California’s Comprehensive Plan to Fight Global Warming: A Strong Step Forward, But Land Use Reform in Particular Needs to be Added

By Traci Sheehan
Executive Director
Planning and Conservation League

Last week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released its Draft AB 32 Scoping Plan, detailing how the state plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Based on our initial review, the draft scoping plan is an important milestone in California's fight against global warming and, to a large degree, reflects the urgency of the situation. It includes a strong commitment to expanding renewable power production, cleaning our cars and trucks, increasing energy efficiency, improving water management, and many other enforceable measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, this draft scoping plan is definitely a "draft," and still has a ways to go before it's ready for adoption later this fall.

We're pleased to see numerous public health benefits in the draft plan. However, if poorly implemented, some provisions could dampen progress towards improving our air and water quality. Adequate safeguards need to be instituted in all components of the final plan to protect public health and improve the well-being of the state's most polluted and economically disadvantaged communities.

In perhaps its greatest single deficiency, the draft plan fails to include meaningful measures to reform California's land use policies. Instead, the draft only encourages local governments to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offers various rewards for good behavior. For example, the draft highlights efforts by the Schwarzenegger Administration to ensure that California's Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) will "provide recognition" of projects that meet regional greenhouse gas goals.

This "pat on the back" approach to land use policy reform is unacceptable in light of the intense pressure placed upon local governments by developers and industries to continue business as usual decision making. The final plan should require any increase in greenhouse emissions from land use decisions to be fully mitigated, and also explicitly require that public agencies use CEQA as a tool to quantify and reduce potential greenhouse gas emissions from proposed projects.

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