Phil Schermeister

Sacramento is one of the cities competing to be "Coolest California City."

We must’ve missed the opening ceremonies with the parade of flag-bearing competitors and giant torch-lighting — or maybe it was canceled to save energy. Either way, ten California cities are competing over the next year to reduce their carbon emissions.

Individuals, local governments and businesses will all be involved in the project, called the Cool California Challenge. The Cool California website has a carbon calculator, tips on reducing your footprint and links to rebates. Plus there’s a social media element, so you can envy, goad or cooperate with your neighbors as you see fit.

The competing cities are Chula Vista, Citrus Heights, Davis, Gonzales, Pittsburg, Pleasanton, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Jose and Tracy. Participants — whether they’re individuals, companies or other types of organizations — earn points by being more carbon-conscious.

The competition is just for those ten cities, but anyone can use the handy tools the website offers. I tried the carbon calculator. It just took a few minutes to tally up my score, and I have to say, I was pretty pleased with myself and my carbon footprint: 57% the size of comparable households in my area. Oh, but still 275% of the global average. So, there’s room for improvement.

At the end of the year, the city with the most points will win the coveted title, “Coolest California City.” The project was created by the California Air Resources Board and UC Berkeley’s Cool Climate Network.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

The EPA's new rule limits carbon emissions from new power plants nationwide.

The US Environmental Protection Agency will, for the first time, begin restricting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants. The EPA’s new standard limits how many pounds of carbon can be emitted per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. It doesn’t apply to existing power plants or to new plants that have already been permitted, and natural gas-powered plants should be able to meet the standard without changes. But coal-powered plants will no longer make the cut without adding carbon capture and sequestration technology.

This won’t have much of an effect on California’s energy industry, Dave Clegern from the California Air Resources Board told me, though he’s not complaining. “It’s always good to see a national standard, and we’re glad the EPA is doing it.”

Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a similar standard for power plants in California back in 2006. The state gets very little electricity from coal-powered plants, and the coal-fired power California residents do use comes from outside of California.

“The EPA kind of levels the playing field for us,” Clegern said. “Now everyone will be operating with a standard that’s pretty close to ours.”

Read more:

• Washington Post: EPA imposes first greenhouse gas limits on power plants
• Politico: EPA unveils greenhouse gas standard for new power plants
• Associated Press (via NPR): Administration To Propose New Power Plant Rules
• Grist: The top five things you need to know about EPA’s new carbon rule

U.S. Chemical Safety Board

Methane can escape from mines, power plants, farms, and landfills.

Carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change, but it’s not the only one. Methane also contributes to warming. In fact, a single molecule of methane causes more warming than a single molecule of carbon dioxide does. But it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long, so a new study from NASA affirms what others have suggested for years: that cutting methane emissions would show quicker results than cutting CO2 emissions. The same goes for soot, also known as black carbon. Plus, cutting back on soot would put a damper on the respiratory diseases it causes, and capturing more methane, which is basically natural gas, would save money.

NPR’s Christopher Joyce reports on the study for All Things Considered. He talked to Durwood Zaelke, who runs the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C.

Zaelke is a grizzled veteran of the climate wars: he was in Kyoto in 1997 when the world’s nations drafted a treaty promising to curb warming, and he has watched that promise fizzle while the planet’s temperature continues to rise.

Zaelke says the Kyoto treaty focused too much on the main greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide.

“I mean, it’s like picking a fight with the biggest bully in the schoolyard,” he says with a note of lament. “You know, you get your lunch money stolen, you get your pants pulled down, and you get sent home humiliated. We’ve made about that much progress with CO₂.”

Cutting down on methane and soot alone won’t solve climate change, but the scientists in the study say they expect they could “reduce projected global mean warming [by about] 0.5°C by 2050.”

The article, “Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security,” by lead author Drew Shindell, was published in Science (the full article is available for a fee).

Craig Miller

On Wednesday, just as the Obama Administration proposed strict new fuel efficiency standards for 2017-2025-model cars and light trucks, the California Air Resources Board leapfrogged Washington with its own package of regulations designed to further reduce emissions from passenger vehicles.

