With help from Alex Nieves and Camille von Kaenel
GREEN UNION ENERGY: Close your eyes and think of the power players you'd expect to be pushing state leaders on California climate policy. Are you imagining the autoworkers union? No. But you should be.
The United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America sponsored SB 787, a bill on Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk that would require a slew of state agencies to collaborate on building out the supply chain for clean energy industries including zero emission vehicles and their batteries, offshore wind energy and heat pumps.
Conventional thinking says UAW is a surprising sponsor for a renewable energy bill, but Mike Miller, the union's region six director, doesn't agree. Miller, who represents over 120,000 members across California and eight other western states, sees himself as part of a long lineage of environmentalist labor leaders. He described climate change as "the signature challenge of our time" in an August UAW report.
UAW is a very different union than the coalition that emerged from the Detroit auto plants in the 1930s. Today, the organization represents workers in local governments, hospitals, nonprofits, and universities. Miller himself came to UAW through academia, cutting his teeth organizing fellow teaching assistants at UCLA in the 1990s.
We spoke with Miller to learn why the labor leader decided to throw the heft of his union behind environmental reforms, and how he thinks the effort will benefit his members in the end.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea come from for SB 787?
Well, the majority of our membership believes climate change is a crisis, and we need to move far more aggressively to tackle that crisis. You know, manufacturing is also in the DNA of the UAW. We need to find a way to thread these two goals together.
Industrial policy also is a historic core of who the UAW is, whether it was meeting manufacturing needs during World War Two or bolstering the post war boom. We've always believed it's necessary for working people to engage in industrial policy.
So we decided about two years ago that we needed to take this seriously. We worked with some outstanding academics and working people to develop a vision for growing the clean industrial economy in California through policy.
Manufacturing has been on a long term decline since the late 80s. In California, we've lost close to a million manufacturing jobs in a variety of industrial sectors. It's important that we grow these jobs back.
We really believe in and support California's decarbonization goals. Climate change is a huge crisis, and one that we need to address quickly.
We think that one of the best ways to have the collective political will to make that happen is to have a strategic industrial policy that creates good middle class manufacturing jobs in the sectors of the economy that need to decarbonize, like batteries, building decarbonization, heat pumps, industries like that, offshore wind.
Can you share more about how you came to this moment of having climate change issues be such a major focus for you?
Hurricane Katrina, I mean you could go on and on.
I talked a little bit about the UAW's DNA. UAW helped found Earth Day. And [former UAW president] Walter Reuther and after him Doug Fraser, I've seen quotes of them, and I'll get these wrong, but I can paraphrase them, testifying before Congress: 'What good does it do to to make more money, make enough money to go on vacation, if the lake you're going to go on vacation to is polluted? What good does it do to have more time off if the air where you live is too polluted to breathe?'
So we've always understood the connection between the environment we live in and the environment we work in. And so it's been an issue for us for a long time. I think that the stark climate crises that you see, and things like the wildfires in LA this year, really helped drive that home and make it a more pressing, salient issue.
Would you describe yourself as an environmentalist?
Yes.
I'm struck that if the policy works out the way you're hoping for, it would benefit workers, but presumably it would also benefit people who are running companies, people in the management and investor class. Why is it that UAW sees it as part of its responsibility to help shepherd along policies that also help this investor class and management class?
You have to have a thriving business, a profitable business, to have a workforce. Auto companies where the auto workers work have to make profits to give pay increases to the workers.
The fight isn't about the success of the company. The workers are often very invested in the success of the company, very proud of the cars and buses and trucks that they build. The fight is over what the workers rights in the workplace are.
That takes a number of forms: The right not to be harassed, the right not be bullied, the right to leave work in the same way that you came in, to work in a safe environment, to have control over your schedule, to have time off to spend with your family, to have paid parental leave, paid sick leave, and to share the profits of the company. The conflict in the collective bargaining process is negotiating over who controls production and in whose interest and who profits from the work that is done at the company. And we're squarely on the side of the workers playing a very decisive role in all of those processes. -- NB
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ENERGY CARE PACKAGE: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the sweeping package of bills Friday to boost oil drilling, rescue wildfire-threatened utilities and extend the state's cap-and-trade program.
