The Brief

After two reparations bills stalled in the final day of session last year, reparation advocates are campaigning Tuesday at the state Capitol to drum up support for the same measures.

In partnership with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, the advocates are calling the rally “the first reparations advocacy day” in state history. The event’s lead organizer, Chris Lodgson, said they want lawmakers to introduce, support and adopt “bold” reparation bills — including the ones the coalition are prioritizing.

“People are still mad about the bills that did not get to the governor’s desk last year, ... and we’re looking forward to success in 2025,” he said.

The two stalled bills weren’t part of the 14-bill reparations package championed by the California Legislative Black Caucus last year: One would have created a new state agency, while the other would have created a fund for reparations policies.

But the caucus, which sought a less sweeping approach in the face of public backlash, prevented the proposals from coming to a vote in the Assembly — a move that upset advocates. Gov. Gavin Newsom ultimately signed five of the 14 bills.

The coalition is also pushing for proposals to allocate $30 million in the 2025-26 state budget to fund the state agency; create a guaranteed income program for senior residents who are descendants of slaves; and compensate Black families who had their property seized through “racially motivated” eminent domain (a proposal Newsom vetoed last year).

But similar to 2024, advocates have a tough road ahead. Reparations in the form of cash payments are politically unpopular, and the Legislature has been warned against new spending amid a budget crunch.

Still, supporters are hopeful. Lodgson said last year’s defeats convinced advocates to take “bigger” actions and reach out to other potential allies.

“The Black Caucus should not ‘own’ all the reparations activity legislatively," he said. "We’re looking to work outside the Democratic Party quite frankly. Folks in both parties need to take the lead on this, and we’ve been talking to the Republican Party too.”

Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — who is also a sitting L.A. City Council member — unveiled a homelessness policy platform Tuesday that calls for the city to prepare for a breakup with the region’s troubled lead homelessness agency and to scale back Mayor Karen Bass' signature Inside Safe motel program.

In Raman’s new homelessness policy platform, she vowed to build an effective homelessness response system in the city, arguing it’s something that hasn’t existed during her five years as a city official.

“ One of the most persistent challenges with homelessness is that no one is in charge at City Hall,” Raman told LAist. “ There is no centralized management or oversight over our homelessness response system at the city. What we have is a patchwork of programs that have very different outcomes and hugely differential costs.”

Raman, who represents Council District 4 stretching from Silver Lake to Reseda, argues only the Mayor’s Office has the authority to fix that fragmentation and deliver transparency.

She is among 13 candidates challenging Bass in the race for L.A. mayor in the June primary.

Homelessness is one of the top issues in the mayoral race. Los Angeles is home to nearly 44,000 unhoused residents and budgets about $1 billion a year for homelessness.

In response to Raman’s announcement, a spokesperson from Bass’ campaign defended the incumbent mayor’s homelessness strategy and noted Raman had supported it.

“Councilmember Raman has been on the City Council since 2020 and is Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, and frankly the most success she has achieved is voting yes on Inside Safe,” Alex Stack said in a statement.

Bass introduced Inside Safe through an executive order, with a goal of moving more unhoused residents from encampments into temporary shelter. Raman later voted with the L.A. City Council 13-1 to accept Bass’ 2023-24 budget, which included $250 million for the program.

Raman argues that L.A. should shift spending away from expensive motel-based programs like Inside Safe, toward lower-cost interventions like short-term rental vouchers and shared housing.

“What I'm proposing is to look across our shelter beds and really investing in what works and stretching every dollar as far as possible at a time when the Trump administration is about to cut funds for homelessness response here in Los Angeles significantly,” Raman told LAist.

The Bass campaign criticized Raman’s plan as impractical.

“The campaign plan she threw out there relies on private landlords turning over apartments to people living in tents — it's unrealistic and would increase homelessness,” Stack said.