The proposed “Advanced Clean Cars” regulations package has four components, including a greenhouse gas emissions standard that matches the new federal one, which isn’t surprising since California played a key role in drafting the new federal proposal.

The other three prongs of the package are new smog-reduction rules, a program designed to spur the growth of zero-emissions vehicle production and sales, and the construction of new hydrogen fueling stations.

According to CARB, the Advanced Clean Cars regulations are designed to deliver:

• A 47% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, compared to today’s levels;
• A further 75% reduction in smog-forming emissions by 2025;
• One in seven new cars sold in 2025 (15.4 percent) be a zero-emission or plug-in hybrid vehicle;
• A total of 1.4 million zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road in California by 2025;
• A reduction of 40 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2025, the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road; and,
• A savings of $5 billion in operating costs in 2025 for California drivers. This will rise to $10 billion in 2030 when more advanced cars are on the road.

Whew. CARB’s Zero Emissions Vehicles (ZEV) program aims to have battery, fuel cell, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles account for up to 15% of California’s new vehicle sales in 2025, which, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), means that dealers had better get moving and sell 1.4 million of these vehicles between 2018 and 2015.

UCS is urging an even more ambitious plan, however, arguing that in order for California to reach its climate and public health goals, the bar should be set higher, at 1.8 million ZEV sold by 2025.

Gretchen Weber

Navajo Generating Station, near Page, AZ

By Susanne Rust

Just as the federal government released its annual index of greenhouse gases, showing a steady increase over the past 21 years, the International Energy Agency warned that we are on the path to 11-degree warming if we don’t curb emissions now.

“Delaying action is a false economy: For every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would be needed to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions,” the authors of the energy agency report wrote in their 2011 World Energy Outlook.

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual accounting of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The index showed a 29 percent increase over levels recorded in 1990, the agency’s baseline year, as established by the Kyoto protocol.

“The increasing amounts of long-lived greenhouse gases in our atmosphere indicate that climate change is an issue society will be dealing with for a long time,” said Jim Butler, director of the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

Butler says you have to think of this number not as a predictor, but more like a dial on an electric blanket. You know that if you turn the dial up, the blanket will get warmer. You may not feel the warmth immediately, but it will get warmer – just how warm, you don’t know.

One of the more striking findings in the agency’s report includes the increase in methane found in the atmosphere. The level of that gas has increased in the last four years, after holding steady for more than a decade. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Butler said that increase is likely attributable to the thawing of permafrost and an increase of methane escaping from tropical areas.

“Climate warming has the potential to affect most aspects of society, including water supplies, agriculture, ecosystems and economies,” said Butler, who added that his agency will continue to monitor these gases “into the future to further understand the impacts on our planet.”

His warning was echoed by the International Energy Agency, which said “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”

Joe Romm, former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy and now editor of the blog Climate Progress, said the International Energy Agency “is one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible … projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them.”

He said the key point of the report is that in the 2020s, “the world is going to be considerably more desperate than we are now. The evidence of human-caused climate change will be difficult for all but the most extreme deniers to ignore.”

He added that superstorms, like the one in Alaska last week, “will increasingly just be the normal weather – and we’ll start to see what really extreme weather is like.”

This post also appears at California Watch, a content partner of Climate Watch.

Gabriel Bouys

In July, when the Obama Administration announced a plan for strict new fuel efficiency standards that would require a fleet-wide average for cars and light trucks of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, the sustainable business non-profit CERES reported the move would create nearly 500,000 new jobs nationwide.

“The new jobs will be related directly to the auto industry, and there will be additional jobs because consumers will have more money to spend because they will be saving on fuel,” said Carol Lee Rawn, director of the transportation program at CERES.

July was a preliminary announcement. The EPA is expected to release official targets later this month.  Final rules are not expected until next July.

