This is hilarious, from Columnist Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee.
Gov. Jerry Brown hopped around Europe for two weeks last month, telling the world that to avoid a climate change Armageddon, it should emulate what California is doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As Brown was crusading in Europe, his Air Resources Board issued a report hailing California’s nearly 5 percent reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases in 2016 by companies governed by the state’s “cap-and-trade” system.
It appeared to underscore the efficacy of the system, whose extension was one of Brown’s proudest achievements this year and one he forcefully touted in Europe.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving.
Julie Cart, the environmental writer for CALmatters who covered Brown’s European sojourn, delved into the report’s data and discovered that the major reason for last year’s drop in emissions wasn’t cap-and-trade, or any other state action.
Rather, it occurred because unusually heavy winter rain and snow storms allowed utilities to depend less on generating electricity by burning fossil fuels and more on hydroelectric power from dams in California and other states.
“Emissions from in-state electricity generation decreased more than 19 percent last year, and emissions from imported electricity dropped nearly 23 percent,” Cart wrote.
That nugget of data is steeped in political irony.
California utilities are under a legal mandate to shift their power supplies from coal, natural gas and other carbon-emitting sources to carbon-free “renewable portfolios” — 33 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2030.
The latter requirement is imposed by 2015 legislation carried by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, who was part of Brown’s climatic posse in Europe.
However, the state’s definition of renewable sources specifically excludes the hydroelectric power from major dams such as Shasta, Oroville and Folsom that was the major reason greenhouse gas emissions dropped so dramatically in 2016.
Read the full story here
Sincere thanks to the 2015/2016 El Niño for usurping our Governor’s feckless climate action.
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Anybody calculate the CO2 emitted by the wildfires?
Not to mention that the fires are directly heating the atmosphere…a double-whammy of Global Warming.
They better fire up the pixie dust farms if they want to meet that mandate by 2030.
I have to laugh and laugh at this feckless Moonbeam Brown. The problem is, he is such a liar; lying is the only thing Democrats seem to be proficient at these days. The irony of it all is most striking.
The biggest problem with that assessment:
‘apres Brown, le deluge’.
He’s the MODERATE in the California Democrat universe.
I’d really like to see more links or references for followup! I want to be in the position to pass on quality information to warmists and alarmists. On this story for instance:
1) “Air Resources Board issued a report hailing California’s nearly …” — If not a URL can’t you give us the name of the report at least?
2) Julie Cart, the environmental writer … delved into the report’s data … — OK, which table, in the unnamed report. The advantage of reading the reporting of an environmental writer is they know or have figured out how to “delve”.
3) Are any other news sources that confirm this reporting?
This is an unverified report from a source I’m not familiar with. If I shared this info with someone I would have to qualify it with those words. Too bad, it seems to be a powerful story about how just about everybody is a “denier” in some sense of the word.
The exclusion of hydroelectric energy from the list of renewables shows how bias the liberal’s environmental policies have become. Liberals don’t like hydroelectric because it can affect the river environment. Their favorite renewable energy (wind and solar) kills thousand of birds with no punitive backlash but you don’t dare put a dam on a river because that affects the type of aquatic habitat (river vs lake). I had over 25 years of experience in PG&E’s hydroelectric facilities and it frosts me how hydroelectric enegry is poohooed by liberals.
John, do you remember the mid-1970’s Northern California drought years? The Federal Central Valley Project (CVP) was not able to meet its contractual commitments to provide PG&E a certain minimum level of electric generation output from Federal hydroelectric facilities.
No matter how much power the CVP provided PG&E after that, PG&E only paid for the reduced peak amount they delivered during the 1977-78 water year. The Fed’s inept negotiations (and hapless negotiators) dragged on for years with multi-million annual losses to the taxpayers.
“it describes radiation movement as a process of “absorption”, whereas any reasonable person knows that all things that absorb radiation also emit it.”
‘Absorbtion’ is a euphemism, a term of convenience used in spectroscopy. What actually happens is that light traveling towards the observer is taken in, and then re-radiated in all directions. Since the amount re-radiated towards the observer is less than the total incident light would have been, a dark line is seen in the spectrum. Scattering would be a better word for it.
The danger with euphemisms like this is that people who are not familiar with the discipline will tend to take them as factual.