In 2021, the California Air Resources Board voted to require that new, small off-road engines – like the ones found in leaf blowers and lawn mowers – meet zero-emission standards starting in 2024. In addition, portable generators, including those found in recreational vehicles, must be zero-emission by 2028.
The rules do not ban the possession or operation of these generators. It will still be legal for California residents to travel to Arizona, Oregon, or Nevada, buy a generator, and bring it back.
New homes and buildings that are constructed in California in 2023 must have electric supply panels and circuitry to support all-electric appliances and heating under a building code update approved two years ago by the California Energy Commission.
The new building code doesn’t ban the sale of natural gas appliances outright but the outright ban on natural gas appliances will come in 2030.
In June, a federal appeals court ruled Berkeley couldn’t ban gas hookups in new buildings. The Berkeley city attorney is pushing back. In June, the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief in support of the city of Berkeley’s petition for a rehearing as it seeks to preserve its ban on gas hookups in new buildings. Berkeley passed the ban in July 2019. The ordinance, which went into effect in 2020, still stands as the legal process continues.
Over 70 communities in California, Seattle and New York City have various regulations limiting or banning various aspects of natural gas.
These are stupid bans. We should be offsetting the CO2 and greenhouse gases. We have a sector of our economy about 1% of the people who provide all of our food. They are farmers. We could have a sector that also grew plants like trees that would absorb all of the extra CO2. This could also be farmers. This could be done for less than $1 per ton. We do not force everyone to grow all of their own food. People may choose to grow their own food but we do not force it. We can solve the excess CO2 issue as well without forcing everyone to do things.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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There is no ‘excess’ CO2, it is the basis of life and plants love it! There’s no proof at all that human emissions are causing ‘climate change’, just dodgy computer models and ‘adjusted’ or ‘homogenised’ temp records. We need more CO2 not less. I would’ve thought that nextbigfuture would’ve come to its senses by now and stop pushing the AGW myth.
“We should be offsetting the CO2 and greenhouse gases.” Why?
offsetting can cost far less than $1 per ton, while spending over $100 per tons.
The World Bank spent $31.7 billion on climate finance in fiscal year 2022.
The President’s Budget for fiscal year 2023 invested $44.9 billion to tackle the climate crisis, an increase of nearly 60 percent over FY 2021.
The U.S. government will spend more than $500 billion on climate technology and clean energy over the next decade.
If only solution less than $1 per ton were used then the 40 billion tons of CO2 per year would be handled by half of what was spent last year. The money that has already gone out is not being spent to resolve the problem. The money already budgeted which is over $1 trillion in less than 10 years would be enough to remove all excess CO2 since the industrial revolution.
What’s really insane is banning wood stove and gas heaters in the northern most states. One bad snow storm will knock out the grid and millions will be left to freeze. I’m sure they’ll be able to bundle up and most will survive with just blankets and the death till will only be in the thousands.
if you switch to electric heat get ready to pay some gi-normous power bills. My house was built with electric heat because we are in south Texas where it seldom gets that cold and the heat pumps do fine. But if the temperature is below about 35 degrees your backup heat (resistance strips just like in your electric dryer) will come on and then that little wheel in the meter will start to spin. That’s what happened here during the horrendously cold winter of 2021.
banning the lawn care implements is retarded. I use a liter of gasoline a month to keep my large yard tidy. This is forced/planned obsolescence.
Newsom jas no idea how many things are gas, diesel and natural gas.
I have been in a vehicle that’s all electric. I definitely don’t want to spend 4 hrs a day charging a vehicle. They are the cause of most homes catching on fire and destroyed in an hour. My husband built our house, all electric but refused solor panels because they were worthless without backup batteries. I wouldn’t have any lithium batteries in my garage or carport because of fires.
$1/ton sounds low. There are carbon markets in that price range, but they’re BS. Things like getting paid to not cut down a forest that already has conservation easement protection.
In real life, global emissions can only be solved if the low carbon options are better than the high carbon options. Nuclear has to be cheaper than coal. Electricity has to be reliable enough so people don’t need generators, etc.
All high cost local regulations are pointless unless they help create globally applicable solutions that are better than the carbon based solutions.
Iron fertilization is not a bad idea. Most carbon would sink to the bottom.
Something will have to be done. This year catastrophic floods caused almost 10 billion of damages to small 2 million country. For such a small country that is a lot. Now here are very high temperatures, new records. Summer weather in October!
The advantage of iron fertilization is that it would likely turn a profit in terms of increased productivity of fisheries.
Meh.
These virtue-signalling, prescriptive -over- performance-based, and other such non-meritocratic-type regulatory agendas can only lead to a massive division in where people want to start-a-business, work, live, play, educate, raise families, and retire.
In a slightly-spiteful tone, I welcome this Future Cautionary Tale in limited locations. As the true sources of innovation, productivity, and success start to abandon, relocate, and move their labor and wealth elsewhere, we shall see if these better-than-thou systems can survive, much less thrive or propogate. California: the new political left-Deutschland?