The campaigns for other candidates, including Spencer Pratt, Rae Huang and Adam Miller, did not respond to requests on Tuesday. Each includes some homelessness policy proposals on their campaign websites.

Inside Safe 

Raman’s proposal took aim at Inside Safe, a city program designed to clear tent and vehicle encampments and move people into shelter, primarily hotel rooms.

The city of L.A. has spent more than $300 million on Inside Safe over the past few years. During that time, the program has moved more than 5,800 unhoused people indoors, according to the Mayor’s Office. Official data shows 40% of those people later returned to the street, as highlighted in a recent L.A. Times report.

The average Inside Safe bed, usually a hotel room, costs the city more than $225 a night, compared to an average nightly cost of about $86 at other shelter or “interim housing” options, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.

Raman called Inside Safe “the most expensive temporary housing intervention in the city by far,” estimating the program costs the city about $85,000 per motel room annually.

For the same money, the city could rent three apartments and provide services through its Time Limited Subsidy Program, she said.

That rental subsidy program costs about $24,000 annually per household, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.

Since Bass took office, L.A.’s overall homeless population estimates have declined by about 5%. The “unsheltered” population — those who live outside in tents or vehicles, instead of in homeless shelters or similar facilities — declined even more during that period, as Inside Safe moved more Angelenos living on the streets into hotel rooms and other shelters.

Bass’s campaign defended her approach.

“Mayor Bass launched L.A.'s first-ever comprehensive street homelessness strategy, driving street homelessness down nearly 18 percent, posting the first-ever consecutive-year decline in overall homelessness and achieving the first decline in homeless mortality since records have been kept,” Stack said.

As a candidate for City Council in 2020, Raman’s homelessness platform had called for eliminating “policies that criminalize people who are unhoused,” including sweeps of unhoused encampments led by the LAPD and sanitation workers.

Raman’s 2026 mayoral homelessness platform calls for “maintaining” the city’s “capacity for encampment resolution.”

"My approach to homelessness in my district would be exactly what I would be doing citywide, which is trying to ensure that we are using every single dollar and resource that we have to move people indoors as quickly as possible," Raman told LAist.

Accountability questions  

The L.A. City Council has been considering whether to redirect about $300 million in annual homelessness funding away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and, if so, whether to put the funds under city or county oversight.

As chair of the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman is expected to preside over that committee's final discussion on the issue, before it issues a recommendation and sends the issue to the full council for a vote.

Last year, L.A. County officials voted to move hundreds of millions away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and administer the funds itself through a new county homelessness department. That funding shift begins July 1.

Bass has publicly clashed with county leaders about their decision. She’s also said the city should be cautious about following suit.

“Withdrawing from LAHSA too quickly, without a plan and without the capacity, will no doubt cause unintended consequences that will leave more Angelenos to die on our streets,” Bass said in a statement last month.

Raman said her mayoral platform sets a framework for moving hundreds of millions in city homelessness contracts away from LAHSA.

“The city needs to be prepared to make significant changes including taking on direct contracting for some funds and potentially contracting directly with the county,” Raman told LAist. “The biggest challenge right now is that, despite my efforts, the city still doesn't have the capacity to manage this transition effectively.”

That’s what her plan is designed to build, Raman said.

Raman’s platform describes LAHSA as “plagued with scandal” and “may be on the verge of shuttering.”

Bass and Raman both point to the city’s Bureau of Homelessness Oversight, created last year within the Los Angeles Housing Department, which they say can help deliver accountability and oversight if scaled up.

According to Raman, that bureau has not yet hired a single person, but it is doing some data work using consultants via a private grant.

Raman criticized the current city approach to the 6,500 people living in cars and RVs as "haphazard" and "ineffective, vowing to develop a clearer strategy.

Raman wants more street medicine teams — funded through Medi-CAL reimbursements — to meet health needs in encampments.

She also proposes a citywide unarmed crisis response team to respond to mental health and substance use calls.

