CHC wrote in February about a challenge to California's cap-and-trade law that came not from Big Oil, but from the environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment. Yesterday, the state Air Resources Board announced that it would delay its proposed cap and trade program until the issues raised in the lawsuit — specifically, that alternatives to cap and trade weren't fully vetted. Gallegos took a moment to give us his reaction to what appeared to be a David victory over Goliath.

What's your reaction to Mary Nichols announcement that the California Air Resources Board would delay the cap and trade program? 

Our initial reading of this is that it doesn’t mean a lot. It doesn’t seem to be very substantive. There are no benchmarks set for 2012 anyway. They say they’re not going to enforce them — well, enforce what?

It also sounds like they’re going ahead with what has been their plan all along. Why go full-speed ahead and then do an alt analysis unless you’re plan is to ignore the alternatives analysis; it seems like the alternatives analysis is pro forma. So we’re not exactly dancing in the streets.

Would the Communities Benefit Fund resolve your concerns with cap and trade?

No. We don’t want that money to come from pollution trading. That’s like saying as long as you give our communities some money, you can go ahead and create pollution hotspots. You can’t pay us off that way. But if it came from a carbon tax or carbon fee or carbon fine that would be okay. You may be able to price carbon you can’t price peoples lives.

If people have been creating this pollution for all these years, they should be paying to help us clean up. They should pay for the cleanup not to the right to pollute. As we see it there is no right to pollute.

By holding up the state's best effort to slow greenhouse gas emissions, are you cutting off your nose to spite your face?

AB32, despite what some of the media is putting out there, does not mandate a cap and trade program. There are 68 other measures in the AB32 scoping plan and those should go full-speed ahead. But 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are industrial, so they better get that right.

And who lives by those industrial plants? It’s people of color. Part of AB32 implementation was an environmental justice committee to make sure these communities don’t get hurt—and it’s just possible they could benefit. We think cap and trade could hurt them, and that’s at odds with what AB32 said. 

We really want AB32 to work. We didn’t bust our butts to defeat prop 23 because we don’t want AB32 to work.

Isn’t cap and trade our best bet at limiting carbon emissions? 

Who says there’s agreement on that? Friends of the Earth doesn’t agree with it. The environmental justice community is in consensus with disagreeing with it. The political expedient was that Schwarzenegger wanted it. And the legislature, many didn’t understand that there was a better alternative.

The political moment is more in our favor now. We’d like the governor to say this is problematic — in Europe, there’s been fraud and cheating the system, and increase in emissions and consumer prices are higher — let’s put it on hold and explore better alternatives.

It’s not cap and trade or the abyss; it’s cap and trade or something better.

Speaking this week at the Games for Change Festival, Al Gore said that when you empower women with not only education, but also access to contraception, women can choose how many children to have and when to have them. Child survival rates improve, family sizes decrease and population growth slows. 

Radical concept?  Apparently for some, as reports Lisa Hymas at Grist. Here are some facts:

• Some 215 million women throughout the developing world want, but do not have access to, modern methods of contraception. This leads to an estimated 76 million unintended pregnancies and 20 million unsafe abortions each year.

• Hundreds of thousands of women succumb to mostly preventable maternal deaths each year. Hundreds of thousands more women are injured during pregnancy, with tens of thousands facing the tragedies of obstetric fistulae or unsafe abortions.

• Over the next decade, an estimated 100 million girls will marry before their 18th birthday, placing them at great risk of domestic violence, HIV infection and early pregnancy.

• AIDS is the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age, and maternal mortality is the leading killer of women aged 15–19 years throughout the world.

Women are healthier and have fewer children when they are educated, empowered and equipped to determine the number and spacing of their children.  Fewer children means greater access by all household members to food, education and health care, which contributes to healthier children who survive at higher rates. Healthier children and empowered girls go to school, marry later and contribute more to the development of their societies and economies. They, in turn, tend to have fewer children, which contributes to slower population growth rates.

And in countries that face food, water and fuel shortages, slower growth rates means less pressure on the environment and greater chances for women and children to survive and thrive.

These are basic, logical and concepts that the international community has known for decades. Nothing controversial here, folks.

In fact, Gore seemed to take great care to not be controversial. He didn’t, for example, make the connection between population growth rates and climate change that some claim he did, perhaps recognizing that the connection between population dynamics and greenhouse gas emissions is highly complex: As Brian O’Neill and others have found, it has more to do with population growth and movement in a handful of countries (the U.S., China and India) than with global growth rates. (See, for example, here and here.)

Empowering, educating and providing for the basic reproductive health of women and girls around the world: Good for women, good for the community. I’m all for it, Al!