California Lawmakers Approve Nation's Most Sweeping Emissions Disclosure Rules for Big Business (apnews.com) 88
Major corporations from oil and gas companies to retail giants would have to disclose their direct greenhouse gas emissions as well as those that come from activities like employee business travel under legislation passed Monday by California lawmakers, the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation. From a report: The legislation would require thousands of public and private businesses that operate in California and make more than $1 billion annually to report their direct and indirect emissions. The goal is to increase transparency and nudge companies to evaluate how they can cut their emissions. "We are out of time on addressing the climate crisis," Democratic Assemblymember Chris Ward said. "This will absolutely help us take a leap forward to be able to hold ourselves accountable."
The legislation was one of the highest profile climate bills in California this year, racking support from major companies that include Patagonia and Apple, as well as Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations convention behind the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The bill would still need final approval by the state Senate before it can reach Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Lawmakers backing the bill say a large number of companies in the state already disclose some of their own emissions. But the bill is a controversial proposal that many other businesses and groups in the state oppose and say will be too burdensome.
The legislation was one of the highest profile climate bills in California this year, racking support from major companies that include Patagonia and Apple, as well as Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations convention behind the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The bill would still need final approval by the state Senate before it can reach Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Lawmakers backing the bill say a large number of companies in the state already disclose some of their own emissions. But the bill is a controversial proposal that many other businesses and groups in the state oppose and say will be too burdensome.
Direct and indirect emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
What a fun new policy to create an entire industry of consultants that will pore over your business trying to calculate this. Theoretically, they should have air sensors in the offices as well to measure when employees fart.
This will be a costly burden that will have no direct impact on emissions, except that it will force some businesses to close or relocate or stop doing business in CA altogether in order to avoid having to comply with this.
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Business is booming - the fifth largest economy in the world with 40 million people.
If you're so worried about the drag on productivity, why don't the rest of the 49 states kick it out of the union?
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Because then they'd be left with New York and Texas paying all the bills, and if New York and Texas tire of propping up a bunch of failed states, the other 47 states would either go bankrupt or join Canada.
Re: Direct and indirect emissions (Score:2)
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And an even crazier percentage of fruits and nuts live there. I know; I'm a California expatriate.
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correction (Score:2)
SOME business is booming "in" California.
Yes, California is home to the headquarters buildings of SOME giant multi-national corporations... but that does not mean what it used to mean. There was a day when a company like Apple was entirely in California - the headquarters were here, the engineering teams were here, the production lines were here, there were LOTS of middle class and upper-middle class jobs in California provided by Apple. Now, the headquarters is here, but the manufacturing is in Asia and a
Re: Direct and indirect emissions (Score:3)
why don't the rest of the 49 states kick it out of the union?
Because Kansas's experiment failed and can't make up for the funding the red states need like California can.
Re:Direct and indirect emissions (Score:5, Informative)
Only those that "make more than $1 billion annually" so small and medium size businesses are safe.
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sobs quietly for the bullied corpos
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Won't someone, anyone, think of the poor future-$1B companies!?
Mitt Romney was laughed at for pointing out that corporations are people, then the laughing stopped after people wised up on the truth of the comment. Hilary Clinton was cheered for announcing she'd raise corporate taxes rather than income taxes, but the smart people realized at some point that corporations don't pay taxes but rather pass that tax onto consumers with higher prices on products and services. Elon Musk went from a poster boy of Democrat policies to being hated for them with his "message rece
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Hopefully it takes a while to reach that point, but a country with an annual inflation rate of 7% would see a million dollar company reach that point in a century. Most western countries try
Low hanging pollution fruit (Score:3)
A lot of CA state and local gov't workers are not allowed to do partial telework because management is stodgy. If CA wants to cut pollution, light a fire under gov't dead wood managers stuck in their ways.
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No idea what you're talking about, do you? Had you said contractors you would be closer to the truth.
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Those folks already hardly do any work. If you let them work from home, they will be much more efficient at not doing work.
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Unless you are in the move-fast-and-break-things biz, 2 in-person meeting days per week is usually good enough. I'm proposing a hybrid model.
Collaboration software is usually better for coordinating details anyhow. Face meetings should be left for big-picture strategic issues.
