California’s Ambitious Plan To Fight Global Warming
California is taking the first bold step to curb the gases that are causing global warming and asking the rest of the world to follow.
(via L.A. Times) The bill would require a 25% cut in emissions of greenhouse gases between now and 2020 and is likely to use mandatory emissions caps on power plants, refineries and other heavy industry as well as energy efficiency measures and an emissions trading program.
To reach 1990 levels of greenhouse gases, as the law mandates, experts say California will need to eliminate 174 million metric tons. About one-third would come as a result of an earlier car tailpipe emissions law in California that has been challenged by automakers in court.
National environmental organizations and their new election-year ally, Schwarzenegger, locked arms Wednesday and predicted that the initiative would help protect the planet, provide global leadership and create thousands of high-paying jobs in high-tech industries. They cited a 2005 study by the California Air Resources Board that estimates that the drive to limit greenhouse gas emissions and develop alternative energy sources will produce 83,000 jobs and $4 billion in economic growth.
California’s ambitious plan to curb global warming will be costly to businesses and consumers, experts said Thursday, and its effect on the climate could be negligible â€â€? unless other states and nations follow.
Although it is too early to know what will happen over the next two decades, the state’s basic industries, including utilities, oil refineries and steel mills, can expect to make major changes in how they do business. And consumers may face higher bills for electricity, gasoline and other goods that use energy.
“My view is that in the end, this is going to be costly, but it’s a cost that we have to be willing to pay because the alternative is potentially very bleak,” said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley.
But experts stressed that California could do little if anything to curb climate change on its own because of the global nature of the problem.
“The actual effect on California’s climate of reducing the state’s carbon dioxide emissions will be negligible. It will only be successful if the rest of the world follows,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s department of global ecology at Stanford University.
Read the full story at the L.A. Times.com site
Facebook comments:
