California Just Doubled Down on Fighting Climate Change

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602348/california-just-doubled-down-on-fighting-climate-change/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]California Just Doubled Down on Fighting Climate Change[/font]

[font size=4]An aggressive emissions bill commits the state to making deep cuts in emissions by 2030.[/font]

by Michael Reilly | September 9, 2016

[font size=3]As the world’s sixth-largest economy, California wields huge influence not just in the U.S., but around the world. So when Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills into law Thursday aimed at reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, it put the world on notice that the Golden State aims to be a major player in the fight against climate change.

The thing is, it’s far from clear just how the state will go about achieving that target.

In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill calling for a return to 1990-level emissions by 2020. He didn’t give a lot of details as to how that was supposed to happen—but legislators responded by passing laws, including one that implemented a cap-and-trade system. Here in 2016, California is well on its way to hitting its Governator-mandated emissions target, and its economy is going strong.

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But finding an additional 40 percent in emissions cuts may prove difficult for a variety of reasons. For one thing, as an extensive piece in Vox explains, the state’s cap-and-trade system may not be legal, and it’s currently being challenged in court by the California Chamber of Commerce. If it goes down, a powerful tool for shaping markets will go with it. And it’s going to take a broad reorganization of the state’s economy, from investment in high-speed rail to improved farming practices, if this is going to work. From the Vox piece:

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[NNadir]

1. By 2030? Is this like the time they announced that 10% of the cars in California...

...would be emission free by 2003?

When the fuck are all these "by-such-and-such a date" people going to commit to doing something, um, now?

I've been hearing this "by-such-and-such a date" shit my whole damned life and the result is that in 2016, or maybe better put "by 2016" we're experiencing the worst new accumulations of carbon dioxide in recorded history.

And the fastest growing source of electricity in California and the United States as a whole: Natural gas.

What's the plan? A few more millionaires and billionaires with "a million solar roofs" and more Tesla cars?

That didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work.

The problem that the world is facing is very much involved with our extreme capacity to lie to ourselves.

They're full of shit in California. When I lived there, several decades ago, I believed this crap. No more. It's wishful thinking of the worst kind, a malicious and criminal adventure in making our children pay the costs of what we didn't do, and what they won't be able to do either, especially when impoverished and weakened by our bourgeois irresponsibility.

[2naSalit]

2. ^^^THIS^^^