Climate Change & Energy – Enviro Updates

Healdsburg council OKs clean energy funds for e-bike rebates, charging discounts for low-income residents

February 4, 2026

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Qualifying low-income Healdsburg residents now have a new suite of city rebates meant to make electric vehicles and e-bikes more affordable and accessible.

Council members on Monday, Feb. 2, authorized tapping into a pool of funds collected annually through a clean energy program run by the state to expand three current EV-based programs for residents enrolled in the city’s CARE initiative, which offers electricity-bill discounts for low income households.

The new incentives include two $1,000 rebate for e-bikes, 50% off the fee at city-owned chargers and a $4,000 rebate for installing an at-home EV charger.

The council also endorsed a tentative rebate for electric vehicles that could offer up to $5,000 back. The city’s hope is to spur greater use of the programs, which have drawn scant participation since Healdsburg offered its original EV incentive seven years ago.

“At the end of the day it is about affordability,” Council member David Hagele said. “We need to be able to help people buy the cars. We’re really trying to move the needle.”

Climate Change & Energy, Transportatione-bikes, EV charging stations

Constellation Energy completes $26 billion acquisition of Calpine, major operator at The Geysers

January 26, 2026

Jeff Quackenbush, NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

But Earthjustice, together with Public Citizen, PennFuture and Clean Air Council, petitioned federal regulators to block the combination, claiming it would increase electricity costs by reducing competition and it would increase pollution via the natural gas plants.

The biggest operator of geothermal power plants at The Geysers field straddling Sonoma and Lake counties is now under new ownership.

Constellation Energy Corp. (Nasdaq: CEG) has finished its $26.6 billion acquisition of Calpine Corp., which has been involved with The Geysers 36 years ago and expanded its holdings to become its top producer a decade later.

The transaction, originally announced a year ago and completed early this year, finalizes one of the largest power-generation deals in U.S. history and creates what the company describes as the nation’s top producer of electricity.

It brings together Baltimore-based Constellation’s zero-emission nuclear fleet with Houston-based Calpine’s natural gas and geothermal assets, positioning the combined company to meet rapidly rising power demand driven by data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and electrification. They collectively serve about 2.5 million customers nationwide and operate 55 gigawatts of capacity across nuclear, natural gas and geothermal resources.

Climate Change & EnergyCalpine, Constellation Energy, geothermal, Geysers geothermal field

Op-Ed: Why California gray whales are starving

January 18, 2026

David Helvarg, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Recently, while sailing with friends on San Francisco Bay, I enjoyed the sight of harbor porpoises, cormorants, pelicans, seals and sea lions — and then the spouting plume and glistening back of a gray whale that gave me pause. Too many have been seen inside the bay recently.

California’s gray whales have been considered an environmental success story since the passage of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and 1986’s global ban on commercial whaling. They’re also a major tourist attraction during their annual 12,000-mile round-trip migration between the Arctic and their breeding lagoons in Baja California. In late winter and early spring — when they head back north and are closest to the shoreline, with the moms protecting the calves — they can be viewed not only from whale-watching boats but also from promontories along the California coast including Point Loma in San Diego, Point Lobos in Monterey, Bodega Head and Shelter Cove in Humboldt County.

In 1972, there were some 10,000 gray whales in the population on the eastern side of the Pacific. Generations of whaling all but eliminated the western population — leaving only about 150 alive today off of East Asia and Russia. Over the four decades following passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the eastern whale numbers grew steadily to 27,000 by 2016, a hopeful story of protection leading to restoration. Then, unexpectedly over the past nine years, the eastern gray whale population has crashed, plummeting by more than half to 12,950, according to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lowest numbers since the 1970s.

Today’s changing ocean and Arctic ice conditions linked to fossil-fuel-fired climate change are putting this species again at risk of extinction.