Re: California Lawmakers Approve Nation's Most... (Score:2)
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Not like they didn’t have a decades long smog problem or anything.
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This has nothing to do with smog. It has to do with CO_2. It's just self-destructive religious fanaticism.
Re: California Lawmakers Approve Nation's Most... (Score:4, Interesting)
As opposed to what amounts to Thermodynamics Denial? The only religious position I see here is the one that thinks God magically makes CO2 act differently because you puke it out of your car.
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You mean like smog regulations pushed cars out of California? No, that didn't happen.
What did happen is human health improved.
https://keck.usc.edu/southern-... [usc.edu]
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resourc... [ca.gov]
You have to consider what kind of world we are leaving for Keith Richards.
All the whiners... (Score:1, Insightful)
What's with all the pro-business whiners here on /.? Seems like this place has ben overrun with typical Retardican drivel I'd find out on 4Chan, OAN, Truth, Twitter, etc.
Companies have to report their financial statements, processes and procedures, and other such items, why not on their environmental footprint? Is it going to be easy? No - first time anyone does anything it's not easy. Over time, the process becomes refined, easier, and itself less costly to implement.
I would like my kids, grand kids, e
Re:All the whiners... (Score:5, Informative)
If you are a person who genuinely doesn't believe that co2 is a greenhouse gas or even that greenhouse effect exists at all then logically that would mean you would absolutely consider this is an undue burden on business.
There is also a strong anti-California sentiment among a portion of the country at large as a result of if being vilified in conservative media for pretty much my entire life. Some of it is deserved, the CA state government is absolutely screwball sometimes (but really in my experience state legislatures everywhere are a mess) but some of it also is just using the state as the battleground for the culture wars since so much of American culture originates and develops there.
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Well, a lot of the US sees CA tod
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Sure but even where I am in Florida we have a state legislature that has lapsed on doing anything about a slow boiling insurance crisis that is coming to a critical point, is more concerned with making teachers just through book advisory boards and getting into unneeded fights with Disney, slow walked and tried to fight a ballot approved medical marijuana implementation (and even then did it in such a crony way as to allow only their handpicked companies to participate) and overall more concerned with cult
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You don't actually SEE any of that. You see infomercials on conservative media preaching falsehoods.
The reality is that California is a huge place with a lot of people. Everything that exists in the USA as a whole exists in some part of California. So yes, all of that stuff happens -it just isn't prevalent. But you have been told it is.
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Calilfornia's GDP per capita is 92,238.29. If you don't understand the meaning of "per capita" then the rest of this will go over your head....
Texas' is 78555.90
New York's is 92291.14
Not bad for a dumpster fire.
For that U-Haul thing, I can find eight different size options for a move from San Francisco to Austin next week. There is this thing called the internet
Not even counting emissions from the oil and gas (Score:5, Interesting)
But that is from their operations only. i.e. Emissions while extracting, producing, transporting the fossil fuels.
The GIANT remaining loophole is that the much bigger emissions from the burning of their end-product, oil or gas, is NOT accounted for in this emissions reporting. Many people don't realize this, and those emissions are much larger than the to-be-reported emissions from company operations.
It's true that some of these end-use emissions will happen overseas, and theoretically some other country (the buyer) would if honest account for them.
BUT, it still might interest California residents to know that their industry is also an enormous contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Make that show up on the transparency books. Set a good precedent.
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I would like my kids, grand kids, etc. to have a planet to grow up on.
Then demand more nuclear power plants.
The days of unfettered profits at the expense of the environment need to come to an end.
That assumes those days have even started, an assumption with debatable evidence.
The cleanest places on Earth have the greatest profit motive to keep it clean. People in poverty don't have the luxury to care about long term environmental damage, they will cut down trees to keep from freezing because if they don't then they won't survive the night to care about not having those trees to control air pollution, erosion, and retain water in the soil for tomorrow. Build th
Notice how this doesn't apply to government. (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, asking them to police their own emissions would mean some pigs aren't more equal than others.