In anticipation of the EPA announcement, CERES is making the case that not only will stricter standards benefit the nation as a whole, but they will also spur economic growth in 49 individual states. Only Wyoming may suffer a net loss from the new rules, said Rawn, according to data from  their report “More Jobs per Gallon,” originally released in July.

The picture for California looks particularly good, said Rawn.

“California is a large state, so there are lots of opportunities there,” she said. “And California is a leader in advanced vehicle technology so it stands to benefit that way as well.”

Specifically, the study finds that:

• the 54.5 mpg standard would create more than 57,300 new jobs in California, putting the state in first place in terms of jobs created.
• the 54.5 mpg standard would boost California’s GDP by about $3.67 billion.

Governor Brown has praised the tougher standards proposed by the Administration back in July.

California is playing a major role in developing the new federal standards. Last year the state had been poised to announce its own rules for model years 2017-2025, but in January the Air Resources Board agreed to a shared deadline with the federal government. Since then, officials from CARB have been working with federal agencies, automakers, and environmental groups to develop the new rules.

Craig Miller

You’d think that kicking thousands of solo drivers out of the carpool lane would make traffic move faster…at least for carpoolers. But you’d be wrong, according to researchers from UC Berkeley.

In 2005, California granted drivers of hybrid vehicles access to carpool lanes (regardless of the number of riders) as a way to spur adoption of low-emissions vehicles. But that program ended this summer, after critics argued that the 85,000 cars that had qualified for special lane access were too many, and all the new hybrid drivers were clogging things up for carpoolers.

But instead of returning the roads to smooth sailing for carpools, the change actually slowed traffic for everybody, reducing speed as much as 15% in the “high-occupancy vehicle” (HOV) lanes themselves, according to the Berkeley study.

The researchers found that the speed in the carpool lane is affected by the speed of cars in the adjacent lane. So, if the regular lanes are more congested and creeping along at a snail’s pace, carpoolers are less likely to be blasting past them at 70 miles per hour.

Their conclusion?  Let more cars into the carpool lane, not fewer, and everyone will move faster.

A rice field in the Sacramento Valley. According to NOAA, rice paddies are a source of methane emissions. Photo: Craig Miller

Despite all the focus on regulating CO2 as a way to combat global warming, a new NOAA study finds that to really put the brakes on climate change, the world can’t ignore the other greenhouse gases.

The study takes an inventory of non-carbon greenhouse gases including methane, which emits from landfills and farms, and nitrous oxide, which primarily comes from soil management and combustion. Per molecule, the study notes that these gases have a stronger muscle for trapping heat compared with carbon dioxide, but they don’t last as long in the atmosphere.

“This study looks at what would happen if society decided to go after the short-lived greenhouse gases, as well as CO2.” said Jim Butler, Director of Global Monitoring at NOAA and author of the study.

Short-lived is a relative term in atmospheric science. Butler said it takes decades for methane to fully run its course in the atmosphere, during which its potential to trap heat is much greater, even though its share in the atmosphere is pennies compared to that of CO2.

Carbon dioxide sticks around much longer, some of it for thousands of years, said Butler.

“CO2 is still the big dog in the fight,” he said.

The warming impacts from all human-based greenhouse gases. At 390ppm, CO2 leads the pack but other greenhouse gases like methane, at 1.8ppm, and nitrous oxide, at 0.3ppm, have a measurable impact.. Table: NOAA

Butler said that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at 390 parts per million and is responsible for 63% of all greenhouse gas warming influence, as shown in the NOAA chart above.  The study equates this warming influence to the heat generated from nine trillion, 100-watt light bulbs.

Butler likens this persistent heating effect to a hot electric blanket.

“If we cut emissions, the [heat of] blanket would still go up by a bit,” said Butler.  “We can’t turn the blanket back down very fast.”

A graph showing the outcomes between the current emissions trajectory (in red) and a scenario where CO2 and non CO2 greenhouse gases are cut by 80% of 2008 levels (in green). Graph: NOAA

The NOAA scientists graphed the “electric blanket” heating outcomes under different emissions scenarios. Even under the most optimistic scenario, where 80% of all greenhouse gases are cut, the study finds it will take 40 years before the blanket’s thermostat goes down.

