Good to see, then, CA using this bridge to push climate innovations. CA and Canada are well known around the globe for leadership on sustainability and fueling a green economy powered by a lot of renewables. States and provinces on both sides are eclipsing their federal governments in leading those nations through this great industrial revolution. Clearly that gap will grow with this agreement.
Funny how collaboration is many times easier across borders than internal for so many nations.
California Governor Jerry Brown, seated, signs SB 32 while joined by Senate President pro tempore Kevin de Leon, second from left, and state Senator Fran Pavley, Thursday, September 8, 2016, in Los Angeles.
AP Photo/Richard Vogel
n late August, a robust environmental coalition advocating sweeping climate change legislation in California scored an 11th-hour victory. With only a week left in the legislative session, the Assembly defied expectations by approving a bill that would build on California’s existing short-term goals to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2030.
The response from the bill’s backers has bordered on the ecstatic, and advocacy groups, media outlets, and political pundits have cast the passage of the law, known as SB32, as a triumphant moment in California’s unstoppable progress as a go-it-alone global climate leader. However, the law’s actual climate impacts will be subtler. While positive, SB32’s passage comes amid deep uncertainty over whether California can realize its domestic climate ambitions. Having rejected a stronger version of SB32 in 2015, the legislature only narrowly passed the law this year by leaving many of the contentious details of implementation unaddressed.
Moreover, California’s cap-and-trade program, the state’s central mechanism for achieving greenhouse gas reductions, has begun to falter in the face of legal challenges and regulatory uncertainties. Business and oil interests that vigorously lobbied against SB32, though eventually unsuccessful in their fight to defeat the bill, gained surprisingly widespread sympathy for their argument that California should not risk pulling too far ahead of its neighboring states.
But California’s response to these obstacles has, if anything, only cemented the state’s global role in combating climate change. Instead of retrenching or retreating, California is taking the fight against greenhouse gases beyond its own borders. In doing so, state officials have placed California in the vanguard of a nascent global movement to coordinate regional climate action across state and even international borders.
These cooperative regional efforts have the potential to far outstrip any national agreements on the table, including last December’s much-lauded Paris Agreement. Amid warnings that existing national climate goals are not strong enough to keep global climate change below catastrophic levels, California has joined a handful of leading states and regions—so-called subnational governments—from around the globe that have taken matters into their own hands. It’s a strategy that could help climate leaders like California overcome local resistance while creating economic and political rewards for other, less forward subnationals to broaden the scope of their own climate ambitions.
It’s not an easy path. In California and elsewhere, climate-minded government officials are testing their constitutional boundaries and face a variety of legal, organizational, and financial obstacles. In some states, constitutional barriers have already blocked officials from taking climate action. Nevertheless, California and its allies are pioneering a collaborative program that offers other subnationals diverse incentives to match their ambitious emissions goals. Their success—or failure—will have dramatic implications for the global climate...."
LINK TO REST OF STORY ON THE AMERICAN PROSPECT: http://prospect.org/article/california-champions-cross-border-climate-innovations
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