Other candidates

Spencer Pratt, a former reality television personality who lost his home in last year’s Palisades Fire, urges a “treatment-first” approach to homelessness, according to his campaign website.

“For years, the Homeless Industrial Complex has prioritized process over outcomes, warehousing over treatment, and press releases over results,” the site states.

His approach would redirect resources to mental health care, drug treatment and stabilization services, according to campaign material.

The Rev. Rae Huang, a community organizer and Presbyterian minister running to the left of Raman, has proposed a new “Mayor’s Office of Housing For All” to coordinate housing and homelessness efforts in the city.

On her campaign website, Huang promises to build more permanent supportive housing and to end “sweeps” or city cleanups of tent encampments.

Candidate Adam Miller is a tech entrepreneur who founded Better Angels LA, a nonprofit that distributes small loans to families facing eviction.

Miller’s campaign platform lists a range of proposals for L.A.’s homelessness system, including 50 more tiny home village sites, more enforcement of anti-camping laws and a better tech system for managing shelter bed reservations.

If no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the June Primary Election, the top two vote-getters will face off in a November runoff.

The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to medical records for millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families.

A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally identifiable medical information the agency obtains, giving it the power to see prescriptions employees had filled or what treatment they sought from doctors. The regulation would require 65 insurance companies that cover more than 8 million Americans — including federal workers, retired members of Congress, mail carriers, and their immediate family members — to provide monthly reports to OPM with identifiable health data on their members.

The proposal is prompting unease from insurers as well as health policy and legal experts, who are concerned about the legality of OPM acquiring such a sweeping database of sensitive health information, and the agency’s ability to safeguard it.

OPM could use the data to analyze costs and improve the system, said Sharona Hoffman, a health law ethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

“But,” she said, “they are going to get very, very detailed and granular data about everything that happens. The concern here is the more information they have, they could use it to discipline or target people who are not cooperating politically.”

OPM spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The agency’s notice asks insurers that offer Federal Employees Health Benefits or Postal Service Health Benefits plans to furnish “service use and cost data,” including “medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.” It says the data will “ensure they provide competitive, quality, and affordable plans.”

The notice, posted and sent to insurers in December, does not instruct them to redact identifying information — a burdensome process that they would need federal guidance to complete.

Instead, it states that insurers are legally permitted to disclose “protected health information” to OPM. Several experts in health policy and law consulted by KFF Health News said they interpreted the request to mean the Trump administration was seeking identifiable data.

The ask comes a year into a Republican administration that has been defined by haphazard mass layoffs and firings of thousands of federal workers, including dozens who say they were targeted in acts of political retaliation or for not embracing the White House’s agenda. Under President Donald Trump, the government has also routinely tested the legal bounds of sharing sensitive and personally identifiable tax or health information across government agencies in its efforts to carry out mass immigration arrests or pursue identify fraud.

“You can anticipate a scenario where this information on 8 million Americans is now in the hands of OPM and there’s a real concern of how they use it,” said Michael Martinez, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, an advocacy organization that filed a public comment opposing OPM’s proposal in February. Martinez previously worked at OPM.

“They’ve given no information about how they would treat that information once they have it,” he said.

Among Martinez’s concerns is how the administration might use information about employees who have sought abortions — 41 states have some type of abortion ban — or transgender treatment, medical care that the Trump administration has tried to curb.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, did not respond to requests for comment.

Martinez and others who reviewed the notice for KFF Health News said the proposal was so vague that they were uncertain, exactly, what medical records OPM wants to access.

At the very least, they said, the proposal would allow the agency to access the medical and pharmaceutical claims of patients with their identifying information, such as names and birth dates. Claims data also includes diagnoses, treatments, visit length, and provider information.

OPM’s request to view “encounter data” could allow the agency to look at “anything and everything,” Hoffman noted.

That could include detailed medical records, such as a doctor’s notes or after-visit summaries.

