These are heady days for us California climate policy watchers. Last month, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) reported that the state’s carbon emissions declined in 2011 for the third straight year. Last week, CARB convened its second successful carbon allowance auction. And with each day, it seems, the state sets a new solar power record.
A host of factors explain California’s carbon-cutting success, among them the Silicon Valley innovation engine, world-class universities and national laboratories, and a Democratic-controlled Governor’s Office and Legislature. But perhaps the most important factor, the one absent at the national level, is a legally binding plan to reduce carbon emissions.
An executive order signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) in June 2005 established short- and long-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduce targets for California: to reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The 2020 GHG reduction target was subsequently codified in California’s landmark climate change law, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, more commonly known as AB 32. But what happens after 2020?
On February 13, Assembly member Bill Quirk (D-Hayward), a freshman state lawmaker elected in November 2012, introduced a bill (AB 284) that requires the state to plan for carbon reductions through 2050. AB 284 does not codify Schwarzenegger’s 2050 GHG reduction target (more on this below) but it would require the California Energy Commission (CEC) to convene a new “Road to 2050 Board.”
The board would include representatives from the CEC, CARB, California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, California Environmental Protection Agency, California Independent System Operator, and the Governor’s Office.
According to the bill, members would be charged with studying both the “best process for meeting a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent of the 1990 emissions level by 2050” and the “integration of renewable electrical generation into the electric grid in a manner to ensure cost-effectiveness and reliability.”
That Quirk is pushing California to prepare a 2050 roadmap for GHG emissions reductions in one of his first acts as a state lawmaker should come as no surprise. A former NASA climate change scientist who supervised the development of the Goddard Institute Climate Model, Quirk later conducted research in atmospheric science and nuclear testing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
“I’m here because I was studying greenhouse warming in the ’70s. We knew it was a real problem but we couldn’t see how bad it would be, and it’s much worse than we ever expected,” Quirk recently told The Olympian, a high school paper published in his district.
A September 2012 report co-authored by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Jeffery Greenblatt and LLNL’s Jane Long found that commercially available and and known technologies would likely be sufficient to enable California to reduce GHGs by 60% by 2050 but an 80% reduction would require significant technological advances in transportation fuels and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). (The report was commissioned by the CEC and California Council on Science and Technology but does not represent state policy.)
As mentioned above, AB 32 does not mandate GHG reductions beyond 2020. According to a report published last week (subscription required) at the Inside Cal/EPA newsletter, Quirk’s bill is “likely to spark discussion among lawmakers about how they may eventually expand the state’s current law.”
According to Inside Cal/EPA:
Sources say it is likely that legislation will be introduced within the next few years that seeks to expand the state’s AB 32 GHG emission-reduction mandate beyond 2020. While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed an executive order in 2005 setting a target of 80 percent GHG cuts by 2050, some sources say this is not legally binding and that a second “AB 32-type” law is necessary.
AB 284 was referred to the Assembly’s Natural Resources and Utilities and Commerce committees. Quirk is a member of the Utilities and Commerce Committee.