California Carbon & Low-Carbon Fuel Standards Summit

I’m at the California Carbon & LCFS Summit in Half Moon Bay (near San Francisco), CA today, as 2GreenEnergy was asked to be a media partner (and I wanted to check this out anyway). 

The director of long-term energy policy at Pacific Gas and Electric, the largest power utility in the state, delivered the first half of the keynote address, in which he covered his organization’s approach to affordable power that supports California’s policies re: climate change mitigation.  A principal ingredient here is renewable natural gas, derived largely from landfills and agricultural waste streams, which he says his organization will support vigorously, “if it can scale.”  Sounds iffy.

Then came the director of legislative and policy affairs of the Western States Petroleum Association, whose message is that the world will be using petroleum indefinitely into the future, which, she says, “grounds the conversation.”  The implication here is that attempts to phase out fossil fuels are silly.  Predictably, she’s not at all bullish on electric transportation, on the basis that consumers are demanding ever-larger vehicles “to get their kids to soccer practices.”

I turned to the guy sitting next to me and whispered, “Did you happen to save a piece of fruit from breakfast?  I desperately want to throw something at her.”

They ran out of time before I could ask her my question: “You’re probably aware that the scientific community tells us that we’re not going to have a civilization here in 50 – 100 years if we follow your lead.  Can you comment?”

Fortunately for us all, there is an enormous effort being made to invest in the EV infrastructure.  VW alone, as part of its emissions scandal settlement, spent $800 million in EV charging stations.  That coupled with the improvements in the energy density of  lithium-ion batteries mean that California is very definitely making huge progress in leading the nation and the world in the right direction.