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AP News: California air regulators update a key climate program, sparking pushback from environmentalists
May 30, 2026—In a nationally republished story, AP News reporter Sophie Austin covered a press conference on California’s landmark Cap-and-Invest vote where Public Advocates Director of Legislative Affairs Michelle Pariset spoke to the heart of what’s at stake. The California Air Resources Board approved sweeping changes to the state’s signature climate program on May 29, including a new incentive program giving away up to $3.5 billion in free allowances to manufacturers and oil refiners, a move advocates like Pariset say will gut the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that bankrolls transit, housing, and climate programs in underserved communities. Pariset put a human face on the numbers: “these are the investments that determine whether a student can get to school, whether a senior can reach a doctor, whether a family can live near reliable transit.”
Since 2014, Public Advocates has worked to allocate Cap-and-Trade (now Cap-and-Invest) revenues for the benefit of underserved populations, particularly in the areas of affordable housing and transit. These revenues, in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund, generate $1 billion annually for affordable housing and transit. Appropriations to the housing and transit programs have already resulted in the avoidance of 13.1 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the removal of more than 400,000 cars from the road, and the creation of more than 20,000 new affordable homes since 2014.
In 2025, we helped win the extension of those programs as part of the renewal of the renamed Cap and Invest program.
But this year, things changed when two refineries threatened to leave the state.