Electric car goal faces big challenge
In 2007, Marin County adopted a new countywide plan.
That’s not so unusual. Counties and cities are supposed to regularly update their general plans, blueprints for guiding new development, environmental protections and the economic health of the community.
But Marin’s plan was different from others; it focused on making Marin even “greener,” outlining goals and guidelines for environmental sustainability. That plan and the state’s continued push toward reducing the drain on non-renewable resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution has Marin officials setting ambitious goals, such as by 2030 having half of Marin’s vehicles powered by electricity.
Today, even with the growth in sales of electric vehicles and hybrids, that goal is hard to fathom.
Still, it addresses the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Marin — transportation.
The expansion of MCE has also been targeted to help counties and cities to meet the state’s climate- change targets first set by then- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.
The county has already converted much of its vehicle fleet to electric and hybrid cars, but it is still far from weaned from the fleet’s dependence on the gasoline-fuel combustible engine.
Local buses are slowly moving toward electric-powered fleets and counties and cities have methodically expanded the availability of power stations for cars.
The county’s goal follows in the footsteps of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent executive order that by 2035 all new passenger cars and trucks to be sold in California have to be zero- emission vehicles.
We’ve made environmental changes before.
One local example has been water conservation, where households and businesses have reduced consumption and waste by converting to water-saving dishwashers, washing machines and toilets. Those measures add up.
But part of the success of those measures were the financial incentives and rebates local water agencies gave to encourage consumers to go water-wise.
The county’s new “green” goals, which apply only to unincorporated areas, are part of a “Drawdown: Marin” plan spearheaded by the Marin Climate Action Network, which involved 150 community volunteers.
Putting the goal in writing and having it adopted by a board of politicians is an important step, but implementing it is the hard work, where it is going to face challenges. How are local leaders going to turn this “green” goal into reality?
The plan is to create a local nonprofit to help implement the strategies and the county is talking about creating a new job to help with needed fundraising. How those strategies will deal with market and supply issues that could either help or hinder its success in converting the more than 230,000 registered passenger vehicles across Marin is unclear.
How is that going to take place across all economic strata in this county? Every household doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to buy a new car every 10 years. And are there enough power stations readily accessible across Marin — and all of its neighborhoods — to accommodate this conversion?
And even if Marin takes these measures, are neighboring counties going to follow? Much of the traffic in Marin is out- of- county motorists going to or from their jobs.
We also need to promote the generation of electrical power through renewable sources. Emergency power outages declared in recent years because the state was running low on electricity is a lesson that California needs to bolster its generation and storage.
Even supporters of the county’s plan admit that it is “aggressive,” and that it has to be in order to address the threat of climate change.
Thirteen years after adopting its first “green” plan, the county appears ready to step up its effort. The details involved in actually meeting those goals — and widespread public buy-in to support them — will determine the county’s success.