The package, which came together in a last-minute agreement after weeks of negotiations with lawmakers, represents a compromise between increasing fossil fuel extraction in an effort to stave off in-state refinery closures and continuing to ratchet down greenhouse gas emissions.
"We've got to manifest our ideals and our goals, and so this lays it out, but it lays it out without laying tracks over folks," Newsom said, against a backdrop of towering redwood trees projected on the screen of a planetarium in a San Francisco science museum. "We set the tone and pace for the rest of the nation."
The legislature's focus on energy emerged in January as leaders promised to tackle affordability, which gained even more political urgency as wildfires and refinery closures raised the threat of higher electricity and gasoline costs. Two of the bills, which allow California utilities to join a West-wide energy market and increase oil drilling in Kern County, garnered Republican votes.
The renewal of the state's carbon market, which Newsom committed to after President Donald Trump threatened to dismantle state climate laws in April, gives the governor a climate win at a time when the state is losing other core pieces of its climate strategy, like its mandated phase-out of new gas-powered cars by 2035. And the package includes a spending plan for roughly $4 billion in annual cap-and-trade revenues, including $1 billion in guaranteed yearly funding for the state's controversial high-speed rail project.
Utilities will also benefit from an $18 billion boost to the state's wildfire fund, a pot funded by utility company shareholders and ratepayers to help pay wildfire-related claims. And the final piece of the package will strengthen air quality monitoring in communities disproportionately impacted by pollution. -- CvK, NB, AN
WHERE'S THE REBATE?: Newsom is retreating on his commitment to restart a state rebate program for EV buyers to backfill the expiring $7,500 federal tax credit.
Just minutes after signing the energy package, Newsom acknowledged at a press conference that the state "can't make up" for the Biden-era incentive that the Trump administration will end on Sept. 30.
The announcement comes after Newsom said last November that he would propose creating a new version of a state rebate program if Republicans went after federal incentives. California ended its broad rebate program in 2023 and replaced it with a system focused on low-income drivers in certain disadvantaged communities.
"We can't make up for federal vandalism of those tax credits, but we can continue to make the unprecedented investments in infrastructure, which we're doing," he said.
Prior to Newsom's announcement Friday, five car manufacturers -- Audi, Honda, Hyundai, Rivian and Volkswagen -- had called on the governor and legislative leaders to create a $5,000 rebate program that would last until July 1, 2028. Under the terms proposed by the companies, cars priced up to $55,000 and trucks and SUVs up to $80,000 would be eligible for the rebate.
And state agencies released a joint list of recommendations for supporting the EV market last month, including "point-of-sale rebates, vouchers, or other credits" to backfill the expiring federal tax incentives. -- AN
SPOTTED: That energy package signing was popping, by the way. At least if your idea of popping is filling a planetarium with just about every key California energy regulator and legislative leader, with a few important industry faces sprinkled in to boot.
POLITICO spotted California Energy Commission Vice Chair Siva Gunda, California Public Utilities Commission President Alice Reynolds, California Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot, California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph and incoming CARB chair Lauren Sanchez. Assemblymembers Jacqui Irwin and Cottie Petrie-Norris spoke ahead of the governor, as did Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire and his soon-to-be successor Monique Limón.
Heirloom's Vikrum Aiyer, Trust for Public Land's Juan Altamirano, Sen. John Laird were all there too.
The speakers stepped to the podium in the dimly-lit room with a towering projection of redwood trees above them. Meanwhile, the TV news cameramen grumbled in the back about the terrible lighting. It seems that the governor agreed.
"This is a horrible setup, I can't see a damn one of you," Newsom said. The last time he spoke in the auditorium, he gave a marathon San Francisco state of the city speech stretching seven and a half hours, and earning sneers from the local press. "This brings back some memories that my staff, particularly my old mayoral staff, does not want to be brought back up." -- NB
-- Solar-powered cars and trucks are getting closer to being a reality.
-- Mudslides and flash flooding linked to Tropical Storm Mario damaged homes and buried cars in parts of San Bernardino County.
-- The Texas-based company trying to quickly restart a Santa Barbara oil pipeline now faces criminal charges.
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