Interview with Liane Randolph, CA Air Resources

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green.. We’re reporting this today at the WRISE Leadership Forum in Washington, DC. And I’m very excited to have with me Chair Liane Randolph. She’s the chairperson at the California Air Resources Board. Thank you for joining me. 

Liane: Happy to be here.

Catherine: Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your current role? 

Liane: Yes. So the California Air Resources Board is a 16-member board. I’m the chair, the only person who’s full-time. And our responsibility is to implement the Clean Air Act in California and ensure that we meet our clean air obligations to protect communities from the health effects of pollution. We are also responsible for developing California’s climate change good things land. Way back in the Schwarzenegger administration, when the environment was a strong bipartisan issue, California adopted a pioneering law to set a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We met that target, and we have exceeded that target, and we have set new targets. We have a statutory mandate to get to carbon neutrality by 2045. And we are also on track to have 100% clean energy by 2045. So it is our responsibility to lay out an economy-wide plan for how we get there. And then we implement the various regulatory programs that move things along. California has been a leader, as we all know, in setting aggressive targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as you just highlighted as well.

Catherine: What strategies are you prioritizing to ensure these goals are met, and what progress have you made so far? 

Liane: So because it’s economy-wide, we need to be thinking about our economy and all the sectors and how we’ve enriched ourselves in all of the sectors. So right now, renewable energy has really been the leader. Our goal is to electrify as much of our economy as possible, as quickly as possible. And we have achieved that by massive deployment of renewable energy. In solar, wind, over 14 megawatts of energy storage, battery energy storage, which has been an incredible ramp. And then just, I was formerly a commissioner at the Public Utilities Commission in California. And I voted on, in my role back in 2017, I voted on our first target to require the utilities to procure battery storage. And from 2020 until now, there’s just been an incredible ramp up of energy storage that helps us smooth out the intermittency of renewables. Helps us balance the solar and the wind and the geothermal. So we have greened our grid incredibly. We have had.

Catherine:  I love that term. Greened our grid.I’ve never heard that term before. How have I never heard that term before? Yeah. Greened our grid. I like that. 

Liane: I mean, we’ve had a period of over 30 days where we were regularly running on 100% renewable energy. And so we’re incredibly proud of that, and we want to keep making progress there. But we also have made a huge amount of progress in vehicles. So in 2021, we adopted Advanced Clean Cars 2, which is the target to get 100% light, new sales of light duty vehicles, zero emission by 2035. And we have also adopted ambitious targets in the medium and heavy duty sector as well. And we’re seeing huge uptake in zero emission delivery vans, zero emission box trucks, all the way up to zero emission large class eight trucks. And we are pushing that forward because we know that transportation is a huge piece of our greenhouse gas emissions in California. If you consider our extraction and refining and use of fossil fuels, we are at almost 50% of our GHD emissions come from the transportation. 

Catherine: Wow, 50%? 

Liane: And so we’re making progress not only by ensuring that we have strong zero emission targets, but we’re also using renewable fuel. So we have been able to significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from trucking by using renewable diesel. We are looking at ways to encourage the deployment of sustainable aviation fuel in California. So we’re looking at all different ways of making our transportation sector much more climate. 

Catherine: I’ve been hearing about that quite a bit, the sustainable aviation piece, something it’s very exciting. Things can be a huge growth area for a lot of people. Environmental justice is central to CARB’s mission. How are you working to ensure that California’s clean air and climate policies address the needs of communities disproportionately impacted by pollution and climate change? 

Liane: Yes, that is a really important question because first of all, we know that communities of color and low-income communities have been historically disproportionately impacted by pollution on freeways, near ports, near industrial centers, near gas plants. And we also know that those communities are going to be first and foremost impacted by the impacts of climate change and have the least ability to cope with the impacts of climate change. So we need to center those communities as we’re thinking about these solutions. And it’s very challenging because a lot of the work really requires deployment of new technology, new zero emission vehicles, new heat pump appliances to move away from gas, new sources of energy. And we know that those residents are least likely to be able to take advantage of those opportunities. So we’ve deployed a few strategies to try and address that issue. 

So first and foremost, we have really made more of an effort to work with communities, talk to communities, interact. We have an environmental justice advisory committee that we made permanent to hear their feedback. We have also reoriented our vehicle incentives so that they are not just an automatic reduction in the price, but instead oriented towards low and middle income residents and cars with lower purchase prices to ensure that people who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to buy a car can use those incentives to do that. We’ve also worked with our local air districts to ensure that there are programs to get people into used cars. More than 70% of vehicle purchases in California are used. So ensuring that we have incentives that can help us do that and get folks into cleaner used cars is also an important strategy. And that’s an area where the Biden administration has been very helpful in having a used car tax credit. We have, as the state is just this week, started a new incentive program for heat pump deployment. And those funds, again, are oriented towards lower and middle income residents to ensure that it’s not people who would be able to make the transition on their own, but to help people who would otherwise be generating the transition. 

