New Report from Biofuelwatch Exposes Sordid Workings of California Climate Politics
While California state authorities continue to promote markets-based and technological approaches to advance ‘net zero’ as a primary focus for climate policy, grassroots organizations and climate justice stakeholders have increasingly mobilized in resistance to this polluter friendly approach to climate.
In the interest of empowering grassroots activists that are working to resist climate false solutions and address the broad array of public health and environmental crises bearing down on our communities, Biofuelwatch has released a report that serves as a window into the backroom dynamics that drive California climate politics, and the resultant state-facilitated policy agenda, often celebrated as an example for the world to emulate.
The report — titled ‘Carbon Capture or Captured Futures? Fossil Fuel and Bioenergy Controls California “Getting to Neutral” Climate Policy’ — exposes the intricate workings of California’s policy making apparatus. The report describes how an elite group of private and public sector specialists has coordinated behind the scenes to promote unproven and dangerous carbon removal technologies in a multifaceted attempt to set the state climate policy table — and to establish a model that could be exported to other state and national jurisdictions.
In combining extensive research with the leveraging of the California Public Records Act, a bedrock law for promoting transparency in state and local government, this report covers political and regulatory events that have not often been illuminated, some of it never before reported, and that in sum will provide a sobering take on California climate politics, with insights applicable elsewhere.
Understanding the push for carbon capture for what it is and where it has come from is an important step in responding to powerful polluters as they manipulate genuine public concern about climate change to capture our imaginations, capture our democracy and capture our futures.
By having information and clarity about how and why these approaches have become so dominant, advocates will be better prepared to counter the fallacies of the prevailing narratives of ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ and successfully organize for the holistic solutions that their communities design and support.
Download the report: FINAL_capturedfutures_Biofuelwatch.