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Voters can change the government, they can't vote to change corporate leadership (not without lots of $$$)
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Voters can change the government, they can't vote to change corporate leadership (not without lots of $$$)
If voters can't change the behavior of corporate leadership then the premise behind this law is broken. The entire point of forcing the reporting of CO2 emissions is so people can make informed decisions on the products and services they buy, and by not buying those products and services it will change the behavior of corporate leadership.
Voters in California appear to like the idea of driving business out of the state, because they keep voting for lawmakers that drive business out of the state. Tell comp
Re:Notice how this doesn't apply to government. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was purely pointing out that comparing what the government does and what a private corporation does is not always a fair comparison (unless everyone in the state is a voting shareholder in said company).
As far as the goal of this legislation, I am not totally convinced this is designed to be one that would drive consumer choice but likely will drive future legislation that will be used to change up the existing California cap-and-trade law into something more akin to a carbon tax. Gotta know where emissions are before you can evaluate how to tax them.
Whether its a good idea, we'll see how it plays out. I think companies should be made to account for their negative externalities, they have been allowed to push those off to the greater public for decades. If fossil fuels had to account for their environmental damage they wouldn't have been such an attractice option for so long, maybe we stick with nuclear power past the 70's in that case. Maybe.
Overall though I doubt this is enough to push these billion dollar companies out of CA, it can't overcome the inherent advantages of the state of which the biggest is a highly educated technical workforce and the state generally being a nice place to live which attracts and keeps that worker base. Companies that want to leave have had enough motivation already, CARB has been around for a long time now.
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Gotta know where emissions are before you can evaluate how to tax them.
Why tax carbon emissions when the government could avoid all this bullshit by building more nuclear power plants?
Stop trying to drive up the costs of fossil fuels when it would be far more effective to lower the cost of alternatives like nuclear power.
I don't know how people got it in their heads that taxing fossil fuels are going to help. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel in California are already very high and people just pay the tax than change their behavior. Why? Because electric cars cost a lot of
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I agree fully that the government should be the one building the nuclear plants, glad we agree on that. Unfortunately good luck getting funding for a federal program to do that (even though we already do with the TVA, just expand that model nationwide).
We get in our heads that taxing fuels will help because
1. Why shouldn't fossil fuels have to cover their environmental externalities, especially when nuclear plants have to with their waste.
2. America is stupidly capitalist at times so having the government
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perhaps not (Score:2)
First, most voters here never hear most of the news they would need to hear in order to want to change things. The press in CA is so monolithic and so aligned with the political party in power that it's astounding. For example, we have a geriatric incompetent US Senator right now in part because when she last ran for re-election she presumed she would win and arrogantly refused to debate or even have any serious press interviews. In any other world, a press would have rebelled at that, but in CA the press w
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First point agree but that's a problem the country over, but yeah, Feinstein (assuming you are talking about her) has to go, she's unfit for office any more, let her retire with some dignity.
Second point is ballot workers who count votes are not "unknown" and mail in voting is very well known and very robust (just ask Washington State). If you think there is widespread fraud happening with ballots where is the evidence? I think we need to be careful with making accusations of illegitimate voting and not be
Re: perhaps not (Score:2)
The reason Feinstein keeps getting elected is because the voters agree with her voting record. No need to rock the boat.
Senate leadership shouldn't let her be in charge of anything though.
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This 1) assumes California is a monolith (its not) and 2) individual action boycotts are effective (theyre generally are not) and 3) these are not CA only companies, just based there but any company worth over 1B is nationwide if not worldwide
This is just gotcha guy [thenib.com]
Sweeping...mandatory commutes? (Score:1)
"have to disclose their direct greenhouse gas emissions as well as those that come from activities like employee business travel under legislation passed Monday by California lawmakers"
Employee travel? Oh, you mean like the unnecessary mandated travel now being imposed on COVID workers who have been employed at home for the last 3 years?
Or are we going to find lawmakers buried balls deep in commercial real estate and not counting that kind of 'emissions'...
California is still not serious on lowering CO2 (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll believe California politicians and voters are taking CO2 emissions seriously when they lift their self imposed ban on new nuclear power plants.