“The long-term necessity of cutting carbon dioxide emissions shouldn’t diminish the effectiveness of short-term action,” said Butler in a press release. “Managing emissions of non-carbon dioxide gases is clearly an opportunity to make additional contributions.”

Los Angeles traffic (Photo: Gabriel Bouys)

Most car insurance is priced in the United States kind of like an all-you-can-eat salad bar, says Justin Horner, a transportation analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. You pay a set amount once or twice a year, and then you can eat one little salad, or you can totally chow down, making several trips back for more food, piles of cole slaw and jello threatening to topple from your over-filled plate. Either way, it makes no difference to your wallet.

And, of course, regardless of hunger level, it can be kind of tempting to go back again and again, just because you can.

On the other hand, if you get your salad at one of those pay-by-weight places, you’re likely to be a lot more discriminating about what’s on your plate. That’s how we buy gas, says Horner.

And, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank, that’s also how we should be buying our car insurance.

“Just as an all-you-can-eat restaurant encourages more eating, all-you-can-drive insurance pricing encourages more driving,” states the report. “That means more accidents, congestion, carbon emissions, local pollution, and dependence on oil.”

According to the study, if car insurance premiums were priced per mile driven, driving would decrease nationwide by eight percent (it would take a $1 per gallon increase in the price of gas to achieve this kind of reduction). This would:

- Decrease carbon emissions by 2%

- Decrease oil consumption by 4%

- Save $50-$60 billion in reduced “driving-related harms”

In California alone, the study finds that an eight percent decrease in driving would account for between seven-and-nine percent of the total CO2 reductions needed to meet the states mandated levels for 2020.

In another study, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if all Massachusetts drivers switched to car insurance priced by the mile, fuel consumption would go down 9.5%, cutting two million tons of CO2 emissions.

You can listen online to Gretchen’s companion radio report to this post at The California Report. You can see and hear our entire series, Miles to Go, at our special coverage page.

PG&E substation near San Jose. The drop in emissions applied to both power generated in California and imported from neighboring states. (Photo: Craig Miller)

If you’re ready for some good news on the climate front: California’s carbon emissions from power generation dropped in 2009 and 2010.

That’s according to a new analysis from Thomson Reuters’ Point Carbon that looked at power generated here in California, as well as electricity imported from out of state.

According to the report (available by subscription only), emissions were down 12% over the study period. Part of the drop, not surprisingly, was due the global recession and the state’s slowed economy in 2009. But the study found that even when the economy started growing again, emissions continued to decline.

Sound mysterious? Not really, according to study co-author Ashley Lawson.

“It was actually the weather,” she said. “It was relatively cooler in 2010, so people were running their air conditioners less, and it was also relatively wetter, so there was more water available for producing hydroelectricity.”

So, despite a slight uptick in the economy, demands on the electrical grid were less due to milder temperatures — and the state was able to meet more of its electrical needs with carbon-free hydropower, which meant less demand for coal or gas, and hence, fewer emissions.

Lawson said that new solar and wind installations in California also contributed to the drop in emissions, and, while they played a smaller role than hydropower (just 15% of the reductions), she said, in one way, they are more significant.

“Hydro power will only generate electricity as long as the conditions stay good for it,” she said. “It’s a temporary situation. Renewables like wind and solar will lead to keeping emissions low because they aren’t going to go away.”

The study also looked beyond power generation and analyzed all of the stationary sources in California that will be subject to the state’s cap & trade program as of 2013. That includes power plants as well as manufacturing facilities and other large industrial plants that emit more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year. The study found that emissions from those 343 sources also experienced a decline of 11% over the same period, although the results varied by sector. Emissions from mining fell nine percent, and those from cement, lime, and glass production fell 34%. Meanwhile emissions from chemical plants rose 21%.

The study did not track emissions from cars, trucks and other transportation sources. Electricity generation is about a quarter of California’s total carbon emissions “pie.”