By Debra Kahn 09/11/2020 05:16 PM EDT
Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged Friday to accelerate California’s response to climate change amid record- breaking wildfires sweeping the state.
Speaking in Oroville, where the lightning-sparked North Complex Fire has burned 250,000 acres over the past month, Newsom said climate change has overtaken the state’s attempts to reduce carbon emissions through increasing renewable energy and shrinking its dependence on fossil fuels.
“While it’s nice to have goals to get to 100 percent clean energy by 2045, that’s inadequate to meet the challenges that this state, and I argue this nation, faces,” he said. “We’re going to have to fast-track our efforts. We’re going to have to be more aggressive in terms of meeting our goals much sooner.”
Fires across the West sparked by dry lightning strikes and hot weather have blanketed the state in ash and eerie red skies. Newsom said nearly 3.2 million acres have burned this year so far, 26 times the acreage burned at this time last year. About 3.5 percent of the state is currently on fire.
“California, folks, is America fast forward,” he said. “What we’re experiencing right here is coming to a community all across the United States of America unless we get our act together on climate change.”
Newsom said he told CalEPA Secretary Jared Blumenfeld and Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot to look at “every prescriptive goal that this state has, to go down that list and to dust off our current processes, our current strategies and accelerate all of them, across the board.” He said the review would be comprehensive, including the state’s policies around electric vehicles, land use, agriculture and industry. “Across the entire spectrum, our goals are inadequate to the reality we’re experiencing,” he said.
He highlighted the state’s progress on renewable electricity in particular, signaling an acceleration of its 2045 target for all electricity to be “zero-carbon” might be on the table. “We’re currently in the process of putting together new ideas, new strategies to accelerate our efforts, accelerate the application and implementation of commitments we previously made,” he said. “And to look at these stretch goals in 2045 and see if we can pull them closer into the future.”
Newsom acknowledged potential tradeoffs between reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the state’s ability to withstand the effects of climate change. When asked whether it was a mistake to have extended the life of several gas-fired power plants, as policymakers did earlier this month after grid reliability issues forced rolling blackouts, Newsom defended the move.
“It was absolutely not a mistake,” he said. While it was “a small step back, we’re going to make giant leaps forward to make that negligible in the context of our total overall strategies.”