Nuclear fission has the lowest CO2 emissions of any energy source we have yet developed, and safer than all other energy sources we've yet developed. If anyone in California wants to claim that nuclear power costs too much then maybe they can toss a bunch of government incentives and subsidies at development like they did when solar power was too expensive. It's amazing how we've brought down the cost of solar power over time, I suggest trying the same tactics in bringing down the cost of nuclear power. If anyone in California wants to claim that nuclear power plants take too long to build then maybe if they hadn't been chasing nuclear power development out of the state for the last 50 years they would not be in this predicament today. The best time to plant a tree or break ground on a nuclear power plant is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
It's not like they can't do more than one thing at a time, build nuclear power plants while you do all the same worthless bullshit in an attempt to lower CO2 emissions. All their investment in wind and solar power has created feast and famine cycles on available electricity, due to the inherently intermittent nature of wind and sun, which means having to import more electricity from out of the state. These other states will burn fossil fuels for the electricity they sell in California, often burning that fuel very inefficiently because they are ramping output up and down as the demand in California shifts with the winds and clouds. This has been raising net CO2 emissions, though they blame this on natural gas but it is precisely because of all the intermittent energy from wind and sun that is driving people to burn more natural gas.
California is not taking CO2 emissions seriously. I know this because they haven't made any big announcements on nuclear power but rather how they are going to increase the costs of businesses to remain in the state. If California is successful in driving CO2 emissions down then it is because they drove businesses out of the state. They've been so effective at driving business out of the state that I suspect they are intending to drive business out of the state.
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Not all of Cali is a major earthquake zone. There are plenty of places a nuke plant could be located with no significant earthquake risk. By significant earthquake risk, I mean if there's an earthquake large enough to affect the operating of the power plant, let alone seriously damage it, the rest of California will have significantly worse issues to deal with, like cleaning up the rubble and rotting corpses of what was previously everything from San Francisco to the greater LA area.
Re: California is still not serious on lowering CO (Score:2)
"Not all of Cali is a major earthquake zone."
That's true. The Klamath Knot is not. But the rest of the state is, and you can't realistically put a plant there, so the end result is that the whole state is a quake zone.
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Build a radioactive box in an earthquake zone, what could possibly go wrong?
Global warming, that is what could go wrong.
Keep it up on the fear mongering over nuclear power and people will soon lose their fear of global warming too. If they can't have reliable and abundant nuclear power to keep the lights on then it must be because global warming isn't so bad after all.
People can claim that I'm making a false dilemma here but there's plenty of history to show we have an actual dilemma. The nations that have consistently reduced CO2 emissions are those with nuclear power. If wind
Re: California is still not serious on lowering CO (Score:2)
"People can claim that I'm making a false dilemma here"
And you are.
Appeals to history make even less sense than your usual drivel. The goal is to change things going forwards, not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
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Let's discuss false dilemmas if you want to play that game. There's people doubting the dilemma that we must act quickly and with great effort or global warming will kill us all. Well, just how long can this dilemma hold if part of that demand to act includes a demand we not consider nuclear power as part of the solution? Either global warming is a greater threat to humanity or nuclear power is the greater threat. Pick one and I expect everyone to act on it. Tell them nuclear power is the greater threa
Re: your sig (Score:3)
Global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising every year FFS.
And given that we need to be at 45% GHG emissions reductions globally by 2030 and at more than 100% emissions reductions (i.e. net-negative) by 2050, to have a good chance of avoiding completely catastrophic further atmospheric and ocean heating, nuclear fission plants, even if considered ok, cannot help much with that required rapid energy transition
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You claim we haven't solved global warming but then go on to explain how global warming has been solved. I agree with you that we have the technology today to solve global warming, and that those technologies are being put in place all over the world, we simply disagree on which technologies those are.
Where I disagree is that this being solved in 15 to 20 years. I believe it is more like 50 years. Either way it appears we agree on seeing significant progress in about a decade, after that the momentum sho
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The wind is always blowing somewhere within a day's drive, so you just have to build a wind farm there and a transmission line to it.
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The wind is always blowing somewhere within a day's drive, so you just have to build a wind farm there and a transmission line to it.
How's that work in geographic and/or political islands like Hawaii, Japan, Israel, South Korea, UK, and so many other places in the world?
