San Diego Claims GHG Reductions Of 25% In 10 Yrs. Just One Problem - It's Not Remotely True
The office of newly minted Mayor Todd Gloria released a climate report this week that claimed the city of San Diego has cut greenhouse-gas emissions by a whopping 25 percent over the last decade. That’d be an incredible feat and reason to celebrate for any city in California — if it were true.
Since former-Mayor Kevin Faulconer adopted the city’s climate plan in 2015, the city has relied on faulty data that massively exaggerates cuts to its largest source of climate pollution: tailpipe emission from cars and trucks. In fact, according to the flawed calculations, the city met its 2020 target for slashing greenhouse gases before the climate blueprint was even approved. City officials have acknowledged the issue — first reported by the Union-Tribune in 2017 — but continued to trumpet progress based in large part on vehicle-emission reductions that never occurred.
The issue stems from the use of outdated data provided by regional transportation and planning experts. When the city drafted its climate plan five years ago, it chose 2010 as the baseline year against which all emission reductions would be calculated. A key component of the process was establishing the amount of driving that occurred at that seemingly arbitrary starting point.
Rather than conducting a new traffic analysis for the 2010 baseline year, the city relied on old modeling projections. The problem was that the data was generated before the Great Recession hit in 2008 and didn’t account for the major decline in driving that resulted from job loss during the economic collapse. As a result, the climate plan greatly overestimated the amount of people on the road for its baseline year. By 2016, it appeared on paper as if the city had taken hundreds of thousands of cars off the road — from an inflated 13.7 billion miles driven in 2010 down to 12.7 billion miles traveled just half a decade later.
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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/story/2020-12-30/san-diego-continues-to-tout-greenhouse-gas-reductions-that-never-happened