California has pioneered initiatives to capture carbon, mitigate wildfires, repurpose fallowed farmland into solar development and recycle greenhouse gas-emitting agricultural waste, all of which could help meet the state's 2045 carbon neutrality goal. But projects face lengthy environmental reviews for permitting, often delaying groundbreaking for several years — despite the Newsom administration’s efforts to cut the red tape.
“This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Is our government serving the needs of our people?” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, who chairs the Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform. “We're going to need to get better at building infrastructure right now.”
During a recent informational hearing, Wicks pointed to the proposed Sites Reservoir Project in Northern California as an example of the lagging review process. While the concept for the project has circulated for decades, it took 10 years after voters approved new funding for Sites through the Proposition 1 water bond for the state to grant an environmental permit.
Wicks blamed further government inertia for the demise of an expansion project for Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County after a 10-year push. In just six years the project’s cost ballooned from $980 million to nearly $1.6 billion due to inflation and scheduling delays. The California Water Commission had granted the project $24 million in Proposition 1 funding to support the planning and review process — taxpayer money the state will not recover.
“Permitting is horribly broken in California,” said Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. "[The California Environmental Quality Act] has become Frankenstein’s monster. It's the law that swallowed California.”
Asm. Buffy Wicks, D-OaklandIn a related hearing on energy infrastructure, Wicks warned the state is already struggling with runaway utility bills and housing prices, which will get worse “if we don't manage the transition [to clean energy] correctly.”
Aggressive emission reductions, however, are just one part of the equation.
“The rest of the job needs to be done by CO2 removal,” said Caspar Donnison, a postdoctoral researcher in energy systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Donnison and his colleagues estimate that to reach the 2045 target, the state needs to remove about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, or about a third of California’s current greenhouse gas emissions.
In a recent report, they outlined three pillars for hitting that metric. The first involves natural and working lands, which present relatively cheap measures at an average cost of $11 per ton of carbon dioxide removed. Ecosystem restoration, forest management and farm practices like crop rotations and cover cropping fall under the umbrella.
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The second pillar is to collect biomass from forest debris, agricultural byproducts and food waste and convert it into energy, through cogeneration or hydrogen production. The cost ranges up to $90 per ton of CO2 and would require as many as 100 additional biomass facilities in the state. The third pillar is to directly capture the carbon from the air, a technology that is still maturing and requires lengthy permits, making it the most costly approach, at more than $200 per ton.
As a San Joaquin Valley farmer and a partner at the consulting firm Water Wise, Sarah Woolf’s work falls under the first pillar.
“We're looking at our water supply system in a much different way today with respect to climate change and how we manage the overall supply,” said Woolf. “It's not just in storage, it's not just in snowpack. It's also recharge and other activities.”
She said farmers are interested in capturing flood flows during storms to recharge the groundwater and build climate resilience. But she shared a common refrain in agriculture over permitting delays at the State Water Resources Control Board. The process has also hindered state-run programs like the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program and floodplain restoration projects.
Woolf said enlarging floodplains in strategic areas can improve flood protection for communities, recharge aquifers and support ecosystems, which act as carbon sinks. But gathering the appropriate streambed alteration permits can take years and a new one is needed annually. Adding further roadblocks, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife requires water managers to install fish screens to protect sensitive species even on concrete canals that are dry most of the year and other nonnatural infrastructure.
“We submit applications for a permit and hear nothing. There's no timeframe. There's no response time,” said Woolf. “That is very, very challenging, and it deters people from doing the projects.”
She praised Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order in 2023 that streamlined the process, but lamented that the subsequent legislation to codify it into law raised more obstacles.
Newsom also advanced legislation last year to expedite judicial review for CEQA challenges to infrastructure projects, which shaved years off the process for Sites, according to Ellen Hanak, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center.
Yet the state faces obstacles in converting fallowed farmland to large-scale solar production, she said.
“There are a number of preexisting regulations and laws that are cross purposes with that, because they think it is bad to take any farmland out of production,” said Hanak, noting that it takes a decade to exit a Williamson Act conservation easement. “I don't think everybody who's going to have to take land out of production is going to have 10 years to wait.”
The issue came to a head in the Legislature last year, when the Western Growers Association and the California Farm Bureau were at odds over a bill to ease the restrictions. Woolf added that the permitting process with transmission lines for solar projects on those sites adds yet another regulatory hurdle in the process.
Managing forests to reduce the intensity of wildfires and avoid further carbon dioxide emissions is another measure that falls within Donnison’s first pillar. The state has spent billions to scale up forest management projects since former-Gov. Jerry Brown committed to treating a million acres of forests a year. Yet Matt Dias, president of California Forestry Association, said the projects fall within a patchwork of state and federal jurisdictions, each requiring different permits.
Matt Dias, California Forestry Association“You have so many acres you want to get treated and you hit a property line and things change, the tides change, the permitting timelines change, the culture changes — and it comes to a stop,” said Dias.
Falling within the second pillar, JoAnna Lessard, watershed manager at the Yuba Water Agency, is struggling with mountains of shrubs, branches and small trees left over from forest restoration projects.
“There are very few biomass utilization projects in the state. There are very few places to take this material,” said Lessard, alluding to the extensive permitting needed to build the facilities. “For one project in one season, it's easily $2 million in trucking fees to get that material to a place, even if they'll take it. Every time there's a fire, there's a glut of this material.”
One promising and well-studied solution to the waste is biochar. Josiah Hunt, CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corp., said that transforming organic matter into charcoal and burying it within farmland boosts soil fertility, improves yields and captures the carbon for potentially thousands of years. It requires a relatively simple modification to existing biomass power plants, but does not reduce the energy output or increase emissions. Yet the upgrades can take 18 months to run through a lengthy permitting process.
Such delays have long frustrated Julia Levin, executive director of the Bioenergy Association of California. She stressed that “the most urgent thing we can do — the only thing left at this point that will stop totally catastrophic climate change — is the reduction of short-lived climate pollutants.” Levin has pushed the state to maintain incentives for dairy farmers to invest in digesters to meet the state’s goal of slashing methane emissions 40% by 2030.
She blamed the California Public Utilities Commission for delays in connecting renewable energy projects to the electric grid.
“We need state agencies to step up and recognize climate change is a different beast and we're going to have to move faster,” said Levin. “We're going to have to accept some level of risk.”
While several lawmakers shared the same level of energy for streamlining permitting processes, environmental justice groups cautioned them to take it slow to avoid air and water quality impacts to communities from the sector.
“We want to make sure it doesn't create unintended consequences that add new harm to already overexposed frontline communities,” said Jonathan Pruitt, a program manager at the California Environmental Justice Alliance, who described biomass facilities in the Central Valley as more polluting than coal-fired power plants.
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