Catherine: Sticking with the theme of transportation, it remains, as you’ve mentioned, one of the largest sources of emissions in California. How do you see the future of zero emissions vehicles evolving, and what role does car play in supporting this? 

Liane: Yeah, this is a critical issue because moving away from fossil fuels is absolutely critical to meeting our climate goals, and so much of those fuels are for transportation, whether it’s personal transportation or goods movement. So our rulemakings are a critical piece of that. So our very clear requirements for new vehicles to be zero emission. And also, it’s focusing on how we can ensure that the infrastructure is there to support those vehicles. So the Air Resources Board is responsible for the vehicle regulation part, but we also work very closely with our California Energy Commission and our California Public Utilities Commission to ensure that the infrastructure is being developed to fuel those vehicles and give consumers and companies confidence that they can operate these vehicles. And we’re pursuing all different types. We are pursuing slow charging, fast charging, hydrogen, all the zero emission strategies. We need to have infrastructure supporting all of them, so we spend a lot of time on that. And of course, we spend a lot of time on education and outreach in implementing our movements, particularly in the goods movement sector, where some of those key heavy duty reductions need to be made.

And so we have a robust outreach process of working with companies and with drivers and with infrastructure providers trying to push the deployment of these zero emission vehicles. We have been successful. In California, we have- almost 26 percent of our new car sales, are zero emission. And that has been successful because we sort of built a strong, consistent regulatory structure. But we’ve also encouraged the development of incentive programs. And that includes, we have a few market-based programs in California, our cap and trade program, which reduces emissions from the industrial sector. And then our low-carbon fuel standard, which makes transportation fuels a lower car. And those programs help fund that transition. They help fund some of the infrastructure that needs to be deployed and the vehicle incentives.

Catherine: Wait, 26 percent, I mean, just putting that into some context, like this is the fifth largest economy on the planet. I guess this is between 26 percent of cars in Montana and no disrespect to Montana. That’s a lot of cars.

Liane: One out of four cars in the most populous state in the country in our zero emission. 

Catherine: Yeah, that is really incredible. But I think it’s also giving confidence that you have the infrastructure to support that. Right? Because I mean, once living in Northern Virginia, you know, we have great infrastructure for EV, but once you start traveling, it’s not always that out of your bubble, right? It can be a little more challenging.

Liane: Yeah, I mean, that’s another example where policy at the federal level is so pretty. Right, right. You know, the NEVY charging program from the IIJA that the Biden-Harris administration has has really been critical in ensuring that there’s vehicle charging on those critical transportation borders. And as those projects roll out, there’ll be much more comfort in taking those road trips. And, you know, I talk to people about charging all the time. And my sense is frequently the education and visibility goes a long way. People frequently realize there are more chargers around them than they think there are. And once they have an opportunity to, you know, download some of those apps that we’ll show you where our chargers are, they kind of, oh, yeah, actually, this is more exciting. In California, it’s interesting. Our challenge is less the number of chargers but more the number of vehicles because our deployment has been so successful that the chargers are very heavily used. So we really are pushing hard to get more chargers online to address the growth of the vehicles. And as we kind of align those two more closely, the charging experience, I think, will increase exponentially.

Catherine: I was talking to somebody in California the other day who used the head of sustainability at one of the cities of California, I won’t mention who, and they were saying that, you know, you don’t necessarily need fast chargers for absolutely everything. Because, like, as an EV owner, I want fast chargers for absolutely everything. And she’s like, no, no, no. Like, if you’re going to work and you’re, yeah, how are you sat in the parking lot for eight hours? You were going home to plug it in, right? 

Liane: So, yes. It’s not always needing to have such an expensive solution. You know, you want a fast charger maybe for a grocery store, for example.

Catherine: Well, so it’s interesting. I never kind of looked at it that way. So, yep. Final question I have for you is California’s clean air policies often serve as a model for other states and countries. How do you navigate the pushback from various stakeholders, such as industry groups, while maintaining CARB’s leadership and setting bold environmental standards? 

Liane: Well, I guess the first thing I would say is, this is not optional, you know? I mean, it’s just not. And as we see what’s happening right now, the hurricane season, it’s just not optional. And so, I think what we are trying to do is share. We spend a lot of time sharing our successes. And sharing ideas that can work for other jurisdictions. And really hope that they choose to follow our lead. And so, we try to provide as much information as we can, share as much of the strategies as we can, talk about the importance of thinking about your vehicle strategy and your infrastructure strategy. We recently worked on building a new global methane, subnational methane coalition.  To work with subnational state and provincial governments from around the world. To talk about, okay, what are the strategies we can do to reduce methane? You know, how do you think about methane in oil and gas, in landfills, in agriculture? What are some of the solutions your jurisdiction has come up with? And we get great ideas when we go to these international forums and hear what other countries and other states are doing that we’re able to build and, yeah, add it to our book. So, it’s not just us or us. Look at what California did and give us some good ideas. And that collaboration is just, it’s so critical because this is not optional. 

Catherine: Well, thank you for speaking with us today, Liane. I really appreciate it. It was very nice to meet you. 

Liane: It was good meeting you. Thank you.