Jonathan Foley, who worked at OPM advising on the Federal Employees Health Benefits program during the Obama and Biden administrations, said he doubts the agency has the capability to ingest such minutiae.

The agency, however, could easily begin collection of personally identifiable medical and pharmaceutical claims information from insurers, he said.

Foley said he sees a benefit to OPM having broader access to de-identified claims data. In recent years, OPM has ramped up its analysis of claims data, which has allowed it to examine prescription drug costs and encourage plans to offer federal workers cheaper alternatives. He’s worried, though, that the Trump administration’s proposal goes too far, because it appears to seek identifiable data.

“It’s kind of shocking to think of them having protected health information without having strict guardrails,” he said.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, requires certain organizations that maintain identifiable health information — such as hospitals and insurers — to protect it from being disclosed without patient consent.

Those entities can disclose such information without consent only in specific scenarios, with a justification that it is deemed “reasonable” or “necessary.” Even then, HIPAA mandates that they provide only the minimum amount of information required.

OPM argues in its notice that it is entitled to the information from insurers “for oversight activities.”

But several people who reviewed the notice questioned whether OPM’s explanation for requesting the information is sufficient.

“The language in it seems quite broad and encompasses potentially a lot of information and data and is sort of light on justification,” said Jodi Daniel, a digital health strategist who helped develop the legal framework for HIPAA privacy rules over two decades ago.

Several major insurers that offer federal employee health plans — including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Kaiser Permanente, and UnitedHealthcare — declined to comment on their plans to comply with the notice or offer insight on where plans to implement the data sharing stood.

Only one insurer individually weighed in with a public comment on OPM’s plan. In March, CVS Health executive Melissa Schulman urged the federal agency to reconsider its proposal.

“OPM’s request raises substantial HIPAA compliance issues,” Schulman wrote, arguing that federal law allows the agency to examine records but not to collect data. Insurers would be breaking the law by providing personal health information for OPM’s “vague and broad general purposes,” she added.

Schulman, who did not respond to additional questions from KFF Health News, also raised concerns about a lack of data privacy protections. She noted that insurers could be liable for security breaches or other situations “where consumer health information is inappropriately shared and outside of our control.”

In 2015, OPM announced the personal records of roughly 22 million Americans had been stolen from the agency in a data breach that has been blamed on the Chinese government.

The Association of Federal Health Organizations, which represents CVS Health and dozens of other federal health plan carriers, also weighed in with a 122-page comment opposing the notice. In it, AFHO Chair Kari Parsons emphasized that insurance carriers are bound by HIPAA to safeguard personal health information.

Federal law requires carriers “to furnish ‘reasonable reports’ OPM determines to be necessary,” Parsons wrote, “not to furnish the individual claims data of every individual.”

This isn’t the first time OPM has requested detailed data from insurers. In the AFHO comment, Parsons noted OPM had made a similar proposal in 2010, prompting HIPAA concerns. She described how, after several years of negotiations with AFHO, they discussed — but OPM never finalized — an agreement in 2019 for carriers to share de-identified data with OPM.

But since then, Parsons wrote, OPM has collected such detailed information on enrollees and their families that, with OPM’s new request, the agency may be able to trace even de-identified records to individuals.

OPM has not provided any update since closing comments in March. The agency would need to publish a final decision before anything officially changes.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover on Wednesday responded to the outcry over tickets for the Olympics, saying the average price was "accessible" and that more $28 tickets would be available in later drops.

He also defended the prices, the majority of which are more than $100 and can go as high as $5,500. Each ticket includes a 24% service fee.

"The average ticket price is under $200," he said. "That's an accessible ticket."

Not everyone in Southern California agrees. After the cheapest tickets sold out quickly in the locals-only sale that wraps Wednesday, many Angelenos wondered if they'd missed their chance to get affordable seats at Olympic competitions and said they felt priced out of the Games before they'd even arrived in Los Angeles.

