I sit down with an expert on California climate policy to dig into the state regulator's latest scoping plan, which contemplates how to meet the net-zero-by-2045 target (and says very little about meeting 2030 targets). There are lots of unanswered questions & reasons for concern ... but there's still time to fix it.
Why is setting a carbon cap so difficult in practice? It seems to me that all regulators must do is say "California must emit less than x tons of CO2 in 2025, x-1 tons of CO2 in 2026, so we're selling x permits in 2025, x-1 in 2026" etc. Indeed, that's the textbook case. I think y'all mentioned how there are other considerations with certain industries (i.e. reliability in electricity production), which makes sense, but I still don't really understand why it would be so bureaucratically complex to set a hard limit on CO2 emissions.
Why is setting a carbon cap so difficult in practice? It seems to me that all regulators must do is say "California must emit less than x tons of CO2 in 2025, x-1 tons of CO2 in 2026, so we're selling x permits in 2025, x-1 in 2026" etc. Indeed, that's the textbook case. I think y'all mentioned how there are other considerations with certain industries (i.e. reliability in electricity production), which makes sense, but I still don't really understand why it would be so bureaucratically complex to set a hard limit on CO2 emissions.