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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center and I'm joined by Alicia Hamann, executive director of Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Alicia.

ALICIA HAMANN:

Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

I'm joined by Caroline Griffith, executive director of the North Coast Environmental Center.

CAROLINE GRIFFITH:

Hi, Tom, and hey, everybody out there in radio land.

WHEELER:

Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. And we are joined by an extra special guest, congressman Jared Huffman.

JARED HUFFMAN:

Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

Well, thank you for coming. So, congressman, you have some wild new colleagues. I feel like perhaps now do you have any stories to tell about George Santos? Have you, have you interacted with the man?

HUFFMAN:

Not interacted directly, but we all watched him on the House floor. We want to see who he's sitting with, who's who he's trying to make friends with, who would even allow him near them. And it's fascinating because he's like kind of starting to make friends with some people and it's exactly the ones you would think. Yeah. Matt Gaetz...

WHEELER:

Yeah. What a surprise, surprise. So in the interest of bipartisanship, who would be your, your best Republican friends in Congress? Because your, your former -- was it a housemate? -- the Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke, ... weren't you friends with another Republican Texas Congressman. Well, Beto was not a Republican. But yeah,

HUFFMAN:

No, I've been friends with a number of Republicans but didn't didn't live with them.

WHEELER:

Okay, that's a bridge too far. But who's, who's your favorite favorite Republican in Congress these days?

HUFFMAN:

You know, I don't want to necessarily put one at the top, but I have, I have really strangely productive relationships with a number of them. I'm sort of frenemies with Garret Graves of Louisiana. We lock horns quite a bit on climate debates and other things. He hates California. He acts like he hates California, but he will quietly tell you that he has hiked and camped on the North Coast and the Lost Coast and I think he kind of likes it actually, but he trashes it all the time and we, we have pitched battles and yet text each other and we can go out to dinner and we actually found a fisheries bill to do together. So it's, it's weird.

WHEELER:

That is weird. So I wanted to start off by talking about all the legislation that you've put forward in recent years that seeks to advance tribal sovereignty. We have the Karuk Sacred Ancestral Lands -- or something like that -- Act, the Yurok Lands Act. What is your driving passion behind working with Native American Tribes and trying to advance tribal sovereignty here on the North Coast?

HUFFMAN:

Well, what I especially like about the lands issues we get to work on up here is it's not about someone trying to score an urban casino that will make them fabulously rich to the detriment of their neighboring tribe. That's what a lot of the many of the urban and metropolitan areas with these land battles are often about that up here. In so many cases, it's, it's just about restoring, you know, some semblance of justice and sovereignty to these lands that were taken away and for really nice, authentic reasons now that that Karuk bill was because that's the place they believe is the center of the universe. That's where they do their world renewal ceremonies every year and they've had to beg for permits from the Forest Service to to do it. Which is just crazy.

WHEELER:

Yeah, give us the 30 second explanation of that.

HUFFMAN:

Well, the bill will return a few 100 acres to the correct tribe right on the Klamath River, an area called Academy. And I think there's another indian name the second, Thank you and now you're just showing off. But that was good. And I've been there and seen these beautiful places and what do they want to do with this land? They want to continue to catch salmon and have ceremonial traditions and treat the land so that it doesn't burn because they know how to take care of it with their ancestral ways. And so it's, it's just, it's, it's a wonderful bill. There's just nothing wrong with it at all and why it's taken so long to get this land back to them. I don't understand.

GRIFFITH:

My question about this is about funding, because one thing that we've heard from a lot of tribal entities is that absolutely they do, would would like to have these lands back to manage them, but they often lack the resources and the funding to be able to do that. Are there any mechanisms that you see federally to help while while turning these lands over to also establish funding sources or to give a commensurate amount of funding that would have been used because many of them are coming from federal lands anyway ... to shift that over?

HUFFMAN:

It's a fair question and that will probably, you know, it'll be a case by case situation. There's all sorts of land that might have resource management value if it's if it's done right and and can be done sustainably. There is housing and other economic development that sometimes goes along with land transfers. But yeah, I think tribes will have to sort that out for themselves when they decide what land they want to take into trust and get back and make sure that they can sustain it once that happens. Alicia, you're gonna ask me about the Eel River?

HAMANN:

You know, I was actually gonna ask you about another very special river because we get to talk about the Eel all the time. And I mean, yes, I would love to hear your thoughts on the Eel. You know, I have equal love many rivers and I was thinking about the Smith. I was just reading recently about the Senate bill to expand the National Recreation Area. And you know, in the spirit of bipartisanship. And you were talking about fisheries earlier, can you tell me if there's gonna be a companion legislation in the Senate or what your thoughts are on that particular movement?

