CNPS Carbon Neutrality Goal and Other Conservation News

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee

At its June 6, 2020 meeting, the Chapter Council approved the CNPS Carbon Neutral Goal. It reads as follows:

“CNPS’s goal is to become carbon neutral in its activities by 2030, meaning that our activities will, in net, add no greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every year. This goal encompasses work done by staff and volunteers, in activities, meetings, and events. Methods for reaching this goal remain to be determined as of the adoption of this goal in 2020, so successful methods, techniques, innovations, and programs will be freely shared within CNPS as a normal function of the society.

• “Justification for Goal: CNPS recognizes that climate change is a threat to the continued existence of at least some of California’s native plant species.

• “Currently, the damage caused by climate change ranks behind habitat loss and non-native invasive species in terms of the threat it poses to California native plant species. In coming decades, climate change will merge with these other threats by making part or all of the current ranges of native plants unlivable for those species, forcing them to migrate or die. We want to avoid this future.

• California as a state has proposed to go carbon neutral by 2045 if not earlier. Experts suggest that we have at most 10 years to avoid locking the global climate into a 2°C warming over baseline, a level that will trigger long-lasting effects and take centuries, if not millennia, to undo.

• CNPS must do its part to protect California’s native plant species from climate change, just as we do our part to combat habitat loss and the spread of non-native invasives.”

Here are a few of the implications of setting this goal.

We’ve also known that climate change was a problem for about as long as CNPS has been around (Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress about it in 1968). As we all know, we’ve done nothing to “bend the curve” on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, so we’re now struggling with an increasingly drastic need to wean everyone off fossil fuels or suffer horribly with extreme weather and its consequences.

CNPS needs to change too, and that is really what this goal is about. CNPS was founded in the 1960s and has existed during a time when access to gas-powered vehicles was considered normal. A majority of our activities implicitly take access to private transport for granted, whether it’s a meeting, a field trip, a work party, or a fundraiser like a garden tour or a plant sale. Now we collectively have to figure out how to do CNPS activities and be CNPS members without emitting greenhouse gases. No one thinks that will be easy, which is why we’re giving ourselves 10 years to experiment and work things out. Transforming the way we do things will become part of our normal process.

Hopefully everyone will become involved. One method is to look at what we are doing now, during the coronavirus shutdown, and to see what particular methods (perhaps online meetings?) would be sustainable and useful in decades to come. The pandemic caused a major, if temporary, drop in greenhouse gas emissions. While CNPS cannot continue to operate in lockdown mode indefinitely, it is worth seeing what we can learn from this time, rather than trying to get through and forget about it as fast as possible.

There have been three dodges suggested by people to meet this goal, and unfortunately none worked. The first is to claim that American society will need to change to meet this goal, that CNPS will be carried along with it, and that therefore wedon’t have to do anything. To the extent that we will need things like better electric cars for field activities, this is correct. Based on America’s multi-decade pattern of avoiding such changes, unfortunately the time for thinking others will do the work for us has passed. We all have to pitch in.

Another idea was to claim that, since we stop large acreages from being destroyed through conservation activities, therefore we can claim the greenhouse benefits of these areas and count that as making us neutral. There are a couple of problems with this. The big one is that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are still rising. Conserving plants by itself is insufficient to decrease emissions, we actually have to decrease our own emissions. The other issue is that we do not own the lands we save. Just as we do not want other entities claiming our greenhouse gas reductions astheir own, we cannot claim others’ reductions to our credit.

The third idea is that we have no competence in decreasing our own emissions, so we should pay someone else to sequester carbon for us and call it even. There are two fundamental problems with this plan. One is that studies have shown that most such carbon offset schemes have been reported to not hit their goals. More generally, if the world had a sufficient supply of carbon sequestration, it would havesoaked up all the greenhouse gases we’ve already emitted, and we wouldn’t have a problem. If, instead, sequestration opportunities are sharply limited, then we need to work on cutting our own emissions, rather than continuing to emit and buying a carbon indulgence elsewhere.

Speaking of which, as you probably know by now, on June 12 the California Appellate court upheld a ruling by a lower court invalidating San Diego County’s Climate Action Program. The problem is CAP mitigation GHG-1, which allows developers to buy offsite mitigation for emissions they produce. In Otay Ranch Village 14, for example, offsets would be used to deal with 72% of the emissions the project would create. Hopefully the County will get tired of losing on this issue and start revising the CAP? I suspect they will appeal this ruling too, but I can hope. And it is worth considering whether it’s hypocritical to demand that developers avoid carbon offsets, while embracing them ourselves.

Turning to General Plan Amendment (GPA) developments, I believe all of them plan to use carbon offsets while claiming they do not violate the CAP. Their dodge is that they do not follow the CAP, but rather follow interim advice issued before the CAP was certified. This interim advice happens to have wording identical to GHG-1, so the only way this dodge works is if environmental groups fail to litigate on it.

The two county GPA developments in the pipeline are Lilac Hills Ranch (LHR) and Otay Ranch Village 14. By the time you read this, we should know how the Board of Supervisors voted on Lilac Hills Ranch. This is the project you voted down in 2016. The developer had a parallel application in process, so they’re taking it to the Supervisors in late June.

This decision poses an interesting quandary for the Supervisors, because the two most pro-development supervisors (Desmond and Gaspar) were elected by margins smaller than the margin that rejected LHR. In Gaspar’s case,she was elected at the same time the LHR was rejected, andshe’s up for re-election this year. Do the Supervisors pass it and risk the voter’s wrath, or reject it and risk their backers’ wrath? It will be an interesting hearing. Some have suggested that LHR will be sent out for yet another round of EIRs, just to avoid deciding in an election year. That may be.

As for Otay Ranch Village 13, it goes to the Supervisors on July 8. If it follows previous decisions, the Supervisors will approve it 4-1 or 3-2, and environmental groups will litigate to stop it. One might hope that the Supervisors would look at the CAP ruling, decide not to appeal it again, and either scrap Village 13 or send it back for a supplemental EIR. They didn’t do that with any other GPA, but it’s possible they might change. Very unlikely, but possible.

If you want to write your supervisor and ask them why they’re wasting money fighting a losing legal battles instead of grappling with climate change, please do so. After all, we’re now grappling with it as an organization ourselves, so we have some moral standing to question them.