California on path to miss its climate goals, agency says

Electric vehicles alone will not curb pollution enough, report warns.

SACRAMENTO — California is failing to meet its goals to reduce vehicle travel, imperiling efforts to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to a state report released Monday.

The California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate change regulator, found that carbon emissions per capita from vehicle travel in California were increasing.

That’s despite a decadeold law that required regions across the state to plan for housing growth so that people could live closer to where they work or to public transit and reduce their time on the state’s roadways.

“California — at the state, regional and local levels — has not yet gone far enough in making the systemic and structural changes to how we build and invest in communities that are needed to meet state climate goals,” the report said.

The state’s inability to curb the amount of driving puts it at risk of failing to meet overall climate change goals. The state hit its 2020 goal for reducing emissions below 1990 levels four years in advance largely due to major improvements to the electricity grid.

But climate regulators warned that the state’s goal to cut emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 won’t be met without a major turnaround in the transportation sector.

Dramatically increasing the amount of electric vehicles on the road will not solve the problem, the report said. Even if new car sales of zeroemission vehicles increase nearly tenfold from today, the state would still need to reduce vehicle miles traveled per capita by 25% to meet the 2030 goal.

“California will not achieve the necessary greenhouse gas emissions reductions to meet mandates for 2030 and beyond without significant changes to how communities and transportation systems are planned, funded, and built,” the report said.

Such changes will not be simple. This year, state lawmakers rejected a bill that would have allowed for the construction of more apartment complexes and other higher-density housing near transit stops across the state. The bill sparked a fierce debate over the state taking a bigger role in development decisions that have largely been controlled by cities and counties.

Climate regulators recommended in the report that the state create a new interagency body made up of state, regional and local elected officials to determine how to plan communities in ways that would help meet emission reduction targets.