Climate Change & Energy, Sonoma Coast, WildlifeArctic sea ice, fossil fuels, gray whales

Trump administration targets Petaluma in latest suit over fossil fuel limits

January 6, 2026

Phil Barber, PRESS DEMOCRAT

The Trump administration is suing the city of Petaluma, along with Morgan Hill in the South Bay, asking a U.S. District Court judge to block the cities from enforcing their bans on natural gas infrastructure in new buildings.

The lawsuit puts Petaluma, which adopted an “all-electric ordinance” in May 2021, front and center in the national debate over clean energy — and in the breach of America’s political divide, as evidenced by language in the government’s complaint.

“From the day President Trump took office, his Administration has prioritized cutting energy costs for all Americans, restoring consumer freedom, and unleashing American energy dominance,” the document reads.

“Sadly standing in the way of that progress, many states and localities have enacted ‘energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security,’” it continues, citing one of Trump’s executive orders.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, refers to the city ordinances as “radical measures.”

Petaluma was among a number of California cities and counties that made a push toward all-electric building projects, following the city of Berkeley’s lead in 2019. They included Santa Rosa, Healdsburg and Sonoma County.

Climate Change & Energydevelopment, fossil fuels, housing, natural gas, natural gas ban

Trump administration announces plan for new oil drilling off the coasts of California and Florida

November 20, 2025

Matthew Daly & Matthew Brown, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The offshore drilling proposal drew bipartisan pushback from lawmakers in Florida, where Republican Sen. Rick Scott said the state’s coasts “must remain off the table for oil drilling.”

The Trump administration announced on Thursday new oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts for the first time in decades, advancing a project that critics say could harm coastal communities and ecosystems, as President Donald Trump seeks to expand U.S. oil production.

The oil industry has been seeking access to new offshore areas, including Southern California and off the coast of Florida, as a way to boost U.S. energy security and jobs. The federal government has not allowed drilling in federal waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which includes offshore Florida and part of offshore Alabama, since 1995, because of concerns about oil spills. California has some offshore oil rigs, but there has been no new leasing in federal waters since the mid-1980s.

Climate Change & Energy, Sonoma Coastfossil fuels industry, ocean pollution, offshore oil drilling

Fight over California coast and offshore oil drilling rekindled

October 31, 2025

Austin Murphy, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Richard Charter of Bodega Bay has spent his adult life protecting coasts and oceans, especially from the ravages of energy extraction. When crude oil starts pouring into the sea, his phone tends to go off — as it did around 3 a.m. on an April morning in 2010, following an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

It happened again in the small hours of Oct. 2, 2021, when a plume of oil reached the surface of the Pacific Ocean a few miles off the coast of Huntington Beach. That 25,000-gallon spill, from a ruptured underwater pipeline, fouled 16 miles of Orange County beaches, with oil washing ashore as far south as San Diego.

“I always seem to get the call in the middle of the night,” said Charter, who now works with municipalities up and down the California coast, helping coordinate their response to offshore drilling threats.

That group is on high alert following a recent Houston Chronicle story revealing Trump administration plans to open large swathes of the California coast to offshore drilling.

Climate Change & Energy, Sonoma CoastCordell Bank, fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuels, National Marine Sanctuary, ocean pollution

Lake County governments opt to delay Sonoma Clean Power expansion

October 22, 2025

Jeff Quackenbush, NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

Lake County’s decade-long consideration of an alternative to Pacific Gas & Electric as the supplier of power to residents and business has been pushed back again.

Both the Board of Supervisors and Lakeport City Council on Tuesday declined to move forward with joining Sonoma Clean Power.

The supervisors failed to secure support to vote on approving the partnership during their morning meeting. And Lakeport’s council members, looking to the county’s move, also opted for more study. That followed the Clearlake City Council’s divided vote Oct. 2 against joining.

The offer required all three to join together. Because of the lead time required by the California Public Utilities Commission for implementing a community choice aggregation power provider in an area, Sonoma Clean Power had been hoping to review Lake County decisions at its November board meeting, allowing service to start in May 2027.

Climate Change & Energycommunity choice aggregation, geothermal energy initiative, GeoZone, Lake County, PG&E, Sonoma Clean Power, The Geysers