Comment AB32 - Easy for big polluters, tough for the green (Score 1) 97
The big pain in the ass here is that AB32 trickles down to California businesses and state-run entities. Everyone has to do their part to reduce California emissions back to 1990s levels (NOT per capita... raw GHG tonnage per year). That's easy for some, but not so easy for others.
If your organization was a big time polluter with little employee growth since the 1990s, you can switch to plug-in hybrids for your fleet, swap out incandescent bulbs for fluorescent/LED, put in new thermostats, disallow hot water in the bathrooms, adopt roof-top solar, and, if necessary, buy bio-methane energy credits. Reaching your AB32 goals would be easy.
But what if you were one of the model organizations in the 1990s that was at the forefront green tech but have since doubled in size? Ya, you may still have a fantastic per capita GHG emissions rating, but you've doubled in size! That means you have to cut your per capita in HALF to get back to your 1990 emissions level. Organizations with this problem are actually going back through their numbers and hoping to INCREASE their back-casting GHG emissions. They want to be seen as having been bigger polluters than they were because, with AB32, if you weren't a big polluter, you're going to have to invest beyond the diminishing returns curve to get anywhere near your state-mandated goals.
If AB32 could be amended to require going back to 1990 PER CAPITA emissions, my organization would be sitting pretty. Hell, we'd be able to sell off the credits from our being BELOW our 1990 per capita emissions. But that's not the case... so we, as one of the lowest per capita polluters in the nation for our industry, will end up paying more in cap-and-trade fees and offsets than actual big polluters.