California ditched coal; is gas next?

LOS ANGELES _ Every day, millions of Californians burn a planet-warming fossil fuel to cook dinner, stay warm or take a hot shower.

Persuading people to stop using that fuel, natural gas, is shaping up to be the next act in California's war on climate change.

And unlike the state's successful push to ditch coal _ which mostly affected out-of-state mines and power plants, and was relatively painless for California residents and businesses _ early efforts to phase out gas are already facing pushback from a powerful homegrown company.

Southern California Gas Co., which serves nearly 22 million people from the Central Valley to the U.S.-Mexico border, is determined to prevent a future without gas from coming to pass, even if it may not arrive for years or decades. The utility has begun a sweeping campaign to preserve the role of its pipelines in powering society _ an outcome critics say would undermine California's efforts to fight climate change.

In city council chambers across Southern California, SoCalGas is working to convince officials that policies aimed at replacing gas with electricity would be wildly unpopular. More than 100 cities and counties have endorsed the company's push for "balanced energy solutions" _ a powerful base of support that it can use as leverage in the coming years as it fights potential laws and regulations that might diminish demand for its product.

Behind the scenes, the gas company has funded a self-styled grass-roots advocacy group pushing the same agenda. The company is also one of the funders of a national trade group's pro-natural gas campaign, which includes a public relations blitz targeting millennials and support for Trump administration regulatory overhauls.

"I don't think anyone's as threatened by what we need to do to save the planet as SoCalGas," said Matt Vespa, an attorney with the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, who has represented the Sierra Club in regulatory battles with the gas company.

In some ways, SoCalGas has no choice but to fight for self-preservation _ it's a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy, a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to serve shareholders. But it's also a legally sanctioned monopoly subject to oversight from California lawmakers and regulators, who expect the gas company and other investor-owned utilities to help the state achieve its climate change goals.

With those overseers in mind, the gas company argues that it's offering a solution to the climate crisis.

SoCalGas wants to use organic waste from dairy farms, landfills and sewage treatment plants to produce biomethane, also known as renewable gas. The Los Angeles-based company says it can solve two problems at once, limiting heat-trapping methane emissions from those facilities and reducing its own climate effects by replacing some of the natural gas in its system with renewable gas.

The utility is already injecting small amounts of renewable gas into its pipelines, and is working to add more.

"We have pipelines. We want them to be used and useful," SoCalGas executive George Minter said in an interview earlier this year. Many clean energy advocates say renewable gas faces serious long-term hurdles. They see the substitute fuel as a dangerous dead end _ a promotional ploy meant to distract Californians from the incompatibility of the gas company's business model with the need to eliminate planet-warming emissions.

For investors in the gas company's corporate parent, Sempra Energy, there's a lot of money on the line. Revenue from residential sales at SoCalGas was nearly $2.3 billion in 2017, according to the American Gas Association _ the second-most of any utility on the association's list, after Pacific Gas & Electric.