Are California’s Global Carbon Emissions Declining?

May 30, 2018

ARE Associate Professor Meredith Fowlie authored this blog post for the Energy Institute at Haas on California's greenhouse gas (GHG) emission consumption. California’s current carbon accounting emphasizes in-state production (although it also estimates emissions from imported electricity and some imported transportation fuels). A redeeming quality of a “production-based” approach is that it is relatively straightforward to track GHG emissions coming out of our factories, power plants, and tailpipes. In contrast, tracking indirect emissions baked into the goods we consume requires chasing GHG emissions up convoluted supply chains that span the country and the globe. More