CARB Moving Forward on Gas Reduction Plan

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Working Californians blogs]

It know it's not a thrilling story, but the plans the California Air Resource Board is putting together is one of the biggest environmental stories in the country. California has huge ambitious goals to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and the CARB is tasked with figuring out how we get there and issuing regulations to ensure it happens. SacBee:

The state Air Resources Board will launch into a yearlong planning effort today that it hopes will yield a workable plan for slashing California's annual greenhouse gas emissions by 100 million metric tons in just 12 years.

That goal – the equivalent of cutting the state's gasoline use almost 70 percent – represents most of the reductions mandated under Assembly Bill 32, passed last year. The specific regulations enacted to meet it likely will affect virtually every sector of the California economy, from how electricity is generated to how new communities are planned.

Many of the emissions reductions will be straightforward expansions of energy-efficiency programs that the state already has pursued for years. But others – like rules that could affect land use – will put the agency in unfamiliar regulatory territory.

At today's public meeting in Diamond Bar, the agency will consider how to divide the state's greenhouse-gas sources into six economic sectors: electricity; local initiatives and land use; transportation; business and industry; agriculture; and forestry.

It is an enormous task, with huge implications.

California's sunshine laws are really valuable in letting us track the CARB's process. We may have a decimated newspaper staff, but they have been paying a lot of attention to these meetings, especially given the vest interest in corporations influencing this process. Not only is there a lot at stake for the environment, but the regulations will have potentially large fiscal impacts on various corporate sectors. So let the sunlight shine.