HUFFMAN:

I think there will be, I can't remember if it was Senator Merkley or Wyden, but I thought there was Oregon senatorial interest in this. So I work with both of them on these issues all the time. I've got a new colleague in the house in southern Oregon, Val Hoyle, who I'm just getting to know, I haven't had a chance to talk to her about this yet, but her predecessor Peter DeFazio was great, was a real champion. So I think things are lined up pretty well.

HAMANN:

Wonderful. Well, while I've got your attention on fisheries, what do you think about the progress that's being made on Eel River dam removal? And you know, I kind of keep really touting this optimistic perspective that if everybody sticks to their, you know, sticks to their work and really makes it happen. We could see dams out by 2030. Am I crazy?

HUFFMAN:

I don't think you're crazy. And I want to commend you Alicia and your colleagues and Friends of the Eel for the way you have engaged in a really smart, certainly firm and outcome-oriented way, but a smart way. And you know, the, the fact that Friends of the Eel and other Eel River interests are saying we will go along with a continued diversion into the Russian river basin for those stakeholders who have come to depend on that water over the last 100 years, if we can get these dams removed, that is a really practical and reasonable position and it's something that we ought to be able to build a two basin solution around. So I thank you for that. I'm trying to take that and run with it. But the politics in the Russian River basin are a little bit tricky because some people don't fully understand that Scott Dam is not even a water supply dam That it was there, it was created just so that hydropower could be more profitable 12 months of the year. And since it's not gonna be ever making hydropower again, and our studies show that a run of the river diversion can provide enough water for the Russian River basin to meet its needs. We've just got a lot of educating to do. I, I think in that part of my district.

HAMANN:

Yeah, well as ever, we're just really appreciative of your leadership and the unique position that you're in representing folks on both sides of the, of the divide, so to speak or, or rather on, you know, opposite ends of this shared giant water system that we're finding ourselves in.

HUFFMAN:

But you asked, you know, how we're doing and where we are, this is going to start moving really fast and I'm not sure everybody appreciates that. We will have a draft surrender/decommissioning plan from PG&E in a few months. It's not that far away. So it's about to get very real. And you know, my hope is that the work we've done these past several years, pulling the stakeholders from both basins together, having the conversations doing the studies that, that provides a foundation that can get us to a solution.

FISKE:

Okay. I'm going to take us on a bit of a hard turn here. So obviously you're a champion of climate action and I know that you've worked a lot on vehicle electrification bills and also that you've been able to secure some funding for public transit and for complete streets projects. So it seems like you have a pretty complete picture of all of the measures that are necessary to get us to a decarbonized transportation system, and there's a lot going on right now. The administration recently released its blueprint for decarbonization. I was just wondering what you see coming coming down the pike, so to speak, in Washington.

HUFFMAN:

So we got a lot done in the last Congress and you know, a lot has been said, there's been a lot of back-patting and celebrating of the Inflation Reduction Act and some other things were able to get done. You know, it came with some trade-offs that we will have to navigate going forward. There's still way too much fossil fuel business as usual built into these things. But I think I can sort of accept that what we got in return is such a transformational, potentially transformational shift in industrial policy in this country and transportation policy, if we if we stick with it that it's worth it that we can continue to navigate the rotten stuff that we had to accept in those deals because we're going to be really changing the paradigm. Finally, so that's I think that is right. But they're gonna be some very significant efforts to pull us back. And you see Joe Manchin starting to do that, already kind of furious that the administration is is not taking a really tough line on these sourcing standards that he put into that bill for E. V. Batteries and components and that they are allowing commercial fleet,s for example, to be exempted from some of those sourcing and materials standards in a way that will allow foreign E. V. S to at least have part of the U. S. Market in the near term. That's making Joe Manchin crazy. And of course he continues to push this so-called permitting reform, which is not about reforming permits for clean energy transmission and other things that we need to move faster. It's really about fossil fuel infrastructure. So we got a lot of fights ahead and some of the ways in which he has opened up fossil fuel leasing in places that we shouldn't have fossil fuel leasing will be, will be something we'll need to fight against. The willow project in Alaska, all the offshore stuff that he's mandating that we go through at least the motions of having auctions. And we're gonna have to, you know, litigate and be ready to undo some of that politically when we can win a few more elections. But that's sort of the landscape as I see it, it's a lot better than it was a couple of years ago. But there are all kinds of pitfalls and they'll be significant. We're gonna stay vigilant because the attempts to roll us back are gonna continue well through the rest of this Congress.

