Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times…

At climate summit, state to give the U.S. an uphill push

California will show whether it can lead the fight when Washington won't.

By EVAN HALPER | Wednesday, September 12, 2018

California's commitment to 100% renewable energy, enshrined in a new law, could motivate cities and states to make similar pledges at the summit in
San Francisco this week. Above, the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington is seen from Emden Street in 2016. — Photograph: Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — Even as California forged its own path for years to battle global warming, pressing forward whether Washington agreed or not, skeptics have persistently scolded that it is just a state — it can't set policy for the nation, much less the world.

If California ever had a moment to prove them wrong, it is now. At the international climate summit Governor Jerry Brown will kick off on Wednesday in San Francisco, the state is playing a role none ever has, pushing the rest of the country to join other nations in enforcing a landmark agreement on climate change that President Trump has quit.

Put simply, the three-day environmental summit will test whether California can bring the country to a place Congress and the White House won't.

“This is a very odd challenge we have,” Brown said in an interview in his office. “It is coming at us from all over the planet. Everyone is contributing and everyone has got to do something to combat it. It is a totally unique world challenge, never before faced. There is nothing like this.”

Indeed, as the Trump administration prepared this week to ease regulations on methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, many states are looking to follow California and Colorado in pursuing policies that require energy firms to capture the methane their drilling operations release and convert it into electricity.

In other sectors, more ambitious commitments may be made. California's new law — signed Monday — putting the state on a path to 100% renewable energy could motivate others to make similar pledges this week.

Brown had not planned the summit as an act of defiance. The idea emerged soon after the Paris climate change accord was signed in 2015, with strong support from President Obama, and the world assumed the United States would take a lead role in cutting carbon emissions in an effort to ease global warming.

It made perfect sense then that California — America's leader in clean tech innovation and climate action — would host a high-stakes gathering of political leaders to cement the Paris benchmarks, assess progress and form new partnerships. The state already has demonstrated how aggressive climate action can boost a large economy.

In the Trump era, however, the event morphed into something else. The president has made clear his administration does not agree with mainstream climate science and sees no need to cut emissions at the pace the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change warns will be crucial to dodge catastrophic warming.

Marchers in San Francisco last week join “Rise for Climate,” a global day of action demanding solutions from local leaders.
— Photograph: Amy Osborne/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Yet roughly half of Americans live in states that are racing to meet goals in the Paris agreement. Half of America's largest cities have made commitments to go beyond state action. And according to a Quinnipiac poll last month, 64% of U.S. voters believe the nation should do more to combat global warming. With Congress up for grabs in November, candidates are being grilled about Trump's decision to disavow the Paris accord.

“The Trump administration is visibly dismantling Obama-era climate programs, and doing it loudly in a way people see and can understand, and it is attacking science more generally in very visible ways,” said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA. “California is big enough and splashy enough, and Jerry Brown is famous enough, that people are paying attention to what California is doing about it.”

Brown said the state has been preparing since President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, one of the nation's first and most important environmental laws, in 1970.

After that, “we developed the institutional capacity and the bureaucratic understanding to combat pollution and carbon emissions,” Brown said. “We are positioned well to deal with the problem. Not to take advantage of this would be a tragedy.”

During the summit, San Francisco will be swarmed with climate thinkers, crusading celebrities and political leaders racing to and from events that range from cerebral to spectacle. Conferees attending a deep dive in methane reductions in the morning can groove to the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir at an evening concert.

But much of the summit will be a grind. Inching toward the Paris goals involves government officials collaborating on and finding new paths for often mundane tasks, from using more sustainable cement to procuring electric buses.

Even before the opening ceremony, summit leaders announced a breakthrough on garbage. Cities involved pledged to find alternatives to landfills and incineration for at least 70% of their trash by 2030.

Local efforts to zero out coal emissions will also be on display, along with plans to advance technologies that capture industrial emissions and store them underground.

“The point is to get people to think about doing more, and then to join with others who have gone through that process and, through that encounter with others, to up the general commitment of the world,” Brown said.

It adds up. A recent study published by Yale University found that all the “subnational” actions around the world — and most acutely in the U.S. — are on target to bring the planet halfway to meeting the Paris goals.

