County wants to delay climate goals because it’s too hard to keep their promises | Opinion

Between Supervisor Sue Frost’s anti-vaxxer nonsense and Supervisor Phil Serna’s years-long narcoleptic performance art, I didn’t think I could be surprised any more by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors.

I feel like this shouldn’t need to be said, but just because the state of California has announced a 2045 deadline for carbon targets doesn’t mean the county can pawn off their own, glacially-slow efforts to reduce the county’s greenhouse gas emissions by 15 years — setting back any immediacy the work of their own staff, the county’s climate task force and the whole of the Sacramento region may have once felt in their efforts to combat climate change.

Yet that is exactly what the Board of Supervisors is proposing to do on Tuesday, against the advice of climate experts on their own task force; delaying their goals by 15 years simply because they feel no immediacy or are cowed by environmental advocates who simply want to see the county do what they said they would do, within the time frame they said they would do it in. Quelle horreur.

Opinion

Tim Irvine, a climate justice advocate and chair of the Sacramento County Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force, said he believes the climate emergency resolution doesn’t need to be amended because such declarations are non-binding; “they can coexist alongside whatever other legally-binding targets are in the county plans.”

“A lot of jurisdictions, I think, are seeing the new California Air Resources Board scoping plan, which is setting the statewide minimum (for) 2045. I think they’re seeing that and they’re thinking, ‘OK, cool. We’ll just also go for 2045. There’s no need to try and do anything else faster.’”

Former Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo sent the Supervisors a letter over the weekend, begging them not to pursue a delay and calling any deferment of the county’s climate action goals “a mistake and a missed opportunity.”

“No issue is more critical to the survival of our planet and our species than climate change. Yet with so many other pressing issues, it seems easy to defer,” Fargo wrote. “You sent a clear message of the importance of addressing climate change when you approved this in 2020. Pushing the date back for 15 years sends the opposite message, that this is not a priority.”

Anne Stausboll too, former Chair of the Mayors’ Commission on Climate, wrote the board over the weekend, admonishing them that “retreating from the 2030 target would be an abrupt reversal of course and would demonstrate a lack of commitment to mitigating and adapting to the crisis we face.”

“Regional leadership is essential to addressing these impacts,” she wrote. “Although it would have been prudent to consult with your experts, it does not appear that the task force has been consulted on whether the proposed change in target date is appropriate.”

County supervisors did not return a request for comment, nor did Todd Smith, Planning Director for Planning and Environmental Review at the county’s Community Development Department, who is presenting at Tuesday’s meeting on the proposal.

County delays goals because they’re hard

Now pay attention, because this next part gets confusing: In 2020, Sacramento County declared a climate emergency. That Climate Emergency Resolution established the year 2030 as an aspirational goal for partial carbon neutrality within the county.

Since then, the state has set a goal for 2045 to both to achieve net-zero GHG emissions and to ensure that human-caused GHGs are reduced to at least 85% below 1990 levels, statewide. Also in that timeframe, the county has merely approved a draft of their Climate Action Plan, the broader emissions reduction strategy, more than a decade in the making. A decade, I might add, in which we could have been working further toward reducing emissions.

That document is completely separate from the Emergency Resolution, which has not yet been fully approved but is likely to by the end of this year. Also known as the CAP, that document would be legally-binding, unlike the resolution, and the CAP’s deadlines are expected to be in line with the state’s mandates for allowable emissions, as measured in emitted metric tons of carbon dioxide, by 2045.

Apparently under the threat of litigation by both sides, the county seeks to realign their Emergency Resolution goals to be in line with the state’s 2045 allowable emissions and cities such as Sacramento, Rancho Cordova and Davis’ own proposed goals. (That’s right, folks, we’re not even talking about full carbon-neutrality here, just slightly decreasing emissions.)

But just because the state has a 15-year-later deadline doesn’t give the county a good excuse to procrastinate. Yes, Sacramento was aspirational by aiming for a 2030 goal, but that’s exactly the kind of ambition we must have to combat a global climate emergency. They could have been even more ambitious at the time, as pointed out by numerous environmental advocates who begged the county to work as fast as possible toward carbon neutrality. Just last week, Earth warmed to the highest temperature ever recorded when the average global temperature reached 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sacramento had the chance to show other California counties that climate change mitigation is not only possible, it’s time-dependent and deathly necessary. How the supervisors have managed to put “emergency” in the title of their resolution and still somehow completely miss the definition of the word is beyond all comprehension.

“We’re at the very beginning of exponentially increasing damages per greenhouse gasses,” Irvine said. “Gas emissions at the current rates are going to push us into a possibly permanent warming feedback loop. …we have to go as fast as possible.

“We need leaders to set ambitious goals, so that when one jurisdiction makes more progress on a faster timeline, other jurisdictions get a model of how they can also do more, faster,” Irvine said.

Sacramento County must remain aspirational in its efforts to combat climate change if for no other reason that we already know we likely won’t meet a 2030 goal, but perhaps we can achieve it by 2035. Meanwhile, the supes acted astoundingly fast on raising their own personal salaries by 36% back in May.

If we set our goals later, then our achievements will be later and there simply isn’t time for that sort of leisure, despite however relaxing Serna makes his job look. We cannot allow ourselves to become complacent with drought, fire and blight simply because the state isn’t working on the same timeline.

Sacramento’s biggest obstacle to fighting climate change isn’t Mother Nature, it’s a Board of Supervisors so stacked with complacent politicians that they’re scared to lead on a divisive issue, however globally threatening. All of them seemingly have either given up on their responsibilities, never cared in the first place, or are so in the pocket of local developers that they either can’t or stubbornly won’t see the wildfires, floods and future destruction barreling toward us.

The Board of Supervisors must not be allowed to change their climate goals on Tuesday and pass their responsibilities onto a generation literally still in diapers. The world, much less Sacramento, can no longer withstand such weak climate policies, nor even weaker politicians.