The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released a Climate Change Action Plan this week that outlined 52 measures to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The DEP, working with the Climate Change Advisory Committee, adopted the goal of reducing emissions by 30 percent below the 2000 levels by 2020.
Among the measures are recommendations to reduce the demand for electricity, build more energy-efficient buildings and expand the public-transportation system.
According to Jan Jarrett, a CCAC member and president of PennFuture — a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization — lawmakers will use cost-benefit analysis to determine which of the measures will actually be put in place.
“The plan won’t quite get fully implemented,” Jarrett said. Policy makers will adopt the recommendations that will achieve the “greatest reductions [in greenhouse gas emissions] with the least amount of money.”
The state budget that was signed into law last week cut $58 million, or 26.7 percent, from the budget of the DEP and $21 million, or 18.5 percent, from the budget of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
These cuts “raise significant doubts about the capacity of both agencies to fulfill their missions,” said Donald Welsh, president of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council — another environmental advocacy non-profit — in a press release. “They are only the latest in a series of cuts or diversions over the last several years.”
However, Jarrett said the budget cuts should not affect the enforcement of the plan’s recommendations in the long run.
“If the 52 measures are implemented, most of them save money,” she said.
The CCAC found that the measures generate a savings of about $11.7 billion between 2009 and 2010.
Gov. Edward Rendell ordered the plan’s preparation last July in the Pennsylvania Climate Change Act, or Act 70.
A major driving force behind the passage of Act 70 was a Pennsylvania Climate Change Roadmap published by the PEC in June 2007, PEC spokeswoman Jessica Anderson said.
“We did an inventory of the greenhouse gas emissions in Pennsylvania,” she said. “[It was] a precursor to the stuff that’s happening now.”
The roadmap found that Pennsylvania is responsible for one percent of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, ranking it third among U.S. states and placing it in league with the 25 most-polluting nations in the world.
Electricity generation is “the lion’s share of our greenhouse gas emissions,” Jarrett said.