Climate change activists march in San Francisco last week. Climate thinkers, celebrities and political leaders will gather in the city this week.
— Photograph: Amy Osborne/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

That still leaves a long way to go. The summit will test how much cities, states and the private sector can do to fill the gap.

“There are many cities that can do more,” said Niklas Hoehne, one of the study's authors. “And there are many more companies that want to do more.”

Although many summit attendees may view Trump as a villain, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said climate change should not be seen as a partisan issue. More than a few Republicans will attend. And he notes that the largest American city running on 100% renewable power now is Georgetown, Texas, a conservative community of 67,000 people with a Republican mayor.

“This is not just a California, blue-state thing,” Garcetti said. “Across party lines, people are taking action. I think most people see Trump as an aberration.”

Mayors are particularly motivated to act, Garcetti said. Many already battle the fallout of a warming planet: raging forest fires, devastating floods, more destructive hurricanes and heat emergencies.

“We know this is happening,” he said. “In the past, these summits were about information. Now it is about action…. Some of us already know how to do this technical work, how to measure emissions and commit [to cutting them]. Now, we are bringing it to other cities.”

The challenge for summit organizers is building a system to track and monitor all the pledges made by the thousands of states, cities and businesses determined to do their part to meet the Paris goals.

“We have the wisdom, the commitment, the experience and the collaborative spirit to work in ways that may not exist anywhere on the planet,” Brown said. “We've got to take advantage of it.”

Still, he said, the task is daunting.

“This is like rolling a gigantic boulder up Mount Everest,” Brown said. “And we are at the bottom.”

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• Los Angeles Times Times staff writer John Myers in Sacramento contributed to this report.

• Evan Halper writes about a broad range of policy issues out of Washington D.C. for the Los Angeles Times, with particular emphasis on how Washington regulates, agitates and very often miscalculates in its dealings with California. Before heading east, he was the L.A. Times bureau chief in Sacramento, where he spent a decade untangling California's epic budget mess and political dysfunction.

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from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times…

Deadline for electric cars hangs over climate event

By EVAN HALPER | Wednesday, September 12, 2018

WASHINGTON D.C. — The political leaders coming from around the world for Governor Jerry Brown's climate action summit this week will grapple with a lot of urgent deadlines to drive down emissions, but one date is especially exasperating.

It is 2035 — the year advocates aim to kill off production of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.

Keeping global warming to levels society can tolerate could hinge on meeting that target. But even clean-technology capital California has no clear path for getting there.

The question of whether drivers should be gently persuaded or forced out of their internal combustion engine cars and trucks over the next 17 years will weigh heavily on the landmark summit, which runs from Wednesday through Friday in San Francisco.

States, cities and companies will try to chart a course to carry the country and the world toward meeting the goals in the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which President Trump has disavowed.

Transportation is the most vexing problem the summit will confront. The sector sends more greenhouse gases into the air than any other, recently outpacing power plants, which are getting cleaner every year. Internal combustion engine cars need to be off the roads altogether by 2050 to meet the Paris goals. Dealers would need to stop selling new models 15 years earlier.

“Even during the Obama administration, when the country was pushing as hard and fast as it could on climate policy, it still wasn't enough” to meet the goals on auto emissions, said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a Bay Area research firm.

Rhodium's modeling shows that just 8% of U.S. drivers will be in zero-emission cars, pickups or SUVs by 2025, a depressing projection for the climate movement.

The urgency is not lost on Brown. Last year, he directed the state's chief air regulator, Mary Nichols, to look into stepping up the state's timetable to phase out gas and diesel vehicles. It gnaws at him that other nations are already catapulting ahead.

Electric vehicles account for 5% of cars sold in California and 1% nationwide. In Norway, they make up 40%. Bans on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars are scheduled to take effect there and in several other countries as soon as 2025. China has put automakers on notice that a ban is on the horizon.

But it is a much tougher sell in America, even in California. A state legislative proposal this year to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2040 went nowhere.

“You want me to issue a press release saying, ‘No more combustion engines’?” Brown said in an interview on Monday. “There are 32 million in California. It doesn't work that way. We have to provide an alternative…. We have to get that in place.”

