Global Warming

Global Warming

global warming

CEQA and
Climate Change
Workshops

The Attorney General is co-sponsoring 5 regional workshops this spring on the California Environmental Quality Act and Climate Change. For more information about the workshops, please visit the Local Government Commission, http://www.lgc.org/.

The planet is heating up. It’s happening not because of natural processes, or gradually over thousands of years. Rather, temperatures are rising quickly and dramatically, climbing with the concentrations of greenhouse pollutants we are pouring into the atmosphere. Global climate change is happening because of human activities.

We are already seeing the effects - disappearing glaciers, shrinking snow pack, droughts, coastal erosion, bigger and more regular storms, and more extreme heat waves. Eleven of the past twelve years are on the list of the twelve warmest years since reliable record keeping began in 1850. Arctic sea ice declined in 2006 by the largest amount ever, losing an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined. The best available science tells us that these and other abrupt disruptions will intensify and spread if we don’t take decisive, dramatic action today. See The Facts About Global Warming and Global Warming Contrarians and the Falsehoods They Promote. With just ten more years of business as usual, we will have committed ourselves to dangerous and irreversible climate change.

In 2006 California enacted landmark greenhouse gas legislation -- AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. PDF logo [PDF 91 kb / 13 pg] The law requires California to reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, which represents about a 10% percent reduction from current levels. Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2005 Executive Order S-3-05 requires further reductions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Achieving these reductions will be a challenging task, especially since California’s population is expected to grow from about 38 million in 2007 to 60 million in 2050. As the chief law enforcement officer of this State, elected by the People and charged by the Constitution to protect the public interest and the State’s natural resources, I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that California meets its greenhouse gas reduction targets.