by reforming the LCFS program. 

An all electric bus driving on the streets of Los Angeles in front of Los Angeles City Hall.
An all electric bus is seen in Los Angeles, Jan. 12, 2021. (Ringo Chiu via AP)

Delivery to California Air Resources Board and Governor Gavin Newsom

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