California approves far-reaching strategy for tackling climate change. So what's next?

[jgo]

Source: Capital Public Radio

California’s air board today unanimously approved a sweeping state plan to battle climate change, creating a new blueprint for the next five years to cut carbon emissions, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and speed up the transition to renewable energy.

Called a scoping plan, the 297-page strategy could serve as a roadmap for other states and countries to follow, including a long list of proposed measures that, once adopted, would slash California’s greenhouse gases and clean up air pollution in the smoggiest state in the nation.

The California Air Resources Board’s plan sets an aggressive target of cutting greenhouse gases by 48% below 1990 levels by 2030, up from the 40% by 2030 required by state law. The ultimate goal is to cut use of oil 94% and become carbon neutral — which means the amount of carbon removed is greater than the carbon generated — by 2045.

“This is an extraordinary exercise and document, and it’s the most comprehensive, detailed plan for getting to net zero anywhere in the world,” said Air Resources Board Member Daniel Sperling, who also is director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.


Read more: https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/12/18/california-approves-far-reaching-strategy-for-tackling-climate-change-so-whats-next/

[ffr]

1. K&R Vote with your dollars. Mine will be towards repairing the damage I've done

as an unfortunately participant in the creation of fossil fueled global warming.

This is another Titanic shift for the leading United State, but the E.U. has some of their own very aggressive carbon reducing regulations in place and in plan.

It's time to get to work on the hard costly work ahead.

[progree]

2. Not a single mention of nuclear 👀⚠️ This isn't going to go over well with some frequent posters

on the subject in DU.

I read the entire article and did a browser search on it and couldn't find it.

Some other points from the article --

17% of all new cars sold in California are EV's, although only 2.3% of the state’s 29 million cars are so-called zero emission. 17% is 1 out of 6, that's a lot more than I thought.

To meet the plan’s targets, state officials project that California over the next 20 years will need about
* 30 times more electric vehicles
* 6 times more household electric appliances to replace gas appliances
* 4 times more wind and solar generation capacity

Electricity use is expected to soar as much as 68% by 2045.

Very ambitious carbon capture and storage goals

No mention of battery or other storage to deal with the intermittency issues of solar and wind, other than a mention in the context of climate-friendly homes

Link to article for convenience of reference (same link as in the OP):

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/12/18/california-approves-far-reaching-strategy-for-tackling-climate-change-so-whats-next/

[jgo]

3. Thank you for the response -

Please note that the OP can only be up to four paragraphs long. It takes responses such as these to get more details across.

[progree]

4. Exactly ✔️ Good job ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[TomCADem]

5. Given the CA is Prone to Earthquakes...

...the Fukishima earthquake in Japan really caused many folks in CA to sour on nuclear energy. Also, given that CA has so many sunny days, it makes sense that CA has increasingly turned to solar. Indeed, just last week, the CA PUC has started to shift from merely encouraging people to build solar panels to putting more emphasis on battery storage to address the timing issues you mentioned.

https://www.kcet.org/socal-focus/fallout-from-fukushima-to-san-onofre

The radiation that blew out of the Fukushima nuclear-power plants, particles of which the jet stream swept across the Pacific, barely left a trace on sensitive monitoring equipment in California. Yet its minute presence also registered loud and clear: this is one planet.

A much louder declaration about the interconnectedness of things had come days earlier when seismological instruments everywhere lit up a split second after the T?hoku temblor's first violent jolt. The tsunami it unleashed went global, too. Within 30 minutes of the initial shockwave, its western surge had slammed into Japan, and by the next day its eastern wave had raced across the Pacific, crashing into Crescent City and Santa Cruz harbors, where it splintered wharves and swamped boats; soon, it was rippling the Atlantic.

That so much of this destructive energy was captured live, transmitted in real time through media new and old, just underscores how bound up we are with people we do not know and landscapes with which we are unfamiliar. Terra Incognita is no more.

Yet even those places with which we are familiar can be unrecognizable, slipping off the screen of our memory. That thought came as I sat transfixed in front of the TV, watching endless hours of footage streaming in from a battered Japan, now reeling before three tragedies, the most ominous of which are the breached nuclear-power facilities.

[progree]

6. If you post that in the Environment and Energy group, you will get quite a response

I don't have the time to get into this at this time of the year.

E&E group: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1127

[NNadir]

10. Really? Does the dumb ass who wrote this nonsense have any account of the death toll...

...from radiation at Fukushima?

How many people died from radiation exactly?

How many people died from seawater?

Is the ass calling for the banning of coastal cities because of the risk of tsunamis?

Does this morally vapid fool give a rat's ass about how many people died from air pollution since 2011?

How about how many people died this summer from extreme heat because so called "renewable energy" has proved useless at addressing climate change.

Some of those dead were in California, where they were burning dangerous natural gas, dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere during an episode of extreme temperatures when the wind wasn't blowing.

This rhetoric does nothing more than prove that one cannot work as a journalist if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

Jesus F'ing Christ. This late in the game, with the climate emergency reaching unprecedented levels of disaster, we still have to listen to this mindless oblivious rhetoric.

