Everything you could possibly want to know about clean technology in the Golden State can be found in an excellent new report, the California Green Innovation Index published by Next 10, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. The report tracks the state’s economic and environmental performance and analyzes key indicators to better understand the role green innovation plays in reducing emissions and growing the economy.
California is a state whose growth has always been built around innovation, as this figure from the report shows:
We’ve often written about California’s leadership policies in energy efficiency — but the report points out a number of fascinating factoids we weren’t aware of:
- California emits fewer GHG emissions per capita than Germany, the United Kingdom or Japan.
- California’s per capita GHG emissions are less than one-half the rest of the nation and are lower than they were 15 years ago. Among states, only Rhode Island emits fewer GHG emissions per capita than California.
- California inventors account for 44% of total US patents for solar and 37% of total U.S. patents for wind technology. The state attracted 36% of total venture capital investment in clean energy.
- Since 1990, green business establishments in the state have grown by 84 percent and employment has doubled.
- From 2000-2005, registrations of alternative fuel vehicles (not including Flex Fuel Vehicles or FFV) increased 1800%.
- Per capita petroleum consumption in California has fallen consistently since 1989 and is now below 1970 levels
The message is clear: You can be a low-carbon economy and a still be a high-tech, job-creating economy.
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This report may also shed some light on the false choice folks like Lomborg, Gingrich and S&N are positing about regulation vs. technolgical breakthroughs.
California has consistently been at the forefront of stringent regulations pertaining to cars, appliance standards, building codes, and emissions from fossil fuels.
Seems like the facts suggest that innovation and strict regulation go hand in hand, rather than being mutually exclusive.
We keep discovering this, over and over again. Of course, it takes the right kind of regulation — setting boundary conditions and performance standards rather than specifying technologies, but when they are properly structured, regulations don’t inhibit innovation, they stimulate it.
In fact, Harvard’s Michael Porter set out to show how destructive environmental regulation was to a state’s economy more than two decades ago. Along the way, he noticed a stubborn and perverse trend — some of the states with the most stringent regulatory standards were hotbeds of innovation and economic growth.
He became an advocate of intelligent regulation as an economic growth tool, not simply a means of controlling pollution.
Somehow, this wealth of empirical data on the compatability of regualtion, innovation, and economic growth needs to get out there, and we need to end this false narrative that regualtion and economic growth are mutually exclusive activities.
It seems that the “magic technological bullet” is the last defense of delayers. Some, like Gingrich and Lomborg, seem to know they are delaying — sadly, S&N seem blithely unaware that their phony narrative is aiding and abetting delayers who oppose real action on grounds of poltical persuasion or old fashioned greed.