This is an important issue for decarbonization, and it is top of mind in California right now. Brief thread with a couple numbers in it follows. https://twitter.com/joobilly/status/1194679572748390401

California has a target of cutting GHGs 40% by 2030. Electricity is ~16% of our emissions. Passenger cars are ~40%.

We have a target to get 60% RE by 2030. That would cut electric emissions by about half from current levels. So of the 40%, that takes care of 8%. Good. 32% to go.

Meanwhile transportation emissions are rising still.

We currently have ~650k EVs on the road. We sell 2m cars/year and we have a goal of getting to 5m EVs by 2030.

If we succeed (we probably will, but it is actually pretty hard!), the vehicle fleet in 2030 will be at best about 1/3 electric.

Let’s generously assume this cuts vehicle emissions by 1/3. So 1/3 of 40% = 13%. Subtracting from the 32% above, that puts us just over halfway there, having tackled more than half the sources of GHGs in the state.

With other policies on the books, we have plans in place to get to about a 26% reduction over all. We don’t know yet how to get the remaining 14%.

We could sell twice as many electric cars, but we’d also need an aggressive buyback program to accelerate retirement of relatively young gas-powered cars. We could decarbonize electricity faster. Great, let’s do both if we can.

But we are pushing these very hard already.

The thing we are not doing is reducing overall care dependency. Realistically, we can’t succeed without doing that.

And this is for our “wimpy” 40% reduction target — not nearly fast enough for 1.5°C pathways. Quite possibly not fast enough for 2° pathways.

So if you are looking for somewhere to work in climate policy, and you’d like to make a big difference and fill in a white space on the map, please focus on transportation infrastructure budgets and housing policy, which are the main levers affecting VMT.

Because, meanwhile, in Washington: https://twitter.com/rachelswan/status/1194344571355877378?s=21

On the whole, I am optimistic that between these efforts, plus aggressive building decarbonization, we can meet CA’s 40% target without new major federal interventions. Maybe.

We’ve been working on it since 2006.

We need to do this, plus go faster, nationwide. CA is struggling but may *just* meet its goals. My home state of Missouri hasn’t even really gotten started.

We can’t do it without a massive overhaul of federal govt’s role in pushing decarbonization.

And if we don’t do it now, it will get even harder. This is why we all need to put everything we’ve got into voting for #GreenNewDeal candidates. If climate is not job 1, we all lose.