This week we talk about fuel efficiency, the California EPA, and Scope 3.We also discuss the EU’s emission reporting efforts, regulations, and business incentives.Recommended Book: Undue Hate by Daniel F. StoneTranscriptThe California Air Resources Board, or CARB, is a California government agency that resulted from the 1967 merging of the state's Bureau of Air Sanitation and its Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board. It's part of California's larger Environmental Protection Agency, and its purpose is to make the air cleaner, healthier, and as free of toxins as possible.Falling under that remit is the setting of vehicle emissions standards: the minimum miles-per-gallon of fuel efficiency vehicles must offer in order to be sold in the state. And California is the only state that's allowed to set such standards, as the federal US government is generally the setter of such things—but the Clean Air Act of 1967 allows the state to get permission to set its own standards from the US government, and then as long as the EPA doesn't find their standards arbitrary or broadly inconsistent with the goals of the US's ambitions, and as long as they're more ambitious than the US's standards for such things, they must grant that permission.The CARB only has 16 total members, two of whom are there just for oversight purposes, so they don't have voting powers, and 12 of the remaining 14 are appointed by the governor of California, and are then confirmed by the state senate. Each of these members are different sorts of air and pollution experts from different regions across the state, except for two members of the public and one person who serves as the Chair of the group.This group, though small and relatively humble in terms of the powers granted to them, and resources allotted, has an out of proportion influence because other states can choose to adopt the vehicle fuel standards they set, instead of those set by the US government. And that's important, because California's fuel standards, since 2009, at least, when they won a court case that confirmed their ability to do this, tend to be more ambitious than those set by the federal EPA; the states that choose to use California's standards are often referred to as CARB states, and there are 16 of them, inclusive of California, as of the 2025 regulatory year.This capability was temporarily truncated in 2019, when then-President Trump decided to take away California's right to set such standards, and the right to set up other popular—in California and other CARB states—programs, like the ZEV mandate, standing for Zero-Emissions Vehicle mandate, which basically said a certain percentage of fleet vehicles had to be zero-emissions vehicles, the percentage increasing each year—he wanted to take the right to set such things away, saying, in essence, a state government shouldn't be able to do so. This rule was reverse in mid-2021, which gave California back that power to set standards, and though many carmakers, including Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and BMW stuck with California's earlier standards, even after they were no longer legally required to do so, because of Trump's actions, seventeen states sued the EPA in 2022, saying, basically, that because California's standards have such a huge impact on how vehicles are developed and sold, car companies adhering to them even when not legally required to do so, because they want to keep selling their cars in California, it unfairly gives them power over the industry that other states don't enjoy. That lawsuit, Ohio v. EPA, is ongoing, but California's influence in this and many other industries—especially in climate-related spaces—continues for the time being.What I'd like to talk about today is a recent piece of legislation passed by the California government that could have even bigger and broader implications for corporations across the United States, and around the world.—California's Senate Bill 253, also called SB 253, also called the Climate Corpora