The draft plan will
not keep global temperatures close to what scientists say will
avoid catastrophe. The world has only ten years to
cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50% if we are to attain the goal.
President Biden has committed the United States to a 50% reduction
by 2030. Yet the draft plan may not achieve even 40% by 2030. This
is not what we need.
The science of climate change
requires front-loading our response. If mitigation
pathways are not rapidly activated, much more expensive and complex
adaptation measures will have to be taken to avoid the impacts of
higher levels of global warming on the Earth system. Not acting
effectively now will just increase the costs of climate
change.
California’s
goal should be at least an 80% reduction in emissions by
2030. A former coordinating author of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Professor of
Sustainability at UC Berkeley, Daniel Kammen, Ph.D., set out a
scientifically backed and feasible program for California in 2021.
It calls for an 80% reduction in emissions by 2030.
The draft plan only
aims for an 80% reduction emissions by
2045. The draft plan’s reliance on carbon
capture and sequestration (CCS) or direct carbon capture (DAC) to
balance 20% of our emissions is more than New York (15%) and far
more than the State of Washington (5%). And this is an unproven
technology.
Neither CCS nor DAC
should be counted on as scalable. The March
28, 2022 IPCC report on the capacity of different
actions to reduce greenhouse gases puts CCS as the least effective
and most expensive of the 43 climate actions the IPCC evaluated for
deployment prior to 2030. We must be smarter and do better than
this.