Hillary Clinton a Good Fit for California's Environmental Concerns

By Tina Andolina

In 2006 California’s environmental community worked hard to pass AB 32 – the Global Warming Solutions Act, because we knew the time to act aggressively had come. We knew that California’s plan could be a model for America if our national leaders had the vision and the will to act boldly to confront the energy and global warming crisis we now face.

Senator Hilary Clinton has unveiled a compressive and farsighted plan to tackle this challenge. This plan incorporates some of the best elements of California’s policies, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050—the level necessary to avoid the most dire consequences of global warming, setting an aggressive standard for renewable energy, and common sense measures like retiring the inefficient incandescent light bulb.

But the Senator’s plan goes beyond what California has so far achieved. The Senator’s plan incorporates some of the key policies the environmental community in California is currently pursing. Specifically her plan calls for auctioning off 100% of the permits involved in a carbon pollution cap and trade scheme. This is a necessary safety valve to ensure true reductions actually occur. Also, the Senator includes a strategy to ensure low income residents can invest in greener technologies, which is a critical and often missing part of the solution. Lower income communities are often disproportionately burdened with pollution. Therefore, it makes sense to establish policies that target funds in these communities.

Other important cornerstones of Senator Clinton’s plan include cutting foreign oil imports by two-thirds from projected levels by 2030; creating a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund by demanding that oil companies invest in clean energy alternatives; reducing electricity demand 20% from projected levels by 2020 by maximizing energy efficiencies, which will save consumers billions of dollars; and focusing on transforming our carbon-based economy into an efficient green economy, creating at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over the next decade.

Because air pollution in California is a public health crisis, the state has demanded that cars and trucks sold in the California pollute less. However, the Bush Administration has tried to derail this effort. Senator Clinton’s plan will help ensure California can insist on higher standards from the auto makers. Her plan includes aggressive policies to raise fleet-wide fuel economy standards from the current level of 25 miles per gallon (mpg) to 40 mpg in 2020 and 55 mpg in 2030. By 2030, these tough CAFE standards will save consumers more than $180 billion per year and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 730 million metric tons.

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