I would submit that this type of rote, uninformed ignorance kills people on a vast scale.

History will not forgive us nor should it.

[TomCADem]

12. So, do you disagree that popular support for nuclear power in CA...

...really nosed dived in CA following the Fukashima incident? I know you may disagree with this, but I do not think it is coincidence that efforts to close nuclear power plants along the CA coastline really picked up steam after 2011.

I would also suggest that if a key part of the PR strategy of pro-nuclear supporters was to call folks "dumb asses" and "ignorant," then they probably undermined their attempts to assuage the concerns of Californians. A better approach would have to acknowledge that safety concerns are legitimate, but that steps have been taken to significantly reduce the risk of a Fukashima type incident.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/21/482997213/californias-last-nuclear-power-plant-to-be-shut-down

With its two nuclear reactors operating near several fault lines, safety is a big concern for those who have been calling for the plant's closure.

"Right out there, we've got tons of highly radioactive waste, sitting," Linda Seeley tells Lauren Sommer of member station KQED, standing at the front security gate that blocks access to the two big domes sitting on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Seeley was one of thousands of protesters here in the 1980s trying to stop the plant from opening. Now she's with a group called Mothers for Peace that's been pushing to close the plant. "I always feel nervous here," she says.

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011 reignited the concerns about the Diablo Canyon plant in California's San Luis Obispo County. After dangerous levels of radiation spilled out of the earthquake-damaged reactors in Japan, lawmakers in the U.S. called for greater scrutiny of the potential risks posed by Diablo Canyon.

[NNadir]

13. I'm not interested in popularity. I'm interested in fighting climate change. I asked some...

...questions about Fukushima, with which I am intimately familiar in extensive detail.

Again, the question is not a poll about how many people are ignorant of the topic. I know there's a huge number of such people who live and die by slogans and sound bites.

The question is "how many people died from radiation releases at the Fukushima reactors?"

Dumb shit stuff from journalists don't impress me. Almost none of them have ever opened a science book, as their rhetoric makes clear. Their comments on nuclear power are all of the "but her emails" nature.

Now, what is the answer to the question? Again, in case anyone missed it: "How many people died at Fukushima from radiation exposure?"

As many people who died from extreme heat in California while the State burned gas and dumped the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere to drive climate change because the wind wasn't blowing much in early September?

As it happens, I know the answer to the question, but I'm interested if among the paranoid antinuke community whose ignorance kills people, if there are a few who can report it.

Today, 18,000 people died from air pollution. (Source: Lancet VOLUME 396, ISSUE 10258, P1223-1249, OCTOBER 17, 2020) How does radiation from Fukushima compare?

There are, for the record, over 900,000 scientific publications on the subject of Fukushima listed on Google scholar.

Surely among them there is one that can compare the death toll from radiation to the death toll associated with seawater in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsumi.

[NullTuples]

7. Politically, nuclear power is currently dead in the water.

I think it has great potential. But I don't trust any current corporation to keep us safe from the dangers it also potentially presents. And we still haven't actually solved that pesky problem of what to do with waste apart from hide it somewhere so someone in the future can deal with it.

[progree]

9. See #6. If you want an answer to your issues, you will get it there by people who have

all the links at their fingertips.

[NNadir]

11. The technical community feels other wise, but then again, we're educated. n/t.

[NullTuples]

17. Gosh, I wish I was smart and technical enough to understand your ineffable logic...

[NNadir]

22. It takes a tremendous amount of work to understand these issues.

It's why glib sloganeering is dangerous.

I have spent 30 years of intense technical work around this issue. I can talk speak fluidly to scientists on this topic,, including my son who is working on a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

In fact I'll be giving a lecture to scientists on the topic in a few days.

Here's what I know: Opposition to nuclear energy is equivalent in many ways to opposition to vaccines inasmuch as both rely on unqualified people discussing in negative emotional terms subjects about which they know little or nothing, loudly proclaiming their ignorance in such a way as to kill people who buy into their rhetoric.

In the nuclear case, such rhetoric kills other people. Today 18,000 people will die from air pollution, as the did yesterday and every day of the last ten years. This will continue indefinitely until we overcome insistent ignorance.

Speaking only for myself I lay responsibility for this death toll on the antinuke community.

Have a nice day.

[NullTuples]

24. Like I've said before, I'm not anti-nuke.

I simply don't trust corporations owned by capitalists to manage nuclear energy production safely. They and their need to continuously extract ever greater profits are the reason we are in this mess in the first place. TEPCO is a good example.

[NNadir]

26. I hear a lot from "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes.

It's a regular feature of my tenure here. Someone says, "I'm not an antinuke...but...

But what?!!!???

I'm supposed to be impressed?

Here's why I don't take "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes seriously.

Suppose, for example, someone tells me that they "don't trust corporations owned by capitalists to manage nuclear energy production safely."

Suppose the person in question tells me so on a blog using a computer powered by electricity.

