Sonoma City Council tables climate action

Jason Walsh, SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE
That’s the way things were left Aug. 15 when the Sonoma City Council tabled discussion of its plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions in light of a lawsuit filed last week by environmentalists against the Sonoma County Regional Climate Protection Authority. The lawsuit was filed by a Sebastopol-based group called California River Watch which alleges that the County’s “Climate Action Plan” (CAP), a program partnered with the City of Sonoma to meet state mandated greenhouse gas levels, is woefully undercounting the amount of greenhouse gases produced by what the group describes as the County’s fuel-driven wine and tourism industry.
The eco brouhaha stems from countywide efforts launched back in 2008 to meet state-required targets of reducing greenhouse gas levels to 25 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, with a longer-term goal of reaching 80 percent below that level by 2050. In 2013, the City of Sonoma joined what the county’s Regional Climate Protection Authority (RCPA) now calls its Climate Action 2020 program, a collaborative effort among the County and all nine of its cities to take measurable steps to reach those GHG targets.
At its Monday meeting, the City Council was set to consider eight Sonoma-specific steps to add to the Climate Action Plan – most of them incentives to encourage Sonomans to lower their carbon footprints. Those measures include ways to encourage solar installations, water conservation methods and restrictions on idling cars. But in the River Watch lawsuit, which challenges the EIR findings in support of the climate action plan, attorneys Jack Silver and Jerry Bernhaut charge that many of those and other similar CAP measures would have shaky implementation rates, are unenforceable and fail to provide evidence that they would set the County on a path to meet its GHG goals.
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