How do you offset carbon emissions by growing trees? I get that trees store carbon, but then what? You cut down the trees to make room for more trees (otherwise its a one off) and then store the wood? How do you store gigatons of wood so that it does not burn and is not attacked by bacteria? If bacteria och fungi decomposes wood, then the carbon would re-circle the carbon back into the atmosphere, right?
So how do you make carbon capture with wood work?
Several ways. One is to just drop the wood into deep water, where the temperatures and oxygen levels so low decay is practically non-existent.
Another is to produce charcoal, and then mix it with soil at farms as a soil amendment. It’s half-life in the soil is quite long.
Or you can simply bury the logs, the deeper, the better.
Or stack it in a desert that doesn’t get enough rain for the fungi to live.
The real problem here is that beating down the common man is not a regrettable side effect at this point. It’s becoming a goal.
[ and it’s more complicated, since
partly ‘common man’ invest into companies supporting opposition to ‘working class’ population (as if working could be something for being ashamed of, and ‘who’ is not ‘working’ anything at all (probably most define ‘working’ with a result that’s increasing individual or national financial power, through tax (no matter what origin) ?) ]
It’s about flux rates. If carbon is stored in a large volume of living trees that have a 100 year lifetime – that is a lot carbon not in the atmosphere, regardless of what happens to the trees after they die. On the other hand if they only live a decade or so due to fires then more ends up in the atmosphere.
It looks like politicians and NGOs are going after the easiest groups and targets to control, not the most meaningful. And China is the runaway CO2 producer and double the use of #2 the U.S. The entire EU produces barely more CO2 than India alone, and not for long. Individual country efforts in Germany, the U.K., France, barely even rank and could be easily offset with more nuclear power; it would not even matter if that takes over a decade b/c they contribute so little. China and India have to stop building coal plants, and they won’t. To be fair, the U.S. exported its dirty manufacturing to China and is now shipping our coal there too.
Forest fires undercut the idea of planting more trees, though competent forest management could fix some of that, but at the cost of more wood being harvested which = less CO2 capture anyway.
Banning gas generators is a more than stupid, it is distracting from the real sources of C02 pollution. Methane is not accounted for in these charts, but it would reduce America’s downward trend in total climate change contribution if it were. We might even still be the #1 cause of all-source climate change.
[ Carbon from plants has to be stored where fossil coal, oil and gas come from (or possibly covered (work in with deep plowing, surface plowing then) with more than ~0.5(-1.0)m (dense soil/clay augmented, reduced porosity to air) on agricultural areas), separated from air’s oxygen. We would need to reverse what are the effects of CO2 (and Methane, water vapor, refrigerants (air condition, without?) ) from (been) energy-wise and financial ‘cheap’ fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas). Without burning e.g. ‘Carbolysis’ to biochar (airless heating wood/plant to about 400-1000°C levels (solar), briquetting and storing for decades/centuries, maybe being natural fertilizer, what slows down carbon back-flow for these decades/centuries). ]
CO2 is not a pollutant.
[ Yes, CO2 is not a problem,
– if mixed with air (and air’s components) on a proper amount,
– if it does not increase above levels that disorder Earth’s solar irradiance/heat storing/reflection balance and not lead towards global overheating (arguable, if all the effects presented are properly and reputably introduced, not only for accomplishing a goal for its own sake, ‘normally’ one thinks science (being an established system) is trustworthy)
– if generated additionally on a timescale humanity can manage (for species living conditions)
( – if maybe not emitted to higher/highest (sufficiently dense) atmospheric layers with air, with longest (AFAIR) persistence (from fossil sources, generated on 10-100 thousands yrs rate, within a, then, more dysfunctional atmosphere and temperature levels to a humanity’s prosperity) )
(- to social formations, if burden of effects are fairly shared on its members capabilities (and not opportunities) and given the possibility for science being mistaken on long term consequences (based on a reasonable probability distribution with 21st century knowledge background)
TL;DR; depending on content, location, amount (overall), social imposts with Carbon’s effects on global heating and CO2’s on ocean’s acidification level ]
Many people want backup power for their home. But a generator needs fuel and maintenance. And in a crisis finding gas when you are running low may be hard and expensive.
However solar plus a backup battery can provide power for weeks on end with no fuel cost and minimal maintenance cost. And california now requires new homes to have solar.
Thought we were set with $51,000 in batteries. They lasted a day, should not have broiled burgers, about a 20 minute oven use. Grid power was out for almost a week and with overcast skies. There was little recharge. We shut off the water heater and only turned it on when using the generator. Gas generators are still needed.
Problem is that trees burn and offsets seem to be easily gamed. In other words, shaky policies for slowing our current trajectory toward a 3C rise (although the exceptional heat this year makes that questionable). An important article published yesterday in PNAS outlines exactly which locations and how many billions of people will experience unliveable (above 35C wet-bulb) conditions, for how long, for every 1C rise that occurs.
Not enough people are taking this serious, still, after forty years of warnings….
Google Vecellio et al. (2023). Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence of empirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance. PNAS.
California needs to be renamed
GAVIN’S GULAG
Stupid comment award