HAMANN:

When it comes to navigating some, some of the nasty stuff as you so eloquently put it like offshore leasing for oil and stuff -- is that gonna be happening at the state level? Or do you see opportunities for that too? For that fight to happen at the federal level?

HUFFMAN:

Well, the auctions will be done by the Department of Interior. So I would hope that states who don't want to see this oil and gas development would be part of the pushback and litigation if necessary, but we just can't extract and burn all of this fossil fuel. If we're serious about meeting our goals here, we're gonna start leaving it in the ground. And that's what's so incongruent. We're doing these wonderful things on decarbonization, the power sector in the transportation sector and all these other things. And then we're opening up all this land, oil and gas development because joe Manchin says we have to that's the part we gotta not accept.

WHEELER:

Let's talk about one of the solutions for climate change, which is floating offshore wind. We have the Humboldt Wind Energy area -- very exciting, over two gigawatts worth of energy potential out there ready to be developed. There's gonna be a lot of work necessary to make that project reality though. We're going to have to have transmission infrastructure improvements. We're gonna have to have port infrastructure improvements -- what's going on in D. C. that we can't see in Humboldt County to get us federal money to make sure that this happens?

HUFFMAN:

Well, there's a lot of money for transmission that should be helpful in this process. I think what needs to happen in D.C ... We put put a billion dollars into the bipartisan infrastructure law to streamline clean energy permitting, including transmission lines, President Biden put an executive order in place to have all of this coordination and prioritization of these types of projects that in in a FECC that does some rule makings and uses its existing authority ought to be enough so that we can move our transmission and clean energy infrastructure projects faster.

HAMANN:

And I'm just going to butt in here for a moment to explain to everyone that is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

HUFFMAN:

It's an acronym, not a verb. Thank you for that. So, yeah. And they're currently operating without a chair because Joe Manchin, you know, one senator has incredible power to hold up confirmations and all kinds of things. He will not confirm uh the pending nomination of the chair of FERC. And so FERC is shorthanded, can't move forward in ways that we need them to. And Joe Manchin out of the other side of his mouth is saying, oh we can't move projects fast enough. We therefore have to go to and the Clean Water Act, all these other things. So he's he is very cynically creating a problem that he's now trying to kind of solve with this really disastrous, permitting reform. So called permitting reform legislation of his and I am going to be pushing in this Congress to try to just use the existing resources, the billion dollars and the existing authorities that we have to move things faster. We can do a lot to speed things up without doing violence to NEPA and the Clean Water Act.

WHEELER:

And we are back to the Econews Alright, so other propositions prop 30 which would have asked the mega rich to fund things like Alright, let's talk about Senate leadership. Who are you favoring to replace Diane Feinstein?

HUFFMAN:

I am endorsing Adam Schiff.

WHEELER:

All right, Adam Schiff. You've heard it here. I think first I think that this is the first time I know well, first time I heard it.

HUFFMAN:

The first time on radio in Humboldt County There we go.

WHEELER:

I love it. So why should...

HUFFMAN:

... your Pulitzer, Tom ...

WHEELER:

Yeah I know, right? I'm known for my journalistic skills.

HUFFMAN:

Look, I think Adam Schiff has just been tested and proven at a level that no one else has he as as our top democrat on the intel committee during the worst of the trump years was just you know, it was trial by fire and he was so good lead impeachment manager in the first of the trump impeachments, did a phenomenal job and is just an all around serious and thoughtful guy. So I think he's ready to be a great U. S. Senator, not a knock on anyone else, but I just don't think anyone else has met that kind of test as amazingly as Adam has.

WHEELER:

What about a second Biden term. Are you encouraging the president to run again?

HUFFMAN:

He's not asking my opinion on this, believing and it's amazing that he wouldn't, but apparently he's going to make this decision without me and like everyone else, I'm just hope let's let's get it over with, let's hurry up and make the decision so that we can know right if he's if he really wants to run, notwithstanding his advanced age and all the ugliness that he will surely face in a re election campaign. I'm ready to close ranks and try to help him win and I think all of us will need to do that if he doesn't want to run, we got to figure out who's going to run and win on the democratic side and there's a deep bench, there's a lot of talent there, but I would like to know.

WHEELER:

Okay, what did you think of his State of the Union? You gave your own kind of mini state of the union? What what what about the President's,

HUFFMAN:

Let me just share with you a little perspective on that in the room. It didn't come across the same way as it did on TV. It's just kind of weird that way. Some of it is acoustics. So, you know, Biden at times when he's speaking, can get very quiet and on television you're still hearing it all because the microphone is doing a great job of picking it up in the room. It sounds like he's mumbling and when the republicans were being really disorderly and unruly and just awful as they can be. There were times when it felt like he lost the rim and it was uncomfortable on television that didn't come across, he kind of owned him on television. And so look, the significance of State of the Union is for the television audience, not for like me sitting in the chamber and I was really pleased that for the audience that mattered. I think he had a great night and I think it was, it was a really strong state of the Union. I was good. You know, even in the chamber, I was good with the substance I was hearing. But I worried stylistically thankfully that was sort of in the room phenomenon.

