Now that the California legislature has approved an extension to the state’s climate change program with the requirement to slash emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 (see last week’s post) the challenge is going to be figuring out how to get there, and transport will be key.
Vox notes, “The stakes are enormous: Policymakers everywhere will be watching to see if California can pull this off. Getting a 40 percent cut will require more than bucking up wind and solar and putting more electric cars on the road. It will mean reshaping virtually every facet of the state’s economy, from buildings to transportation to farming and beyond.”
That’s the point: if California can meet this target and transform its economy without catastrophe, other governments will follow suit. And we’ll know this within the next 5-10 years. The article provides a good overview of what the state is doing, including the status of the cap and trade program that is currently being litigated, but the real meat of the article focuses on a 2015 paper from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) which actually looked at measures the state would have to implement to get to 40%.
LLNL looked at three scenarios in the paper. “S1” would incorporate all the policies the state has already committed to; “S2” would add in actions the state is considering implementing. Neither of them were enough to get to 40%. To get there, the state would need “S3” which is kind of a “DefCon 5” scenario that looks like this:
Every sector would be affected under this scenario (and there may be other ways to get there; for instance, the article discusses cap and trade as a strategy). Here’s what we’re really talking about with “S3”: the Low Carbon Fuels Standard (LCFS), Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV), fuel economy standards, the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) (33%), building efficiency measures, landfill methane capture, high speed rail, more biofuels, combined heat and power (CHP). But wait, there’s more! Under “S3” it would also include these additional measures:
Basically by 2030, California would get more than 50% of its electricity from renewables, ZEVs would make up at least 25% of the fleet, high-speed rail would displace a significant percentage of car travel, biodiesel and renewable diesel would fuel heavy-duty trucks, pastures would be converted to forests, electricity would replace natural gas in heating, and so forth.
The author closes, “California is essentially offering itself as a guinea pig in the world’s most important policy experiment. Everyone else will be watching and learning from the state’s successes and failures — whether it can develop the needed clean tech, whether it can spur innovation, whether it can control costs and navigate political opposition, whether it can rejigger the grid to accommodate enormous quantities of renewable power. No pressure!” None indeed.
