California pledged to reduce carbon emissions with AB 32, but the devil is in the details.

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As it releases its early action measures, CARB and its new board chairwoman Mary Nichols propose increasingly strict regulatory measures. The agency doesn’t appear to be folding under pressure from stakeholders.

The $3.5 billion Salinas Valley farming industry relies heavily on stationary diesel engines, to pump water, for example, says Bob Perkins, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. One of CARB’s proposed early action measures considers “electrification” of these engines. Perkins says stationary farm engines do not get the heavy use that cargo trucks do. This, he says, means the engines can last decades.

Perkins also says farmers already are frustrated with “still-evolving rules” on diesel engines. “They don’t want to be told, ‘You have to buy an engine next year and, by the way, a couple of years later you’re going to need to buy another engine to replace it,’ ” Perkins says.

Darlene Din, an agricultural land use consultant who works with local farm businesses, says one of her big concerns is that solutions for one set of regulations (for example: state rules) are going to be prohibited by another (such as the feds). “We’ve historically put a lot of energy into [negotiating between agencies] and then the big dog kind of ignored us,” she says. And her fear is that AB 32 will lead to one more set of conflicting regulations.

New industries, however, see a potential boon in AB 32.

Rich Gillis, chief executive officer of Energy Alternative Solutions, Inc. (EASI), built his Gonzales-based company around a “community-based closed-loop” model. Gillis’ fledgling company makes biofuel out of restaurant grease to the tune of 144,000 pounds a week, picked up, in part, by Salinas Tallow from a host of local, grease-recycling restaurants: Rio Grill, Tarpy’s, Montrio’s, Willy’s Smokehouse, Whole Foods, Phil’s Fish Market, Lollapalooza and Elli’s Great American Restaurants.

“Part of the closed-loop system,” Gillis says, “is that a good portion of the fuel that we’re making will rotate itself back into the community.” Salinas Tallow uses “BioEASI” in their trucks. EASI’s latest move will be to start producing biodiesel on the property of its main distributor, Coast Oil Co. “We won’t need as much product finished storage because we can take our piping and run it into their diesel tanks above ground and they can blend it and it will come out of the pump,” Gillis says.

One of the regulatory fine points that matter to Gillis is that alternative fuels – not just fossil fuels – be evaluated for greenhouse gas reduction on the basis of their “cradle–to-grave” lifecycle. Gillis says a biodiesel fuel made from local feedstocks – local grease, in the case of EASI – should be favored over shipped-in products made from soy or palm.

Gillis would like to involve local farmers in the biofuels production loop. “We’re talking to farmers every chance we get,” he says. But he doesn’t expect local farmers to jump at the chance to grow fuel feedstocks like canola and safflower because crops in Salinas Valley’s $1.5 billion lettuce industry or its $500 million strawberry industry simply are more lucrative. Instead, Gillis envisions collaborations and “joint ventures,” where, for example, seeds crushed to render their oil can be worked into a meal for ranchers to mix in pig or cow feed.

“You have to have a farmer or a group of farmers involved in the production of biodiesel in multiple ways,” he says.