California summit may exert global influence
WASHINGTON — Even as California forged its own path for years to battle global warming, pressing forward whether Washington agreed or not, skeptics have persistently scolded that it is just a state — it can’t set policy for the nation, much less the world.
If California ever had a moment to prove them wrong, it is now. At the international climate summit Gov. Jerry Brown kicked off Wednesday in San Francisco, the state is playing a role none ever has, pushing the rest of the country to join other nations in enforcing a landmark agreement on climate change that President Trump has quit.
Put simply, the three-day environmental summit will test whether California can bring the country to a place Congress and the White House won’t.
“This is a very odd challenge we have,” Brown said in an interview in his office. “It is coming at us from all over the planet. Everyone is contributing and everyone has got to do something to combat it. It is a totally unique world challenge, never before faced. There is nothing like this.”
Indeed, as the Trump administration prepared this week to ease regulations on methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, many states are looking to follow California and Colorado in pursuing policies that require energy firms to capture the methane their drilling operations release and convert it into electricity.
In other sectors, more ambitious commitments may be made. California’s new law — signed Monday — putting the state on a path to 100 percent renewable energy could motivate others to make similar pledges this week.
Brown had not planned the summit as an act of defiance. The idea emerged soon after the Paris climate change accord was signed in 2015, with strong support from President Obama, and the world assumed the United States would take a lead role in cutting carbon emissions in an effort to ease global warming.
It made perfect sense then that California — America’s leader in clean tech innovation and climate action — would host a highstakes gathering of political leaders to cement the Paris benchmarks, assess progress and form new partnerships. The state already has demonstrated how aggressive climate action can boost a large economy.
In the Trump era, however, the event morphed into something else. The president has made clear his administration does not agree with mainstream climate science, and sees no need to cut emissions at the pace the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns will be crucial to dodge catastrophic warming.
Yet roughly half of Americans live in states that are racing to meet goals in the Paris agreement. Half of America’s largest cities have made commitments to go beyond state action. And according to a Quinnipiac poll last month, 64 percent of U.S. voters believe the nation should do more to combat global warming. With Congress up for grabs in November, candidates are being grilled about Trump’s decision to disavow the Paris accord.
“The Trump administration is visibly dismantling Obamaera climate programs, and doing it loudly in a way people see and can understand, and it is attacking science more generally in very visible ways,” said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA. “California is big enough and splashy enough, and Jerry Brown is famous enough, that people are paying attention to what California is doing about it.”
Brown said the state has been preparing since President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, one of the nation’s first and most important environmental laws, in 1970.
After that, “we developed the institutional capacity and the bureaucratic understanding to combat pollution and carbon emissions,” Brown said. “We are positioned well to deal with the problem. Not to take advantage of this would be a tragedy.”
During the summit, San Francisco will be swarmed with climate thinkers, crusading celebrities and political leaders racing to and from events that range from cerebral to spectacle. Conferees attending a deep dive in methane reductions in the morning can groove to the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir at an evening concert.