With summit as backdrop, Brown signs bills to confront climate change.
With his highly touted international summit on global warming serving as a backdrop, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a raft of bills Thursday in San Francisco that seek to put more electric vehicles on the road and demand that ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft deploy cleaner, greener cars.
The signing of the eight bills coincides with the three-day Global Climate Action Summit this week in San Francisco. The laws are intended to reduce heat-trapping pollution in the transportation sector, a dirty part of the economy that has proved much harder to clean up than power plants and heavy industry. About half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions come from cars, trucks and other forms of transport.
The laws introduce several new initiatives, including electrification of school buses and a permanent extension of the vanpools that carry farmworkers to their fields. One statute, by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, directs state regulators to develop new emissions-reduction targets for ride-hailing companies, which represent an increasing chunk of the traffic and tailpipe pollution on California highways.
“Whether we travel by car, bus or boat, the need to move to zero-emission transportation is urgent,” said Brown, who signed the legislation in an unconventional manner — while taking a cruise on San Francisco Bay’s first plug-in hybrid ferry.
The maiden voyage of the Red and White Fleet’s Enhydra, which took Brown, his wife, Anne Gust Brown, several authors of the new laws and other summit attendees on a sunset sail beneath the Bay Bridge, was just one of many flourishes that have come with this week’s summit.
While the core of the summit has been highlevel discussions among mayors, governors and other world and business leaders on advancing local climate action, it has drawn an eclectic mix duly representative of San Francisco. Plain-suited policymakers have huddled with fiercely independent academics, partisan politicians, hooded techies and plenty of protesters, each with their own cause.
“Only in America can you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference,” former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said after his keynote speech Thursday was interrupted by demonstrators calling for stronger regulation of the fossil fuel industry.
The invitation-only summit was organized by Bloomberg and Brown with the goal of motivating local governments and businesses to help the United States meet the emissions cuts it pledged in Paris three years ago and also to elicit greater participation by regional leaders around the world. President Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a hoax, has pledged to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement and abandon Obama-era climate programs, all of which will make it harder for emission targets to be met worldwide.
Activists are now turning to California, a state that would be listed as having the world’s fifthlargest economy if it were a nation, to lead the fight against global warming.
“San Francisco is really the perfect place to hold this event,” Bloomberg said at a joint news conference with Brown on Thursday, the second day of the summit.
Brown used the occasion to criticize Trump, again, for his inaction on climate change, saying the president would go down in history as a “liar, criminal, fool — take your pick.”
Meanwhile, political leaders and corporate executives were busy making promises to take action on global warming — actions that would be relatively insignificant but perhaps numerous enough to make a dent in the problem or at least build momentum.
On Thursday, Bloomberg and Brown announced that a group of U.S. cities, states and businesses pursuing climate action, known as America’s Pledge, was partnering with the Japan Climate Initiative, a new collaboration of more than 200 Japanese governments and firms to find ways to reduce greenhouse gases. An alliance of 17 governors, including Brown, pledged to sequester more carbon on public lands, reduce super pollutants and produce more solar energy. Kaiser Permanente committed to becoming carbonneutral in 2020.
“We certainly have a long ways to go, and that’s why we’re here,” Bloomberg said. “But there’s every reason to be optimistic.”
The legislation signed by Brown seeks to build on previous efforts to boost the numbers of electric cars in California. This year, the governor issued an executive order calling for 5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2030.
The state, however, has a long way to go. Sales of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars have foundered, mostly because of their high cost and the relatively low price of gasoline. Only about 400,000 zeroemission cars have been sold.
“These bills will help get more clean cars on the road and reduce harmful emissions,” Brown said.