WCI & Cap-and-Invest read from the facility records up.

01 · California · 25 Aug 2026

California’s covered emissions fell 26%. Its carbon price sat at the floor for eight of the first nine years.

Cap-and-invest was reauthorised to 2045 last September. We decomposed the 2013–2024 reduction across 11,204 facility-years of CARB records. Electricity and fuel delivered 87% of it, both under mandates that bind independently of the allowance price — and in industry, where the price stands closest to alone, 62% of the fall was plants closing.

02 · California · 27 Aug 2026

California repealed its electric vehicle mandate. Its fuel market absorbs the consequence.

The zero-emission vehicle rule is gone; the LCFS is not. Every electric vehicle that now does not get sold is a block of LCFS credits that never gets generated and a block of deficits that never stops being generated — and the bank is what absorbs the difference until it cannot.

03 · California · 11 Sep 2026

California gave RNG four separate end dates. Which ones bind a project depends on when it breaks ground.

The 2024 LCFS amendments changed four elements of RNG crediting, and each one runs to a different date. Which of them apply turns on a single term — break ground — that the regulation defines by reference to the federal investment tax credit, so a project’s LCFS treatment is set by a tax rule written for another purpose.

04 · California · 18 Sep 2026

California put offsets under the cap. Each one used for compliance now retires an allowance from the next year’s budget.

The amendments CARB adopted on 29 May took effect on 1 September 2026. The programme now runs to 2045 under the Cap-and-Invest name, 118 million allowances come out of the 2027–2030 budgets as an inventory correction, and every offset credit used for compliance now retires an equivalent allowance from the following year’s budget.