Hoover pushed back against that idea, saying ticket sales were critical to paying for the Games, which could end up costing taxpayers if they're not delivered within budget.

" These are the biggest games in Olympic history. And so in order for us to be able to deliver a fiscally responsible, as well as a safe and secure Games, our ticket prices start at $28 and offer a range of pricing for everybody," Hoover said. "You may get on the website and you're not gonna necessarily find the ticket at your price in this drop. There'll be more drops coming."

What's unclear is how many $28 tickets, or tickets under $100, will be made available in future sales, including the general sale that launches Thursday.

LA28 has avoided sharing exact numbers and prices, outside the promise to make at least 1 million tickets available for $28.

The cost of tickets could get even more expensive in future sales. When LAist asked if Olympics organizers would use dynamic pricing, where sellers can adjust prices based on demand, Hoover didn't rule it out.

" We're not using dynamic pricing in this round of ticket drops," Hoover said. "We may adjust it in the future."

Another way people in Southern California can participate in the Olympics will be to volunteer. But it appears there will be fierce competition for those slots, too. Hoover said Wednesday that he estimated needing 60,000 volunteers and that more than a quarter million people had signed up. That includes some 50,000 locals.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is advancing a plan that could funnel hundreds of millions in road dollars to a struggling oil refinery — pitching it as a cleaner jet fuel initiative. The credit, drawn from funds voters designated for highways and local streets, could also raise gas prices for most drivers.

UC Berkeley economists warn it could raise California gas prices. And while the plan is pitched as a climate measure, the analysis finds it could cut emissions at more than 10 times the cost economists consider effective, one of the authors told CalMatters.

The proposal is expected to receive a final legislative hearing on Thursday. It has drawn backing from lawmakers and labor groups, who say it preserves jobs at facilities like the Rodeo refinery in Contra Costa County and helps the state achieve its climate goals.

But the plan has drawn criticism from an unlikely mix of voices: oil industry representatives, the Legislature's nonpartisan analyst — who is urging lawmakers to reject the proposal — and environmentalists who argue California is underfunding cleaner, more effective alternatives like mass transit.

Phillips 66 leads the subsidy line

The governor's four-page proposal is a straightforward mechanism granting a tax credit to producers in a small corner of the jet fuel market — with potentially far-reaching implications for most drivers.

Only two companies currently produce state-certified jet biofuel and also owe diesel excise tax in California — the conditions required to claim the credit, said

Andrew March, a Department of Finance budget analyst. Of those, only Phillips 66 has publicly confirmed it would qualify for the credit. The company spent $1.25 billion converting its Rodeo refinery in Contra Costa County from traditional petroleum refining to biofuels.

Jets do not run on gasoline; they run on a fuel refined from petroleum by oil companies that also produce gasoline for cars and diesel for trucks. Because jet fuel requires less processing than gasoline or diesel, it is generally cheaper to produce. But sustainable aviation fuel, made from products like used cooking grease and animal fat, costs significantly more, roughly twice the price of conventional jet fuel, due to the expense of converting refineries and processing organic materials.

Under the proposal, producers would earn credits for selling the fuel here and use those credits to offset the diesel taxes they owe.

The formula for credits isn't flat — the cleaner the fuel, the bigger the credit, ranging from $1 to $2 per gallon.

The state estimates that Newsom’s proposal could cost between $165 million and $300 million, but California's nonpartisan legislative analyst warns that figure could be far higher. That’s because the tax credit is so high that it could incentivize companies outside California to acquire California companies with diesel tax liabilities, said Helen Kerstein, who evaluates climate programs for the Legislative Analyst’s Office. A major California refiner like Chevron could also buy a renewable fuel company elsewhere and ship the fuel here, she said.

If more companies claim the credit than expected, diesel tax revenues could fall more sharply — driving the program’s cost higher than anticipated. In February, a team of UC Berkeley economists estimated the proposal could cause diesel tax receipts to fall by as much as 75%.

