State Officials Contemplate Big Changes in California Livin'
California, where automobiles go to be worshiped, might have to change its ways in a big way to accommodate the state's plans to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases.
That was demonstrated by the recent issuance of a set of recommendations to regulators who are trying to figure out how to get California on track to meet the goals of its innovative AB 32. The 2006 law aims to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, approximately a 25 percent cut.
Underscoring the challenge, the report (view full document here) notes that the state's population, now at 36 million people, will likely surge to 42 million by 2020, and to 60 million by 2050, when even deeper cuts in emissions are called for. And it includes assertions that population patterns have trended toward less density -- i.e., more sprawl -- not less, causing people to drive even more.
"As a result, Californians are more dependent than ever on the automobile to connect them to jobs, services and amenities," said the report's authors. In fact, the number of miles driven has been going up by about 3 percent a year, according to the document.
That translates into a lot of miles given federal statistics showing the state has more than 33 million automobiles, trucks and buses on the road. Passenger vehicles account for 30 percent of the state's greenhouse emissions, according to the report, putting driving, something deeply embedded in the state's cultural DNA, squarely in the bull's eye. And along with it, the development patterns that help generate all those miles behind the wheel.
The implications are potentially profound. Stanley Young, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, which has primary responsibility for developing the strategies to implement AB 32, called the document a "wish list" that nevertheless helps paint a bigger picture. The final outcome, he said, could be enactment of changes that "we've been talking about for 40 years."
In 83 bureaucratic pages, the ponderously titled "LUSCAT Submission to CARB Scoping Plan on Local Government, Land Use and Transportation," lays out a blueprint for higher density, more ambitious planning and on a more prosaic level, even greater use of "gray" water. The document is scheduled to be discussed at an open forum in Sacramento on Wednesday.
By way of partial translation, LUSCAT is the Land Use Subgroup of the Climate Action Team, one of 11 such groups formed to provide recommendations to CARB, the California Air Resources Board. That's the agency given primary responsibility for designing a the means or "scoping plan," to reach the greenhouse law's goals. It hopes to have a draft plan ready by sometime next month. The Climate Action Team is a multi-agency effort charged with participating in the process and developing measures to achieve the reductions.
In a state where transportation accounts for the largest single share of climate-changing emissions -- more than 40 percent overall, according to the California Energy Commission -- how much people drive is a vital component in figuring out what to do about the problem. Or, in the strangled prose of the document: "VMT [vehicle miles traveled] reductions correlate directly with reductions in GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions."
Encouraging "alternative mobility options," i.e., getting people out of their automobiles, will require improving land use through state, regional and local planning, the document's authors wrote. It encourages a more regional approach to such efforts, despite the fact that most planning is in the hands of local officials now, and one that would seem to involve the state more intimately in the process, such as implied by this passage:
"Government agencies from the federal through to the local level plus thousands of special districts make decisions that guide land use in California every day. The state will adopt policies and programs that reflect this shared responsibility and increased collaboration across all levels of government on how to reduce GHG emissions through improved land use decision-making."
Less cryptically, the document lays out a number of suggestions, including:
- Exploring ways to make sure that the California Environmental Quality Act, the state's hallowed basic environmental statute, doesn't create barriers to more "compact" developments, urban infill and affordable housing.
- Earmarking a portion of the proceeds from a market-based system of reducing emissions, now under consideration by state officials, to encourage denser development and make other improvements, such as helping to clean up old industrial properties, known as "brownfields," so they could be re-developed.
- Looking at ways to improve public transit usage, even recommending that officials consider making it easier for people to use bicycles to get to their stops, and providing funding to reduce fare costs.
- Increasing the recycling of gray water, which is what goes down the drain when people do their laundry or take showers.
- Analyzing pay-as-you-drive insurance policies that would allow motorists to reduce their premiums by driving less, (or, looked at another way, penalize them for driving more).
Hmm, more centralized planning, denser cities, people walking to work or bicycling to public transit, paying even more to drive their cars -- could be some real changes ahead for the California lifestyle, which often pretty much lives up to its stereotype of a car-based culture in which people travel many miles to and from work and even farther to play.
Taking the state toward more compact and transit-oriented patterns, the report says in what might be an understatement, "poses a major challenge. It will require policies that not only discourage development on the fringes, but remove barriers to, and allow, without burdensome discretionary review, the development of appropriate infill locations. But, the challenge is not insurmountable."
In reality, anyone paying close attention to the debate in California (and it's not clear how many have) shouldn't be too surprised at the breadth and depth of proposals under discussion. Both California Attorney General Jerry Brown and the air board's chairwoman Mary Nichols have sounded similar themes in the recent past (see Climate Law Update story here). Brown also pushed the theory through his office's sometimes controversial employment of litigation or threats of litigation under CEQA (see previously cited Climate Law Update story, plus this one).
Meanwhile, other experts and officials have also recently raised the potentially society-changing implications of curtailing greenhouse emissions and the potential backlash to them (see Climate Law Update story here). Other states are also grappling with similar challenges (see Climate Law Update story here).
The above constitutes just a sampling of the ideas and recommendations buried in the report, and a hint of the kind of things that are under consideration. Anyone interested can show up at the Sacramento hearing at the energy commission's headquarters (access meeting details here and additional notice here, with links to materials), listen via web cast or submit comments by e-mail. Climate Law Update, of course, also encourages comments to our site.
(Photo: San Francisco Bay Area traffic; Wikipedia)
Top California officials Thursday laid out a vision of a reduced-carbon future that included some very un-California-sounding notions, such as denser cities and cars driven fewer miles.