Five states sign climate pact

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer | Saturday, March 10, 2007 9:53 PM PST ∞

California is no longer alone in its campaign against climate change. The nation's most populous state, after passing a landmark law last year to slash industrial greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020, has joined with Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington to address what some are calling one of the planet's most serious threats.

In what they are calling the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative, the states pledged a little more than a week ago to set targets for greenhouse gas reductions for each state individually, and for the five states as a whole, within six months.

Within 18 months, they pledge to introduce a market system to provide a way for power plants, oil refineries and cement-makers to trade carbon emissions credits and reduce emissions overall.

Lisa Shaffer, assistant director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, called the five-state pact a significant "political signal to the rest of the world and to Washington" that could ultimately lead to a national strategy on climate change.

John Galloway, senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Berkeley, said the pact will spark the development of a clean energy industry that rivals Silicon Valley in its influence on California's economy.

"We are in a dynamite place to make that happen, and we should capitalize on that opportunity immediately," Galloway said.

The pact came one month after an international panel released a report that said scientists are 90 percent certain that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from industrial nations are changing the planet's climate.

The gases are said to act like a blanket, trapping heat from the sun that otherwise would bounce back into space. As the layer of greenhouse gases thickens, they say, more heat is prevented from escaping. Climate scientists say that process explains the 1 degree rise in the planet's overall temperature in the last century.

"There's no debate that climate change is happening and that it is happening because of human activity," Shaffer said.

Taking the lead

One degree may not seem like much. But scientists say the Earth was only 5 degrees cooler than it is today when the last Ice Age occurred 10,000 years ago, leaving much of North American frozen solid. And they say the planet was only 5 or 6 degrees warmer than it is today during the steamy era of the dinosaurs.

While the 1 degree change is well documented, not everyone in the science community agrees that the warming is primarily a response to human activity. A few scientists suggest the oceans and atmosphere are so complex, it is impossible to quantify how much impact industrialized society is having.

Fearing the potential consequences of accelerated climate change, such as droughts, coastal flooding, reduced water supplies, more wildfires and a lot more hot weather, nearly 170 nations have signed a 1997 treaty called the Kyoto Protocol that calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 5.2 percent by 2012.

The United States is one of the signers, but has never ratified the treaty and therefore is not subject to its provisions. President Bush has consistently opposed ratification on the grounds that the Kyoto Protocol would hurt the U.S. economy and is unfair because it exempts China, the world's second-largest emitter. The United States, which is No. 1, is responsible for 22 percent of worldwide emissions.

In the absence of a national strategy to combat climate change, California stepped forward in 2002 and passed a law ordering a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions from vehicles. Cars and trucks account for close to half of the state's emission total. Then last year, the state passed another ground-breaking law requiring a 25 percent reduction from industrial sources, which account for most of the rest.

And now the four neighboring states have followed suit.

"In the absence of meaningful federal action, it is up to the states to take action to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country," said Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, in a statement. "Western states are being particularly hard-hit by the effects of climate change."

Climate scientists recently reported that temperatures are warming twice as fast across the Southwest and in Southern California as in the rest of the United States.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger predicted that the five-state system for trading emissions credits will become a model for a national cap-and-trade system.

The idea is patterned after cap-and-trade systems employed by Kyoto Protocol to reduce world greenhouse gas emissions and by the South Coast Air Quality Management District to clean up the air in Riverside, Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, one of the nation's smoggiest regions.

Under such the regional air-quality program, caps set upper limits for ozone emissions. And factories try to stay within the limits. If they can't, they have the option of buying credits from factories with emissions to spare. The five states plan to adopt a similar system to combat global warming.

Slowing the rate of growth

When it comes to greenhouse gases, California is the second-largest generator in the nation behind Texas and 16th largest in the world. Based on California Energy Commission statistics, California is responsible for 1.3 percent of emissions worldwide.

Shaving some of those emissions is hardly going to make a dent in the climate change problem, scientists say, but the campaign has to start somewhere.

"The fact is, every little bit helps," Shaffer said. "As corny as that sounds, it really is true. It seems like what one state does doesn't matter, but it really does."

And now we are talking about the impact of five states rather than one, Shaffer said.

At the same time, there is so much work to be done.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased by one-third since the dawn of the Industrial Age, from 280 parts per million to 380 parts per million.

"We are on track to more than double where our planet has been for the last million years," said Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

At current rates of growth in use of fossil fuels, the level will reach 500 parts per million by 2050 and 700 parts per million by 2070, Lewis said. Even if the world were to cut emissions in half, the carbon level would reach 450 parts per million by midcentury ----- and stay there for 100 years or more. He said that's because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere 500 to 5,000 years.

"Slowing the growth of emissions means that we will only slow the rate at which we will pile them up," Lewis said.

He likened the situation to paying off a high-interest credit card that has been charged to the max. "Just because you stop charging debt on your credit cards doesn't mean that you are going to pay them off," Lewis said.

Still, Lewis said it is better to slow the growth of emissions than to let levels soar out of sight.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-5442 or ddowney@nctimes.com.

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