“They're going to incentivize a whole lot more sustainable aviation fuel than they're planning,” Aaron Smith, a Berkeley economist who co-authored the report, told CalMatters. “That is going to be a huge hit to the state's diesel tax receipts, and so it's going to be a huge hole in the budget.”

March, the budget analyst, disputed Smith’s findings, saying it assumes an 8-to-10-fold surge in sustainable aviation fuel flowing into California. Other states that have passed similar credits haven’t experienced such growth, he said. The program is designed to grow over time, as more companies begin producing sustainable aviation fuel and become eligible, March said.

One refinery’s bet 

Last year, Assemblymember Anamarie Ávila Farías and a dozen colleagues toured the Rodeo refinery, which sits along the shores of the San Pablo Bay, in the Concord Democrat’s district. What they learned alarmed them, Ávila Farías said.

Phillips 66 officials told lawmakers that due to the loss of federal incentives — and because California's own low carbon fuel program wasn't generating enough revenue — projects like the refinery conversion were struggling, she said.

Phillips 66 lobbied the Governor’s office directly near the end of 2025. Newsom included the tax credit in his budget proposal. Ávila Farías and 40 of her colleagues joined in a “bipartisan” push for the measure.

“In 2026, these facilities are on the brink of closure,” Ávila Farías said in written responses to CalMatters questions.

The Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington, on Sept. 30, 2025. Photo by Stella Kalinina for CalMatters Phillips 66 declined to answer basic questions about the proposal it lobbied to help shape: whether the Rodeo facility is profitable, whether it faces closure without the credit or how much it expects to claim if the credit is approved. Neither the governor’s office nor the company would say what role it played in shaping the proposal.

In 2025, the company made $4.4 billion in profits. The Houston-based company’s renewable fuels segment, which is anchored by the Rodeo complex, lost $380 million in 2025, worse than the $198 million loss it posted the year before, according to the company's annual report.

Disclosures filed with the California Secretary of State show Phillips 66 lobbied the Governor's Office directly on a "proposed sustainable aviation fuel incentive package” in the last three months of the year — after the legislative session had concluded but budget planning for the next year is typically underway. An earlier disclosure specifically referenced 'diesel excise taxes' alongside the fuels incentive package.

Phillips 66 was a member of the Western States Petroleum Association, the state’s main oil lobby, until the end of last year. The association has not taken an official position on the tax credit, though its chief lobbyist has urged lawmakers to stay focused on keeping California’s traditional petroleum refineries open.

Phillips 66 has been a significant contributor to state campaigns through 2024, donating a total of more than $1.1 million to legislators, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. Since 2024, the company has continued to fund legislative campaigns, including those of Ávila Farías, Secretary of State data shows.

For workers at the Rodeo plant, the stakes are high. Joe Jawad, president of United Steelworkers Local 326, represents roughly 250 workers there, many from families who have worked the refinery for generations. In total, the refinery employs more than 400 workers.

“If this incentive passes, it's my understanding this place stays here for years to come,” Jawad said. “That's what we're looking for.”

But the transition has concerned local environmental justice advocates. Community organizer Daphney Saviotti-Orozco, who grew up in the unincorporated community of Rodeo, a few blocks from the refinery, worries biofuels could still pollute local air quality with methane, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter.

“There'll be more pressure to make even more,” she said.

A hit to California’s highways and byways

California has long protected fuel tax money for roads. Newsom’s proposal could drain those funds.

In hearings, lawmakers have specifically raised concern about the use of road dollars for green jet fuel.

“We don't have sustainable funding for our transportation system,” said Lori Wilson, a Democrat from Suisun City, who chairs the Assembly transportation committee, speaking at a March 11 hearing. “It does give me cause for concern.”

The state constitution protects gas and diesel excise taxes: they must fund highways, local streets and transit infrastructure. Voters reinforced that mandate in 2010, when they passed Proposition 22, which barred the state from borrowing or redirecting those funds.

