County Unveils New Carbon Budget

Sonoma County unveiled a new “carbon budget” Thursday, an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent over the next four years.

The plan was introduced at the Climate Protection: Everyone Profits conference held at Petaluma's Lucchesi Community Center, a gathering of civic and environmental leaders from the region.

The plan calls for a reduction of 1.2 metric tons of carbon emissions by 2015 and targets electricity, transportation and solid waste. Dozens of steps have been identified to reach the goal, including the completion of the SMART train, slated for fall of 2014, retrofitting homes and businesses with better insulation and efficient appliances, and investments in renewable energy sources and jobs, among other proposals.

Supervisor Efren Carrillo, who spoke at the conference, said the county was already doing many things to reach the goal, such as converting its entire fleet of government vehicles to electric, one of the largest in the country.

Sonoma County also recently installed a 1.4 megawatt fuel cell that will offset the county’s natural gas use by heating county buildings, and launched programs such as Farms to Fuel, converting chicken manure into electricity.

“We are very proud of these initiatives and we are rising to the challenge of climate protection and making sure that everyone profits, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” Carrillo said, adding one of the biggest obstacles in developing renewable infrastructure is access to financing.

An estimated 213 million gallons of gasoline and 55 million gallons of diesel were consumed in Sonoma County last year, along with 2.6 million megawatts of electricity, at a cost of about $1 billion. As high as the numbers sound, Sonoma County’s energy footprint is less than a half of the nationwide average, although twice as much as in the rest of the world.

That means there is plenty of room for improvement, say renewable energy experts.

“The truth is we haven’t accomplished anything close to what we need to in terms of reducing green house gas emissions,” said Caitlin Cornwall, a biologist at the Sonoma Ecology Center.

Other ideas to curb carbon emission include encouraging smart transit and mixed-use land use development and shifting to public transit, biking and electric vehicles. Another is creating an electric car share fleet throughout the county. According to the Regional Climate Protection Authority, four out of five trips made in the county are by a single occupant in a fossil-fuel powered car.

Steve Birdlebough, chair of the Sierra Club Sonoma Group, was one of about 200 attendees of the event and said it’s common to use “overblown terms” when discussing carbon emissions.

“Everybody tends to exaggerate what needs to be done and what is doable,” Birdlebough said. “Now we are beginning to settle down and say ‘OK, here are economic facts of life and here is what we can do'…This is a roadmap and it really is doable. We just have to put our minds to it.”

Check out more details about the proposed carbon budget.