Originally shared by John Baez
We don’t need to turn the earth into a hell
Imagine that after the Twin Towers fell on 9-11, all the stories were about the heroic firefighters, and almost nobody talked about the cause: Al Qaeda.
Now imagine that a whole city had been ruined.
That’s what’s happening in Houston.
We know the extremely hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico made Harvey into a “1000-year hurricane”, one that would happen very rarely if we weren’t turning the earth into a hell.
Meanwhile, this Friday in San Francisco the temperature reached 106 Fahrenheit, or 41 C. Locals were astounded, because the average high at this time is, or was, just 70 Fahrenheit (or 21 C).
And down near where I live, the heat wave has helped feed a huge fire in Burbank California — see the picture. I imagine one guy saying to another “Look, we’re in hell! See the sinners being roast alive over there?”
In California we don’t want to stand idly by while the world goes to hell. Our state is only responsible for 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, but we’re trying to pioneer new ways of living that other places can copy. It’s a big experiment:
Last August, the State Legislature set a goal of slashing emissions more than 40 percent below today’s levels by 2030, a far deeper cut than President Barack Obama proposed for the entire United States and deeper than most other countries have contemplated.
So how will California pull this off?
On Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law expanding the state’s cap-and-trade program, which is expected to play a big role. But cutting greenhouse gases this deeply will involve more than cap and trade. The state plans to rethink every corner of its economy, from urban planning to dairy farms.
No one knows yet if it can succeed. “You can think of California as a giant laboratory” for climate action, said Severin Borenstein of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
And the experiment has reached an interesting stage:
Until now, most states have followed a standard playbook for curbing emissions. Market forces have replaced older coal plants with cheaper and cleaner natural gas, while state mandates have added modest shares of wind and solar power to the grid. As a result, domestic carbon dioxide emissions have fallen 14 percent since 2005 at relatively little cost.
But California has now plucked most of that low-hanging fruit. The state’s emissions are nearly back to 1990 levels, it barely uses any coal and it has installed as many solar panels as the rest of the country combined. Per capita, California has the third-lowest emissions in the nation, after New York and the District of Columbia, which means further cuts will come less easily than they would for a state like Texas.
“Each additional increment of carbon reduction is tougher than the previous one,” said Dan Reicher, director of the Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford. He added, “California will have to reach deeper into the bag of technologies” to cut emissions from more stubborn polluters like oil refineries and cement plants.
In January, California’s Air Resources Board, which has broad latitude to carry out the state’s climate laws, detailed one possible strategy for cutting emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
First, by law, California must get 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, up from 25 percent today. That’s a herculean task in itself: The state is already straining to cope with sharp swings in solar power during afternoons and will soon have to juggle ever-larger shares of intermittent renewable electricity, by deploying batteries, reworking its grid or taking other novel approaches.
Second, the board envisioned the number of electric cars and other zero-emissions vehicles on California’s roads rising to 4.2 million by 2030 from 250,000 today. Freight trucks would have to become more efficient or electrified, while cities would need to adopt far-reaching strategies to promote mass transit, biking and walking.
But a major push on renewable power and transportation would get California just one-fourth of the way toward its goal. Other cuts would come from doubling efficiency savings from buildings and industry, no mean feat in a state that already has some of the strictest building codes in the country. The state would also need to lower the carbon content of its gasoline supply under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, possibly by increasing biofuel use.
One-third of the reductions in the proposal would come from curbing climate pollutants other than carbon dioxide, including hydrofluorocarbons from air-conditioners and methane from landfills, wastewater facilities and manure piles at dairy farms. No state has ever regulated agriculture so aggressively, and dairy farmers are pushing back, warning that capturing methane from millions of cows could prove untenable.
In its proposal, the board emphasized that some of these strategies may not pan out — for instance, the Trump administration could block California’s move to force automakers to build more zero-emissions vehicles. Other regulations might reduce emissions less than anticipated, especially if California’s economy grows faster than expected.
So, as a complement to these efforts, Mr. Brown insisted on expanding another major program: cap and trade.
It’s gonna take work, but at least we’re trying!
We might get a big extra boost if self-driving electric cars revolutionize the auto industry and kill demand for petroleum… but I’ll save that story for another day.
The big quote is from here:
• Brad Plumer, Just how far can California possibly go on climate?, New York Times, 26 July 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/climate/california-climate-policy-cap-trade.html