Extra

Editor's Note: On Tuesday the City Council will vote on a 2030 emissions reduction target from the City Manager. You can read about that item here .

On Wednesday, the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment, and Sustainability Police Committee will take up a stronger and more legally binding climate ordinance being developed by Councilmember Kate Harrison. Harrison's item appears likely to meet with resistance from committee members Taplin and Robinson, reflecting the YIMBY agenda that calls for rapid, very dense, and tall construction throughout most of Berkeley.

The following is from an email posted by Thomas Lord on local mailing lists and shared here with permission, which considers the narrow issue of the City Manager's emissions target for 2030, as compared to Harrison's:

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An interesting problem is that both Kate Harrison's item in policy committees and the city manager’s item coming to council on Tuesday claim to have "science-based emissions limits [targets]". In spite of both claiming to be "science-based", the two items set wildly different rate-of-emissions targets for 2030.

City manager: reductions of 11%, year over year, for 8 years; Kate Harrison: reductions of 25%, year over year, for 8 years. How can this be? 

Kate's quite aggressive target is very well aligned with the science and with the goal of a just transition for all. The city manager's target, based on a methodology promoted by C40 and the World Wildlife Foundation, is based on significant science errors. 

 

The WWF created the methodology used by the city manager. They made the statistical error of treating all "scenarios" discussed in the 2018 IPCC report as equally plausible, and thus averaged their targets. (A "scenario" is a stylized case-study of a possible future emissions and carbon removal technology.) The multiple scenarios considered by the IPCC are not meant to be considered equally plausible. Some are commonly considered impossible or wildly implausible -- namely those that depend the most on technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Averaging the scenarios therefore builds into the WWF model an overly optimistic assumption about the very near term future of carbon removal technology -- namely that it will magically be deployed at a very large scale more or less overnight, today. As a result, the WWF methodology recommends a shockingly slow pace of reductions (albeit still one much higher than current targets). (There are other problems with the WWF methodology and how it was locally applied but the built-in bogus assumptions about carbon removal technology appear to me to be the biggest source of error.)

I don't know where Kate's office came up with the 25% rate of reduction (total of 90% by 2030) but if you do the math to see how much would be emitted by 2030 and then by the time emissions were about 0, you'll see that Berkeley would come in a bit below a budget for 1.5C warming, meaning that energy-scarce developing countries would stand a better chance of building modern infrastructure (but sustainably) -- a critical goal among Paris agreement members, and the goal the city manager mistakenly claims to having satisfied.