How is that they apparently trust corporations to operate dangerous natural gas plants "safely" or coal plants "safely" when these plants clearly kill people whenever they operate normally. They cannot be operated safely.

To me, this is the signature of an antinuke, selective attention. Antinukes routinely assign "concerns" - all of them dangerously vapid since antinukism kills people and drives climate change - to nuclear energy that they apply to nothing else.

If someone has evidence that corporate management on nuclear plants in the now 70 year history of commercial nuclear energy has killed as many people as will die today from air pollution, much of which comes from corporately owned dangerous fossil fuel power plants, that would be interesting, but they can't, because such evidence doesn't exist.

I keep in my files a publication that tracks the environmental factors that lead to disability and mortality for whenever some one, a straight up anti-nuke or an "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke starts whining about "safety" of nuclear plants without giving a fuck about how many people are killed by dangerous fossil fuel plants, or how many people die from climate related effects. The data for the death toll from air pollution can be found therein.

It's here:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

This death toll works out to about 18,000 people per day.

Commercial nuclear power plants have operated in the United States since 1958. It would be interesting if any "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes could come across evidence that corporate mismanagement of "safety" in the total 64 history of American nuclear power mismanagement has led to the number of deaths that air pollution will kill today. Or, if, similarly, any antinukes or "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes can point to the other big boogeyman in the anti-nuke portfolio, so called "nuclear waste," to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel over more than six decades in this country has led to a death toll as high as will die in the next two hours from air pollution, the uncontrolled release directly into the environment of dangerous fossil fuel waste, which unlike used nuclear fuel, kills people.

Have a nice day.

[NullTuples]

8. Interestingly, CA's PUC just voted to quadruple the payback time on rooftop solar.

They've cut the buyback amount of surplus power to almost nil.

The only way that makes sense to me is bribes, conflicting interests...or maybe they want to have all solar in CA be centralized and owned by corporations.

Problem is, the state also recently passed a law that says all new home construction must have rooftop solar.

Something really stinks here.

https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/12/california-solar-rules-overhauled/

"New rooftop solar projects are now considered uneconomical"

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/12/15/california-pulls-the-plug-on-rooftop-solar/

https://www.kpbs.org/news/local/2022/12/15/california-regulators-adopt-new-solar-panel-rules-that-reduce-incentives-to-install

[hunter]

15. Wealthy people should pay for their own damned batteries.

The current rate structure transfers money from low income people who don't own the roofs they live under to very affluent people.

The saddest thing about all this is that solar and wind power can't save the world. The numbers are in, the experiment has been done. They'll only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels, especially natural gas and will do nothing to reduce the overall amount of greenhouse gasses humans dump in the atmosphere.

If we want to quit fossil fuels, and we must, we simply have to ban them and let the cards fall as they may. Enthusiasm for solar and wind power is just another flavor of climate change denial.

[jeffreyi]

16. In the meantime...

There is an industrial scorched earth solar and power corridor and lithium mining apocalypse unfolding on our public lands, very much contributing to the demise of desert tortoise, sage grouse, yucca, countless other organisms. And making a toxic valley fever dustbowl in the process. And not solving the problem in any way whatsoever. Making some people rich, though, including those in foreign corporations, who do much of the mining. And no lithium recycling in sight.

[NullTuples]

18. and your solution is?

Also, love the BS about "the numbers are in, the experiment has been done". It's just so...right wing troll.

[Elessar Zappa]

19. Solar and wind won't save us.

Nuclear is the only possible answer. That’s a fact.

[NullTuples]

20. I see. Because we can trust corporations to run it safely?

And not put profits before people? Or life on the planet?

Cancer is a nasty way to die.

Nuclear has the potential - a few countries and our own navy have proven than to be true.

But unless we run the entire industry like they do, it's inevitable there will be "accidents" with wide scale effects.

Meanwhile, we just keep stockpiling the waste products, some of which will be be dangerous for 10,000 years.

Call me when humanity grows up, replaces capitalism and is willing to have non-profit nuclear.

[jgo]

21. I found this article about how scientists are tackling nuclear waste disposal interesting ...

https://cen.acs.org/articles/98/i12/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best.html

[hunter]

25. California energy data is all public.

You can wade through it and use real numbers at gigawatt scales to model any proposed energy system you like -- any mix of solar, wind, batteries, hydro-storage, nuclear, and fossil fuels.

You'll discover that solar and wind power alone, without natural gas inputs, are incapable of supporting the lifestyles affluent people are accustomed to.

That's true on any scale. A wealthy person can pretend to be energy independent with solar panels, an expensive battery system, a "backup" generator powered by canola oil, but that neglects society at large, the same society that supports their comfortable lifestyle.

Very simply, solar and wind energy are not economically viable without significant fossil fuel inputs.

The only energy source capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely is nuclear power.

[Kaleva]

23. Even if goals are achieved, many parts of CA will still become unhabitable

Because of severe drought and wild fires.

China produces twice a as much greenhouse gases as the US does and it won't be long before India passes the US in greenhouse gas emissions. So even if the US achieved net zero, we will still be devasted by climate change.