The discussion about greenhouse gas emissions and what Santa Barbara County should do to help the rest of the world in grappling with the costs of climate change isn’t exactly an easy one in which to stay engaged.
There are gobs of acronyms to deal with, state laws chock full of technical terms, a cacophony of players wagging their little metaphorical fingers, and this thing called cumulative impact—which essentially means that the impact of one project’s greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t really make a huge difference, but the emissions from everything, all together, does.
And all of those things add up to what county planning staff and the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District (APCD) are currently in the process of nailing down: a greenhouse gas emissions limit for future projects, also known as a bright-line threshold.
On March 25, the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission heard a first run-through of what staff is recommending, which is a 10,000-metric-tons-per-year threshold for greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources. Anything emitted over that number would need to be mitigated by purchasing emissions credits on the open market or through California’s cap-and-trade program.
Staff said the threshold is what’s used in major metropolitan areas such as the Bay Area, where it captures 95 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It would only capture about 82 percent of the emissions produced in Santa Barbara County.
The overwhelming majority of public speakers—20 out of 21—who stood at the podium during the meeting said the county needed to set the threshold at zero, or as close to zero as possible, and many mentioned the need to capture at least 95 percent of county emissions.
“Any new emissions should be considered cumulative and therefore significant,” Linda Krop with the Environmental Defense Center said during the meeting. “This is a scientific decision, not a political decision.”
Krop said that all new greenhouse gas emissions could have a potentially significant impact on the environment, and that’s why the greenhouse gas emissions threshold should be set at zero.
“They could afford the pennies,” said Katie Davis, a Sierra Club member, referring to oil companies operating in the county. That industry would be one of those affected by a greenhouse gas emissions threshold, and in some sense, the county already imposes a 10,000 metric tons threshold on a case-by-case basis.
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors put that limit on the Santa Maria Energy project approved in 2013, requiring them to mitigate for 78,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions once the full 136 cyclically steamed oil wells are up and running. Ben Oakley, a spokesperson with ERG Resources, said his company will write a $350,000 check this year for greenhouse gas reductions.
Oakley acknowledged that he was the “lone voice of dissent” at the meeting and said the numbers outlined in AB 32—the state law that requires California to reach pre-1990 emission levels by 2020—are based on science. The law, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, lays out the way to do this as cutting emissions by 16 percent of business as usual. So if a company were regularly producing 26,000 metric tons of carbon-based pollutants per year, it would need to reduce that output by 16 percent.
The discussion at the planning commission level is similar to what was discussed at an APCD advisory council meeting and emissions workshop on the evening of March 25.
According to the APCD’s website, the council voted to recommend that the district’s board of directors approve what’s known as the
AB 32 consistency threshold, which would utilize a 10,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas per year screening threshold and require projects emitting above that to reduce emissions by 15.3 percent of business as usual.
Molly Pearson, the APCD’s planning and grants supervisor, said public speakers at the meeting pushed for a zero new emissions threshold as well.
The planning commission is expected to hear the matter again on April 9, and the APCD board is expected to discuss greenhouse gas emissions on April 16.
This article appears in Apr 2-9, 2015.