California here we come?

For some reason, California enthusiasts seem drawn to ranking their state against the nations of the world. “If California were a country,” they often say, “its (fill in the blank) would be the (fill in the blank) largest in the world.” If you don’t believe the word “often” belongs in the preceding sentence, go to your computer, perform a Google search for the phrase “if California were a country,” and contemplate the 445 million returns you receive.

In economic terms, California’s high regard for itself is to some degree based in fact. In 2013, California’s $2.2 trillion gross domestic product would indeed have given it the eighth largest national economy in the world, edging just ahead of the economies of Russia and Italy—if California were a nation. Which it is not. (I know; I live in it.)

Still, California’s economic heft, population—roughly 38 million people—and tradition of innovation have made it a longstanding trendsetter, for the United States and beyond, in cultural, economic, scientific, and political matters, from the Beach Boys to the Reagan Revolution to the iPhone. In its approach to climate change—an issue that includes culture, economics, science, and politics, mashed together at a doomsday level of significance—California has clearly been more aggressive than the US national government, most other American states, and most other countries. Indeed, the California climate change approach is so wide-ranging and intricate as to defy easy summary.

At its core is the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which requires the state to have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. To meet this goal, the state has instituted controls on transport emissions—via both tailpipe emissions standards and low-carbon fuel standards—set efficiency standards for new construction, and ordered utilities to get a third of their energy from renewable resources.

As a backup to these programs, California has also created a market-based cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide pollution allowances, in which greenhouse gas-producing utilities and industries pay for and are allowed to trade among themselves permits to emit greenhouse gases. Over the years, the total cap on emissions permits will be reduced. At the same time, the state will use revenue from emissions permit sales to fund other green initiatives, including crucial early segments of a high-speed rail system that is planned to connect its major urban areas. The state is also in the planning stages for a comprehensive program for adapting to unavoidable effects of climate change—particularly sea level rise.

In short, the California climate change program could seem almost an environmentalist’s dream, and for that reason many public figures on the left side of the political spectrum—in and out of the state—have suggested it as a model that the US federal government should follow closely and spread to the rest of the world. Indeed, as California Gov. Jerry Brown notes in an interview that introduces this Bulletin special issue, California represents:

 … one percent of the greenhouse gas problem in the world; one percent. Whatever we do, in and of itself, does not have any significant impact, so what we have to do is build allies and help get countries like China and India, Brazil, on board for serious action on climate change. … I mean, the odds are not favorable toward our future until or unless we can change a lot of minds and get some very concrete steps [taken] by powerful forces. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2014)

California and Brown have long been environmental leaders, and the state’s regulatory efforts in regard to smog and car mileage standards have had enormous influence at the national level. Whether the various pieces of the California approach to climate change attain the same level of national influence will in some regard be a matter of politics. Green is political gold in this very blue and environmentally conscious state, and that calculus does not necessarily hold in the country’s red states or, perhaps more important, in the US House of Representatives. But, over time, effective policy can trump politics. So the Bulletin asked experts in five segments of California’s climate change effort to give their best estimates as to what is and is not working in the state’s approach, and what might or might not be profitably adopted by the United States, and by other countries round the world. Because what starts in California so often winds up coming to a theater, store, website, smart phone, or government near you.