Senator Cortese’s Climate Restoration Bill Clears First Hurdle
Senator Dave Cortese’s (D-Silicon Valley) bill, SB 1297, cleared its first hurdle today after passing the California Senate Environmental Quality Committee. SB 1297 will ensure California takes a leadership role in advancing climate restoration by taking steps to minimize embodied carbon and maximize carbon sequestration in the built environment.
“We must shift the conversation and think bigger,” says Senator Cortese. “California can and must advance both climate neutrality and carbon restoration objectives, which together will require achieving and maintaining net-negative emissions as soon as possible, by leveraging a tremendous, but largely unexplored, opportunity to sequester carbon in our built environment.”
“We are expanding methods in buildings and construction projects that can create and maintain high-quality jobs for California workers,” he added.
Despite high greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) impacts from building materials and the significant potential they offer to advance California’s GHG goals and climate restoration, little has been done to address these topics in California. SB 1297 will begin to address this important gap by requiring the state to develop a plan and recommendations to minimize embodied carbon and maximize carbon sequestration in building materials.
Embodied carbon, or GHG emissions associated with producing and using building materials, accounts for at least 11 percent of global carbon emissions.
“Through relatively recent innovations, it is now possible to store CO2 in the built environment, including roads and buildings. Minimizing embodied carbon and maximizing carbon sequestration in the built environment represents an outstanding opportunity for California to take a leadership role in advancing climate restoration,” says Rick Wayman, CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration.
At the recent UN Climate Conference, California joined an effort to accelerate innovation, investment, and market development for low-carbon building materials. The federal government also recently announced that in 2022, the General Services Administration (GSA) will require contractors to disclose the embodied carbon of building materials for new building and major modernization contracts.