The shift toward electric vehicles in parts of Europe and Asia is bolstered by government subsidies and tax structures that few American politicians would consider. They include tough gas-guzzler penalties for those who drive high-horsepower, climate-unfriendly pickups and SUVs, and large cash grants and tax breaks for those who buy electric.

The U.S. approach is grounded in requiring automakers to meet steadily more ambitious mileage-per-gallon targets, a process that has gone a long way in cutting carbon emissions.

But fuel economy standards will fall short unless the government sets a near-term target of zero miles per gallon — the point when all new cars run on no gasoline or diesel at all.

“Even if we were to double our fuel economy targets, we still don't get there,” said Niklas Hoehne, an author of studies for the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and co-founder of NewClimate Institute, a German think tank. “The transition won't happen in a way that is compatible with the goals agreed to in Paris.”

No one is talking about doubling fuel economy targets in the U.S. The Trump administration is in the process of trying to freeze current targets in place for six years. Yet the clean-tech optimists trying to push California — and by extension, the rest of the country — say there is still hope.

“We saw the same thing with renewable energy,” said Simon Mui, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-partisan environmental advocacy group. “We went, in the course of a decade, from a plan that didn't require any of our power to come from renewables to a plan that requires 100% renewable energy by 2045. We are at the same place [with transportation] that we were with wind and solar 10 or 15 years ago.”

California, in particular, has shown a capacity for rapid adaptation. The Toyota Prius first was manufactured in 1997 in response to California's clean-car policies, and spawned a hybrid revolution. The California Air Resources Board estimates there will be 70 electric vehicle models available by 2022, and much of the innovation is coming from labs in California.

California and like-minded states have been aggressively building charging stations and other infrastructure to coax drivers to go electric. And cities, counties and other bodies have transitioned fleets to zero-emission buses and trucks.

Los Angeles will roll out an ambitious “Zero Emissions 2028 Roadmap” this week, a plan that aims to accelerate electrification and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the region by an additional 25% by the time the 2028 Summer Olympics come to town.

The plan includes building tens of thousands of charging stations and sets ambitious targets for getting drivers and shippers into zero-emission vehicles. Up to 45% of cars in Los Angeles could be electric if the road map holds up.

“This is us saying we need to go further and do everything we can to get people behind the wheel of an electric car or an electric truck,” said Matt Petersen, chief executive of Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, a government-funded nonprofit that's helping lead electrification efforts.

Driverless vehicles, still in their early stages, could also push electrification forward. The models that ultimately hit the streets are likely to be electric since they are easier for computers to drive and for companies to maintain — and local officials are demanding the change.

“We will be pushing for any autonomous vehicles that hit our streets to be electric,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “It sends a signal to the Ubers and Lyfts, who then turn to the manufacturers with a very strong message.”

Other countries aren't waiting to go electric. And some analysts say that could spur Washington and the auto industry to act, particularly as Chinese manufacturers develop their own electric car models to meet booming demand.

The Chinese market is already approaching the size of the entire U.S. and European markets combined, and soon will dwarf them. If auto companies fail to reorient their strategies toward electrification, they risk losing huge market share to upstart Chinese competitors, says Joern Buss, a Detroit-based auto industry consultant with the firm Oliver Wyman.

Brown says Trump needs to wake up to that threat. “He is building the Chinese auto industry and destroying the future American auto industry,” the governor said.

Skeptics say waiting to be nudged ahead by more forward-thinking nations amounts to fiddling as the world burns.

The idea that the internal-combustion engine can be phased out in the next 20 years without government intervention on a massive scale and an unprecedented social awakening among the driving public is foolish, said Peter Tertzakian, executive director of the Arc Energy Research Institute, a Canadian group that analyzes energy investments.

He said most leaders assume the average driver will embrace electric as technology improves, much as parts of the power industry gave up fossil fuels as better systems emerged. But giving up gas-powered cars requires complex shifts in the way people live that don’t come into play when a coal power plant is replaced with a solar or gas plant.

“The Paris agreement was signed three years ago,” Tertzakian said. “The years keep passing, and the substitution [of gas-powered vehicles] is not happening. Look at oil and gas use. It is not decelerating. It is accelerating.”

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