WHEELER:

Well that's very interesting. I I imagine it was probably hard to hear him over Marjorie Taylor Greene just shouting over him,

HUFFMAN:

parking fascist slogans or whatever she was doing over there.

GRIFFITH:

I don't know if you haven't answered this, maybe Tom you do just you said that his State of the Union address was strong which reminded me that it ended with and it seems to always end with the president saying the State of the Union is strong. Do they ever not say that can't always be strong?

HUFFMAN:

The trademark twist on that this year I think was because the soul of our nation is strong because the backbone of our economy is strong, the State of the Union is strong. I thought that was kind of

GRIFFITH:

Yeah.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Well I I could go into a long diatribe about how the Chinese Communist Party suddenly shifts its language and those subtle shifts are always read in in D. C. For like these large pronouncements about where the chinese economy is gonna go. But we won't go there Truman the cat. Oh yes, we're getting two really important issues here. So you've given up your facebook and in its place we have your cat, Truman reminding us about important things like his love of lane in the sink and also kind of issues surrounding Big tech. So one interesting area of potential overlap of interest between republicans and democrats is the area of big tech. I wanted to get your thoughts on why you gave up your Facebook, why your cat is now there instead and potential areas for agreement in regulating.

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, well facebook, some other social media platforms I'm sure this would apply to. But Facebook has really gone to hell in the last few years I used to really value Facebook as a place where I could have really candid conversations with those who wanted to follow my feed and they would see it and I would throw stuff out Sometimes sometimes I would just vent and I would have interesting conversations with people, sometimes I would provide, just provide really what I thought was valuable information and people seem to appreciate it and they engaged back and it was, it was a pretty active place and it all just stopped. I don't know, a year or year and a half ago maybe they changed something about the algorithm. And so when I would post something that I thought was really important, I would take a long time to write this out. And I was gonna really put something big out there for people and I would see like three people view it. And then I would get a notice from Facebook that said, you know, you can boost this post for X dollars. I began to figure out what was going on there, just trying to charge you money to get to where you had always been before and squeeze a little more dollars out of their users. But I figured out that whenever I posted a picture of my cat Truman, I got the same old engagement. It boom, it was crazy. It went viral. So something about animal pictures that they weren't dampening with their algorithm and so I just decided to go all in and then I made my Facebook page congressman Huffman's cat Truman and I try to post cat pictures regularly to kind of keep the algorithm beating thing going. And it seems to work now

WHEELER:

Did you name your cat because Harry Truman was also a Missourian?

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, I grew up in independence, Missouri, which you history buffs will know is Harry Truman's hometown.

HAMANN:

All right, I mean for what it's worth. I think Truman has been doing a spectacular job getting the facts before the people on Facebook.

HUFFMAN:

He loves the attention. I bet he does.

WHEELER:

So unfortunately the Democrats -- maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately" because I'm not supposed to be partisan -- but the Democrats did not retain control of the House and you are back in the minority. What is that shift like from being the majority party to being back in the minority? Does your playbook change? Are you on the defense? Is it more fun? Is it less fun?

HUFFMAN:

Well, first while Republicans may have won the majority, you could debate whether they have control of the House. But your point is taken And the good news there is I've been in the minority before for my first what, six years? I think I was in the minority and I watched speaker John Boehner, speaker Paul Ryan and then thankfully Nancy Pelosi, once we won in 2018, it's a totally different experience when you are in the minority, you are completely at the mercy of the Republican chairs. In terms of what happens in committees, the entire agenda, you have no ability to call hearings or to get votes on your bills. So it's you you absolutely are a persecuted political class when you're in the minority and you become very defensive, especially if you have a Democratic president, Republicans very predictably. We'll just try to do everything they can to embarrass and malign the administration and your job kind of becomes too, if it's appropriate to defend the administration, I'm not gonna do it if they've done something dumb. But there's just a lot of politics behind what is, you know, supposed to be oversight and that's kind of the way the roles shift minority and majority.

WHEELER:

Do you prefer one to the other? Yeah. You like being in the majority?

