The California experiment
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s green state and the mathematics of carbon
(Dec. 6, 2007) By Cosmo Garvin
If you wiped California off the face of the planet, just made it disappear — left behind no car or SUV, politician, person or cow — you’d eliminate only about 1.6 percent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
Keep California and lose Texas, and you’d more or less double the benefit to the planet, but you’d still be a long way short of solving the problem of global warming.
So it’s hard at first to see how California’s highly touted experiment in planet saving, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, or just AB 32 for short, is going to make much of a difference.
But on a human scale, on the scale of what government can do, AB 32 is an enormous undertaking. “We’ve got only five years to develop regulations for every sector of society,” explained Stanley Young of the California Air Resources Board.
The plan was signed into law by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2006, and its goal is to reduce California’s greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. In that way, AB 32 is meant to mirror the Kyoto Protocol.
In 2007, California is expected to put about 496 million metric tons (MMT) of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of it is carbon dioxide, but mixed in there are nitrogen oxide, methane and a whole cocktail of less common but more harmful gases produced by transportation and industry.
So, what do 496 MMT of greenhouse gases look like? CARB figures that just 1 MMT of CO2 would fill 200,000 hot-air balloons. So, all of California’s greenhouse gases for a year would fit into about 99 million hot-air balloons.
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44th Annual Kinetic Grand Championship Race
STAFF PICK / events, art, outdoors, sports, for kids, free / 9 a.m.-6 p.m. A 3-day, 42-mile kinetic sculpture race over land, sand, mud and water! LeMans start at the Noon Whistle on the Arcata Plaza. Follow the race through Manila, Eureka and into Ferndale on Memorial Day for the Glorious Finish. kineticgrandchampionship.com. 889-3024.
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