Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, September 4, 2025…

At the state capitol, negotiations are heating up over California’s signature program to fight climate change. It’s called cap and trade, and the state uses it to cap greenhouse gas emissions. But the program expires in 2030, and lawmakers are debating how to extend the program amid rising energy costs and concerns about the closure of oil refineries.
California, Oregon, and Washington are forming a health alliance to issue their own vaccine recommendations. The move comes in response to the Trump administration’s changing vaccine guidance.
A major new immigration detention facility has quietly opened in California’s Mojave Desert. But advocates say the private prison company that owns it has not obtained permits to operate.

Affordability Concerns At Center Of Cap-And-Trade Renewal Debate

When California’s flagship climate program was last reauthorized in 2017, the biggest champions of cap-and-trade were looking to the future. “This isn’t for me, I’ll be dead,” then-Gov. Jerry Brown thundered at a panel of state senators, as negotiations intensified that summer. Brown’s goal was to forge a bipartisan coalition to limit planet-warming emissions, balancing the concerns of environmentalists and industry to solidify California’s global leadership and avoid the worst climate damages he foresaw: vector disease, mass migrations, and “Southern California burning up.”

Eight years later, the costs of climate change have arrived. Intense wildfires are driving up the price of electricity and home insurance for Californians already struggling with affordability. Climate-fueled costs have injected a new dynamic into negotiations over extending cap-and-trade before the legislative session ends Sept. 12. The program raises billions of dollars every year from polluters, and Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers are debating ways to use that money to lower the costs of a warming state and follow through on their post-election promises to prioritize affordability.

Negotiations to extend cap-and-trade to 2045 have moved slowly behind closed doors for much of the year. The program is complex, and just 21 of the state’s 120 legislators were in office for the last reauthorization vote. But the talks have become more urgent as auction returns earlier this year faltered, reflecting uncertainty about the future of the program.

Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, a Democrat from Ventura County, introduced a plan from Assembly Democrats to extend the program. To make electricity more affordable, Irwin is proposing a revamp of the California Climate Credit. The credit is currently paid to utility ratepayers twice a year, typically in April and October. PG&E customers, for example, receive two credits of $58.23 this year, regardless of power usage. Utilities pay for the program by auctioning off free cap-and-trade allowances granted by the state. Irwin’s plan would shift the credit to the hotter summer months, when Californians run air conditioning. The proposal would also integrate the credit directly into bills based on usage rather than providing lump-sum payments. “People that have the highest utility bills, people that are in hot areas that don’t necessarily have solar or battery backup, people that have lower incomes are going to see the biggest decrease in their bills during those summer months,” Irwin said.

In Rebuke Of RFK Jr., The West Coast Unites On Vaccine Policy

Leaders in California, Oregon and Washington are teaming up to issue their own vaccine recommendations in response to the Trump administration’s inconsistent guidance.

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“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk,” the states’ governors said Wednesday in a joint statement.

The announcement comes amid growing turmoil related to public health in Washington. President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have fired or replaced top Centers for Disease Control officials, stripped away vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and children, replaced every member on the federal immunization committee and slashed funding for mRNA research.

The three Democratic governors offered few specifics on how the partnership, called the Western Health Alliance, might shape which vaccines are available in their states. For now, they say the coalition will lean on medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics to guide its recommendations.

California’s Newest Immigration Facility Is Also Its Biggest. Is It Operating Legally?

A new immigration detention facility has quietly opened in California’s Mojave Desert, even though the private prison company that owns it may lack the permits to operate.

The California City Detention Facility in Kern County is set to become the largest immigration detention center in the state, with a capacity of 2,560 beds. It’s part of the Trump administration’s push for a massive expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention nationally.

The reopened prison in California City, a small town 100 miles north of Los Angeles, would significantly increase ICE’s ability to hold immigrants for deportation in the state. For most of the past year, ICE has held roughly 3,600 people a day on average across its six other California facilities.

CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based private prison company which owns and operates the facility, confirmed it has begun receiving ICE detainees but would not say when it started to do so. Lawyers for detained immigrants say they first heard last week that clients were being transferred from other locations to California City.

Immigrant rights advocates who oppose the facility claim CoreCivic is operating without proper permits and in defiance of a state law that requires 180 days’ public notice and two public meetings before a local government can issue a permit allowing a private company to run an immigration jail.

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