by Paul Taylor, Examiner.com
California Gov. Jerry Brown’s liberal-progressive impulses are once again pushing climate carbon reductions. As global governments struggle to sustain the evermore-tenuous reasons to foreclose on proven, conventional, economical fossil fuel energies, the governor’s new executive order goes even further than Pres. Obama’s radical proposals to curb questionable global warming processes.
Lacking any specifics on how to achieve his new carbon dioxide reductions or mitigating technologies, Brown sets a target of reducing emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels over the next 15 years. These would be the most restrictive climate regulations ever enacted in North America. Obama announced a plan last summer to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 30 percent by 2030, with 2005 levels as the starting point.( Los Angeles Daily News, April 29, 2015)
Brown’s executive order aligns California’s greenhouse-gas reduction targets with those of international governments ahead of this year’s U. N. Climate Change Conference in Paris. The 28-nation European Union has set the same target for 2030. The E.U. record of myopic renewable energy mandates is being reviewed and rejected by many members due to “energy poverty” — where ambitious green bureaucratic dreams of a carbon-free world have raised household power bills 30% or more in recent years.
The California Independent System Operator (ISO) overseeing the state’s electric power plants, transmission grid and system planning recently raised the specter of energy poverty due to the state-mandated renewable energy portfolio’s failure to meet rising electric power demands. The challenge to meet non-peak electricity demands has been created by the state’s 33 to 51 percent mandate for green renewable power by 2020. These non-peak power shortfalls are already occurring, but will get worse by 2015, and become disastrous under Brown’s new climate conniption.
Green renewable energies include wind, solar, biofuel, biogas and small-scale hydroelectric power sources. In the mandated California state energy system that would be half supplied by green renewables, predicted electric power short falls would be inevitable. It would no longer be just peak hot months of the summer or unusual winter cold snaps creating power blackouts or rolling brownouts.
Gov. Brown’s reflex to cut carbon on behalf of a partisan push for phantom climate imperatives presents a critical challenge to the reliability and affordability of electricity for consumers.