I keep hearing idiots suggesting undersea power cables from Asia and Africa to supply energy for Europe. How's that working out for Europe right now for relying on energy imports from Africa and Asia? Russia was able to use that energy reliance against Europe to at least delay a response to invading Ukraine. They may have disrupted natural gas and other energy flowing
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Nirvana fallacy. Yawn.
Europe is big enough to survive a dunkelflaute on renewables alone, even without Russia or Africa.
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Europe is big enough to survive a dunkelflaute on renewables alone, even without Russia or Africa.
Then don't tell me that we haven't solved the problem of global warming yet. With the rate Europe is building windmills then they are well on the path to energy independence.
Definition of solving global warming problem (Score:2)
"Solving" this problem means solving it before the thermal increase inertia takes temperatures to truly dangerous levels, for both us and many species and ecosystems. This year's extreme wildfires and floods are literally nothing in comparison to what's coming, because they're occurring at global atmospheric temperature only 1.2 degrees C above pre-industrial. And
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Definition of global warming solved (Score:2)
You seem to be satisfied with it being "theoretically solved" because we have some tech that could do it, eventually.
My light definition of "global warming solved" is measured global ghg emissions verified over about a decade average as decreasing at the required velocity to have a 50% chance (according to IPCC modelling) of preventing warming greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times.
Slightly heavier definition: Global atmospheric CO2 and methane (and other
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(according to IPCC modelling)
According to IPCC modeling we aren't going to reduce CO2 emissions without building more nuclear power plants. Do you wish to revise your definition now?
https://nei.org/news/2022/ipcc... [nei.org]
https://news.un.org/en/story/2... [un.org]
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
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Nuclear fission power might have been a viable major part of the solution, but that ship has sailed due to the massive 30+ year denial and inaction on global heating. Wind and solar and transmission can be scaled to the needed extent within a decade, with sufficient will and strategic funding/taxation shifts. Sufficient grid energy storage and smart grid for dynamic stability of the grid can be in place within 15 to 20 years, with nothing but today's technology.
Well shit... anything can be scaled to meet demand with "sufficient" will and resources. The question of merit is which mixture of solutions provide the best economically and environmentally feasible means of getting there.
I've yet to see any credible modeling demonstrating wind/solar/ess alone as a credible let alone optimal way of achieving a future free of burning hydrocarbons. Modeling I have looked at in the past indicates storage requirements grow to insanity as the mixture of intermittent renewable
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I see no reason why we need to focus on a single solution. All solutions with a reasonable chance of reducing emissions should be pursued simultaneously.
We can easily build hundreds of nuclear reactors near nuclear weapon test sites at a fraction of the cost of building them in populated areas. We could also build solar farms, wind farms, dams and energy storage. We can build carbon capture infrastructure to make sure fossil fuel power plants are carbon neutral. We can also do some geoengineering, spray som
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Do you have any other hobbies besides masturbating about nuclear power?
Re: California is still not serious on lowering CO (Score:2)
We had a nuclear power plant near me here. It was plagued with problems. It took them several years to fix all these problems and the down time gave it a bad reputation. However, they fixed everything. But they still shut it down. Too many anti nuke do gooders got in the way of progress and convinced the voting populace to shut down the plant. The towers are still there. The exclusion zone still. I really wish that we could start a new functioning plant on the same property as most of the required facilitie
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Nuclear is just kicking the can down the road.
It needs massive investment to build, meaning only a small number of businesses can do it, with political support, on a timescale of decades. If we are relying on that to happen, we have no hope.
Renewables are cheap and quick to deploy. They are distributed and decentralised. California has great natural resources. Now stop wasting everyone's time with this and focus on a practical, timely soloution.
Many holes in that bucket (Score:2)
SCOTUS will rule it "unconstimuhtooshunal". (Score:1)
Note the emissions disclosure that is missing (Score:1)
The governor and his pals in the legislature are not going to disclose anything about the emissions from the massive wildfires we get multiple times every year. These emissions are mostly avoidable, certainly reduce-able, and have no "upside" but their disclosure would expose the insanity of many regulations. Going nuts over the emissions from pizza ovens, for example, while darkening the sky with soot and choking people with CO2 from mostly avoidable fires on government land is not a good look. It's simply
How about ... (Score:2)