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, you can guess which one I prefer. I like holding a gavel in my hand and being able to decide what happens in every one of my hearings of my subcommittee and being able to know that I have a fighting chance of getting a good piece of legislation actually voted out of committee and maybe even off the House floor. That is, it's none of that applies when I'm in the minority. I am really lucky if any of my bills see the light of day. And so yeah, I gotta work with Garret Graves from Louisiana and others in a very different way. Usually with their name first on any legislation we do together to have any chance of advancing

GRIFFITH:

Thinking about that that shift in power: Are there any especially environmental gains that have happened over the last few years that you think are particularly at risk now and things that we should be watching out for?

HUFFMAN:

Well, all of the things that we've done on clean energy are under the kind of threat that I discussed earlier because we have a Democratic Senate and the Biden administration for at least the next couple of years, we probably have backstops against the worst attacks on the endangered species act. And other things permitting reform is the one that scares me the most because I think President Biden and Chuck Schumer feel like they've made a deal with Joe Manchin and they really want to help Joe Manchin and I don't, I wasn't part of that deal and I don't want, it won't break my heart if he is voted out. He's a pretty rotten guy. So yeah, that that's probably the one that worries me the most.

FISKE:

Another thing that I've heard recently come up is raising the specter again of the Congressional Review Act. And I'm thinking in particular of this, what would normally be a kind of obscure piece of regulation around the spending of guidance for spending federal transportation dollars and whether it should prioritize fixing the roads before we build new highways or whether it should prioritize multimodal transportation. And apparently there's something of a fight brewing about this. I'm wondering if you'd heard much about that.

HUFFMAN:

I haven't, they're gonna do a Congressional Review Act, resolution on Transportation. I hadn't heard that, but it'll be coming through a committee I sit on so I will dig into it and we'll fight back. They might pass it out of the House probably will. But I'd be very surprised if that can make it through the Senate. And so I hope that that won't be a serious threat. They're also going to try to do it on this waters of the United States rulemaking, which we had a hearing on last week in transportation and infrastructure. And this is, it's just really shameful how they have lied about this issue. And it was so frustrating when the Obama administration waded in and tried to do a pretty sensible science based definition of what waters of the United States are. So we can actually have clean water enforcement and they carved out all kinds of exceptions for normal farming practices and other things. And we would sit in hearings and Gina McCarthy and others would explain it. They would show us the text that says, no, you will not have to get a permit to fix your fence or maintain your irrigation ditch. And I would come home and farmers in my district would be whipped into a panic by the farm Bureau and others who had convinced them that this was this overreaching thing that was going to put them out of business and they'd have to, every time they started their tractor, they were going to need a clean water permit. So it's just very discouraging and uh, it's, it's happening again. The Biden administration re upped this rulemaking and they're coming at it with the long knives under the congressional review ad that's one that I do worry about though, because there might be enough Democratic senators -- thinking of Jon Tester maybe some others -- they would join with them and then that it could actually pass.

HAMANN:

So fighting misinformation particularly along bipartisan lines is something that I think all of us here at the table are constantly dealing with. Do you have advice about good strategies and and ways to, you know, ways to really reach people and make sure they're getting accurate information.

HUFFMAN:

There's so many fact checking sources available now online and I think just having all of those at the ready is really helpful. But it's it's just gonna be a constant challenge for all of us. And I think it's important that our schools do some of the work in this regard, teach kids how to be critical thinkers, how to vet and check sources. I'm seeing that and some of the schools that I visit and it's really encouraging and that shouldn't be controversial. That shouldn't be like the De Santis fights in Florida or anything. Basic factual hygiene should not be a controversial thing. And if we can instill that you are part of the adult side of the continuum, you know, that's probably what it takes to push back.

HAMANN:

I really like that term. Basic factual hygiene. It's a lot more palatable than the class I took in high school, which was "theory of knowledge." Wonderful class, but basic factual hygiene...

WHEELER:

Sounds like you went to a much better high school than I did.

HUFFMAN:

I didn't have that class. We were, we were really fortunate. I was told, like, the Indians welcomed the pilgrims and all this stuff.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Gosh! All right congressman, we have to let you go. But before you go, what is your favorite place to go to eat when you come to Humboldt?

HUFFMAN:

Well, where we going, to the diver tonight, John? No, Brick and Fire.

WHEELER:

All right. Yeah, it's lovely. You're in my neighborhood.

HUFFMAN:

But you can't go wrong. The Waterfront. All kinds of places in Humboldt that are quite yummy. You're very fortunate to live in this beautiful place.

WHEELER:

We certainly are, and we're fortunate to have you as our congressman. So thank you so much, Congressman Huffman, for joining the EcoNews and for all you listening, join us again next week on this time in channel for more environmental news from the north coast of California.