California's tipping point – watts?

Roger Kayaza

I recently published an article describing how Jennifer Hernandez and Lauren Teixeira’s groundbreaking journal article titled “It’s Time to Reset California’s Climate Leadership” aligns with the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) Implementation related. I agree with the author that both states need to reevaluate their climate policies until states can “reduce emissions while ensuring housing, an affordable cost of living, and good jobs for all.” This article highlights the measures needed to reduce emissions from the transport sector to achieve climate nirvana.

California Climate Leadership

California was the first state in the nation to enact a “solution” to climate change through the 2006 AB32 Global Warming Solutions legislation. Hernandez and Teixeira's introductory paragraph explains:

Faced with Donald Trump's re-election, rising inequality and declining support among the state's non-white majority, California Democratic leaders have begun raising pointed questions about the state's much-vaunted climate policies. California Democratic Assembly Leader Richard Rivas opened the new legislative session with a focus on meeting constituent concerns about housing and the state's extremely high cost of living, with a special emphasis on the state's climate Policy: “California has always been a leader on climate issues. We will continue to provide leadership on climate issues,” he told congressional colleagues. “But not on the backs of poor and working people, not on taxing or charging projects that don’t work, and not on blocking housing and critical infrastructure projects. That’s why we have to be results-driven. We can’t blindly support the people who are causing these problems. Institutional Defense.

Hernandez and Teixeira compared California, Florida, Texas and several indicators across the United States to determine whether California's claims to be a trendsetter on climate were successful. They explained:

California was asserting its ecological superiority long before the passage of AB32, the 2006 law that committed the state to ambitious climate goals and established a cap-and-trade system to achieve those goals. Even before the landmark bill, the state’s per capita carbon emissions were well below the national average.

The authors show that the main reason for California's low per capita emissions is that its power sector emissions are low to begin with. Texas and Florida reduced power sector emissions without climate policies as generators switched from coal to natural gas “primarily for economic reasons.” California’s climate policies limit future power generation technologies to solar, wind and battery storage. The unexpected costs of deploying these technologies have made California’s electricity prices second only to those in Hawaii.

In my article, I compared California to New York. New York observed a reduction in emissions due to the switch to natural gas fuel. The deployment costs of wind, solar and storage are starting to become apparent and will force rates to rise, competing with California and Hawaii for the most expensive prices. Another similarity is that both California and New York will have to look to other sectors for future emissions reductions. California's largest emitting industry is transportation, while New York state has the highest emissions from construction due to climate differences. Transport emissions are only slightly lower. This article highlights Hernandez and Teixeira’s description of the emissions reduction strategies the California Department of Transportation plans to pursue to meet climate goals.

transportation industry strategy

Hernandez and Teixeira raise an issue that has been acknowledged by New York institutions, but few understand its implications. Future emissions reductions will not come from the power sector because the incremental benefits will be small:

Rooftop solar and California’s other signature climate policy options, despite rising costs, offer diminishing returns because most of the low-hanging emissions reductions have already been achieved thanks to lower baseline electricity consumption and early adoption of natural gas. The carbon footprint of adding expensive new renewable energy sources will never be large. As a result, the state is placing increasing emphasis on aggressively reducing emissions from the transportation sector—the state’s largest source of emissions.

In New York, the construction industry is the largest source of emissions for climate reasons. Still, the climate bill’s goals are so extreme that New York and any other jurisdiction that wants to achieve net-zero emissions will ultimately have to adopt the same aggressive transportation sector emissions reduction strategy that California supports:

Compared with places like Texas and Florida, California's emissions reductions since 2006 have come primarily from the transportation sector rather than the power sector. Low-carbon fuel requirements, new refinery regulations, and electric vehicle regulations have combined to significantly increase the cost of driving. California now typically has the second-highest natural gas costs in the country, behind Hawaii, where all gasoline must be imported by ship. The state has mandated a phase-out of internal combustion engines in vehicles by 2035, and its gas prices now appear to be even higher than those in Hawaii: Just days after the election, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) voted to further tighten low-carbon policy fuel standards, which are expected to The measure would further raise gasoline prices to a maximum of 85 cents per gallon.

I find it hard to believe that Californians will passively accept a significant increase in the cost of gasoline. But that's not all.

More ambitiously, California climate regulators require local governments and regional planning agencies to reduce car use by 30% even after California switches to electric vehicles – the reduction in “vehicle miles traveled” will be 2.5 times the mileage reduction. To achieve this, CARB recommends that local governments eliminate lanes through so-called “road diets” and provide funding aimed at increasing driving times and traffic congestion and encouraging the use of public transport, even as large-scale investments in public transport have fail. Reversing a ridership decline that began before the COVID-19 pandemic and left the transit system with a massive operating deficit.

discuss

The mother of all real-life blows comes from regulators who believe road diets will be accepted by citizens. Public transportation is great in concept, but the reality is that much of our society now relies on personal transportation. A hundred years ago, every city had extensive trolleybus and intercity rail networks, and cities were compact enough that this transportation option was feasible. What I mean by feasible is that people can use public transportation to get from where they live to where they work in a reasonable amount of time. However, a hundred years ago these tram systems began to cease operations because it was inconvenient to rely on mass transportation. Most of these systems are now gone. Even if replaced by a bus system, the fact is that public transportation takes more time, and using it forces you to stick to a schedule. Over the past 100 years, development has spread and the ability of public transportation to move many people from where they live to where they work has been limited to large cities. This makes personal transportation demand inelastic. Only a fool would think that road dieting would stimulate the use of mass transit. This affects emissions reduction targets, as the emissions reductions envisaged by the transport sector will never be achieved.

in conclusion

Most readers here are aware of the difficulties that reality presents in relation to plans for a net zero transition. The inevitable impact of transition policies on personal choices and quality of life becomes apparent when you realize the physical challenges. Unfortunately, most people don't realize what they're getting into.

The public faces constant propaganda that there is a clear climate crisis with every extreme weather event. All they hear is the big lie that the solution to the weather problem is as simple as stopping using fossil fuels, which are cheaper, more resilient, safer, and improve the quality of life.

Eventually, the fact that these plans include policies “aimed at increasing driving times and traffic congestion and encouraging the use of public transport” will seep into the public consciousness. I can't imagine a situation where this wouldn't cause a huge backlash. Will this guessing game end when wind and solar systems cause a huge backlash, or when the public is asked to pay 85 cents more per gallon and give up personal transportation options?

Roger Caiazza blogs about energy and environmental issues in New York at the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This represents his opinion and not that of his previous employer or any other organization with which he is associated.

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