Taking on work that many see as leading the nation in working to help the environment, but many others see as beginning a process that will drive business from the state, initial strategies are discussed.
Greenhouse gas brainstorming
Energy, climate experts to converge on capital to attack the problem.
By Jim Downing - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Monday, March 5, 2007
The stiffest restrictions under California's new greenhouse-gas reduction bill don't take effect until 2012, but state regulators already are hurrying to draw up a list of strategies to slash emissions much sooner than that.
For the next three days, energy and climate change experts from around the world will convene in Sacramento to discuss the best ways for the state to quickly shrink its carbon footprint.
Many of these approaches -- like collecting methane from landfills and dairy farms --will be invisible to consumers.
But others will be easy to spot -- from motion-detecting lights on displays at the local grocery to skylights instead of fluorescent bulbs in big-box stores. By reducing electricity usage, such steps reduce the need to burn fossil fuels for electricity.
Together, experts say, this collection of small changes can help push the state toward meeting the goal of reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 as mandated in Assembly Bill 32, signed into law last year.
Over the past 15 years, California's greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing by the equivalent of about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. That's the same as adding the emissions from about a million average cars, every year, in a state that averaged about 350,000 additional passenger vehicles each year since 1990.
Under the new plan, though, the state's businesses and residents will be required to reverse that trend, cutting climate-changing emissions at the rate of about 6 million tons a year.