Newsom’s proposal wouldn’t technically violate the rules, but the proposal would have a similar impact, said Kerstein, of the legislative analyst’s office.

"Every dollar that goes to this credit is one fewer dollar that goes to local streets and roads, and the state highway system," Kerstein said. "That's the trade-off."

March disputed the framing, saying there were other sources of money for transportation funds.

“The projected impact on road repairs is not a dollar for dollar trade,” he wrote.

The credit would pull money from three programs: Caltrans highway maintenance, local street and road funding and competitive freight grants. California's roads are already starved for cash.

Current funding only covers about 61% of projected highway needs, according to Caltrans, while more drivers switching to electric vehicles are likely to shrink gas tax revenue. Local streets and roads face a $74 billion funding gap, according to a survey from the California State Association of Counties, which advocates for local jurisdictions.

“We definitely need road repairs, but we can't miss this chance on jet fuel,” Ávila Farías wrote. “We must do both.”

A costly climate fix

But the plan’s primary beneficiary isn’t the climate; it’s a refinery whose parent company lost hundreds of millions on renewable fuels last year. And while supporters say the jet fuel credit would cut carbon emissions, critics say it could do so at a steep cost.

The plan would cost $1,000 to $2,700 per ton of emissions reduced — more than 10 times what economists consider a cost-effective way to cut climate pollution, according to the Berkeley analysis.

That’s because California is already getting most of the climate benefits from renewable fuels — also made from plant and animal materials — through its low carbon fuel standard, a program that pushes producers to make what they sell here progressively cleaner. Many of those fuels today go into diesel trucks.

Berkeley’s report contends that the credit would mainly shift the same limited supply of used cooking oil, animal fats and other raw materials into jet fuel instead of replacing fossil fuels.

March said the state has invested in similarly-priced and more expensive policies in the past in order to boost emerging technologies. “Public investment does what private capital won’t,” March said.

Matthew Botill, a division chief with the California Air Resources Board, said boosting sustainable aviation fuel is critical because demand for jet fuel is expected to grow and state policies aim to cut fuel use in trucking by shifting to electric vehicles.

Without stronger incentives for sustainable aviation fuel, petroleum use in aviation will rise as more people fly, undermining the state’s climate goals, Botill said at a March 11 hearing.

But by diverting renewable diesel from trucks, producers could drive gas and diesel prices up by 10 to 15 cents per gallon, according to Smith and the Berkeley economists – pushing trucks back toward petroleum and making the fuel mix dirtier and more expensive to clean up.

“Markets chase the subsidies,” said Danny Cullenward, an energy policy researcher who agreed with the Berkeley findings. “You make a very attractive subsidy, and people say, ‘Well, I'd rather be delivering that thing.’”

Environmentalists say the state would be better off investing in proven, emission-cutting solutions like electric cars and trucks and mass transit.

“We're not funding the low-hanging fruit,” said Christina Scaringe, California climate policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There's just a very basic argument that we don't have a lot of money.”

March, the state budget analyst, told CalMatters that predictions about the governor’s biofuel proposal’s impact on gas prices are “highly uncertain.”

Lawmakers, including Ávila Farías, have compared jet biofuel to solar or wind power in their early stages arguing California “must act boldly now,” to support sustainable aviation fuel.

Smith is skeptical sustainable aviation fuel will ever get cheap enough to stand on its own. And the economics have only worsened since the U.S. began strikes on Iran in late February, sending fuel prices sharply higher.

Before the conflict, conventional jet fuel ran about $2.50 a gallon, according to Argus Media – which also tracked sustainable fuel’s cost at more than twice that — $5.48. Since the strikes on Iran, both have climbed. At west coast airports this week, Globalair.com reports the price of sustainable fuel has reached $10.20.

"You need a lot of government support to make it work," Smith said. "I just don't ever see that happening."

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.