California is preparing to scale back one of its landmark climate laws in a win for big business groups that also threatens to undermine efforts to cast the state as the nation’s leader in the fight against global warming as Donald Trump returns to the White House.
State regulators said last week that they will dial back enforcement of a law that requires large companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Progressive Democratic lawmakers intended it to serve as a backstop in case of political shifts and litigation risks at the federal level.
But that reinforcement isn’t as bulletproof as it was once thought — and the attempts to weaken enforcement of a climate law hailed as nation-leading have much more to do with California’s internal hand-wringing than Trump himself and come just as a similar federal rule is on the brink of crumbling under a GOP trifecta in Washington.
“Even before Trump won, we knew that the SEC had really scaled back its proposed rule, and we knew that as a result, California’s climate leadership was more important than before,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who authored the climate disclosure law. “If California isn’t leading on climate during the most anti-climate presidential administration in history, then boy, that’s an issue, and we’re not going to let that happen.”
