Will California ratepayers pay for climate research?

After months of closed-door negotiations, California lawmakers today unveiled a bill to collect $37 million a year from ratepayers for up to a decade to pay for global warming research. The effort would bolster the state's complex effort to ratchet down its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 by 2020, amounting to a 30% cut over expected levels.

The fees, which would add an average of about 10 cents per month to electricity bills statewide, would pay part of the cost of the $87-million annual budget of a Climate Change Research and Workforce Development Institute.

The Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee approved the bill today on a 7-3 vote.

The institute is backed by public and private universities in the state, which would benefit from sharing nearly $900 million in research grants over the next decade. Projects would include developing technologies to reduce emissions, researching ways to switch to a low-carbon economy, fine-tuning forecasts of climate change impacts and fostering "green-tech" jobs in renewable energy.

For more, read the full story.

-- Marc Lifsher

Photo: California will need more renewable energy, like these windmills near Palm Springs, to meet its greenhouse gas emission goals. Credit: Lee Celano / AFP / Getty Images

Comments

[sheila]

genius. so instead of getting a million families solar generation systems on their homes (aka energy independence), and directly creating several thousand skilled local jobs, we spend nearly a billion dollars on more research into how to get a million families to buy solar power from Big Energy and create 16 jobs, mostly in the collections dept.

why on earth can't they limit their research to reading one article on the wild success of feed in tariffs in the 40 nations which already have them, and look at the 2 GW/year of rooftop PV being installed in both Germany and Spain and then actually use that Billion to DO SOMETHING FOR US AND THE PLANET?

oh, and as for your photo, CA needs point of use solutions including "net zero" and "passive solar" design, conservation, efficiency smart metering, geothermal heat exchanges, solar thermal, solar PV and microwind, not more dead ecosystems and species, and vastly increased GHGs like these wind farms cause. there, research done. now where's my grant money and feed in tariff contract?