Air Regulators Turned Lobbyists Lead To False Conclusions About Need For Carbon Capture in Cap-and-Trade, Consumer Watchdog Tells Legislative Leaders

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- As lawmakers take up Cap-and-Trade for extension to 2045, they should reject any lobbyist pressure to include Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) in Cap-and-Trade, the state's central greenhouse gas reduction program that caps emissions and mandates companies trade pollution allowances, Consumer Watchdog told legislative leaders today.

"Some regulators turned oil lobbyists shaped the Cap-and-Trade program from within CARB, feathering their nests for future work for regulated companies," Consumer Watchdog wrote in a letter to Senate President pro Tem Mike McGuire and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. "Among their clients are oil giants peddling false climate solutions such as CCS. Their lobbyists push the view that CCS is positive. In fact, the process of capturing emissions from industrial smokestacks is polluting, fossil-fuel intensive and is far more likely to fail than succeed, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The dedicated pipelines to transport compressed carbon for burial are also dangerous because CO2, if leaked, is a potentially lethal asphyxiant."

For the letter, see: https://consumerwatchdog.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/CCSLetterLegLeaders08-18-25Final1.pdf

"Former regulators-turned-lobbyists want CARB to clarify that CCS can lessen how many pollution allowances oil companies must buy," the letter continues. "Industry investments into CCS elsewhere in the United States or in California outside their own regulated facilities could also be included to earn a small allowable percentage of carbon 'offset credits' to reduce the amount of pollution allowances that companies must buy to meet Cap-and-Trade obligations. Current qualifying projects include reforestation, forest preservation, and methane capture from dairy farms and landfills. Studies find offset projects rarely deliver what they promise, nor do they do anything to reduce emissions at regulated instate facilities that continue to pollute communities."

The Consumer Watchdog letter reviews how regulators shaped Cap-and-Trade and then used the revolving door as lobbyists furthering corporate interests over the public's. 

• Virgil Welch, a star CCS lobbyist did two stints at CARB as Special Counsel and Chief Advisor to the board chair overseeing policies such as Cap-and-Trade. He joined the lobbying firm AJW as a partner between 2016 and 2017 and then rejoined CARB. While at AJW, the International Emissions Trading Association was onboarded. It represents some of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world that advocate for market-based solutions to climate change, including CCS. After returning to CARB, Welch stayed until 2021 when he joined Caliber Strategies and became the director of the California Carbon Solutions Coalition that advocates for CCS and other carbon capture technologies. It became a client of Caliber in 2023. Oil companies were behind the coalition in an earlier form, according to the Energy and Policy Institute.
  
  
• Jon Costantino was a climate change planning manager at CARB involved in the creation of the 2008 blueprint for how California would meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets that identified Cap-and-Trade as a central strategy. He left CARB in 2010 and founded the lobbying firm Tradesman Advisors six years later. In the 2023-2024 legislative cycle, Tradesman Advisors represented the Verified Emissions Reduction Association (VERA) that Costantino also directs. The trade association represents developers of carbon offsets and has developed an applicable framework for CCS. Tradesman has represented Phillips 66, lobbying CARB on Cap-and-Trade in the last legislative cycle. The firm also lobbied CARB on Cap-and Trade for VERA in that 2023-24 cycle.
  
  
• The same story has been repeated in CARB's Low Carbon Fuel Standard program that sets declining carbon intensity targets for transportation fuels and features tradable credits based on how much an alternative fuel reduces carbon intensity. Richard Corey was CARB Executive Officer at CARB for several years prior to leaving in 2022. While still at CARB, he was a booster at conferences and public hearings for oil refiners Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66 when they sought to convert their Bay Area gasoline refineries to run on animal fats and vegetable oils. He then joined AJW that represents World Energy, an alternative jet and commercial vehicle fuel refiner based in Los Angeles County that uses inedible agricultural waste, fats, oils, and greases. When biofuels are burned, they are still polluting.

When standards are tightened in under the LCFS or Cap-and-Trade programs, prices go up for consumers as companies pass on the rising costs of compliance. "These sorts of conflicts of interest explain why policies at CARB are skewed to delay a transition to a zero-carbon economy as long as possible," the letter concludes. "It's not fair for consumers to be paying for that. It's why, on its merits, CCS should not be rolled into Cap-and-Trade. We urge you to ensure that it does not happen."

SOURCE Consumer Watchdog