Dear Neighbors,
To truly restore our climate, me must return our atmospheric and oceanic concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions to preindustrial levels as swiftly as possible.
California must lead on climate restoration, a critical third pillar of climate action alongside mitigation and adaptation. That is exactly why I am working with stakeholders from environmental justice groups, labor, and industry to craft a plan for California to not only adapt to, but to reverse climate change: SB 1297.
My bill, SB 1297, is a vital opportunity for California to chart a global path forward in climate restoration. SB 1297 calls on the state to develop a strategic plan to advance carbon reduction across all building and construction materials and maximize carbon sequestration. Notably, this would greatly expand the reach of our state’s current embodied carbon reduction goals and include materials such as cement, concrete, aggregate, lumber, cross-laminated timber, steel, and more.
California uses enough aggregate, concrete, and other building materials that it could store all carbon emissions from major industrial sources in the built environment. Removing carbon from our building and construction materials and using them to sequester carbon can be done safely, permanently, and economically – with an incredibly high impact. Storing carbon in the built environment will enable net-negative emissions to help draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which provides additional climate benefits above and beyond California’s efforts to rapidly and completely transition to clean energy.
SB 1297 would require stakeholder input and for state agencies to develop plans, accounting frameworks, and otherwise encourage the use of building materials where feasible with low or negative embodied carbon emissions, to help maximize the level of carbon sequestration in the built environment.
As many of you know, in Santa Clara County, we led the charge to declare a countywide “climate restoration emergency that demands immediate action to halt, reverse, restore and address the consequences and causes of global warming" and on Earth Day’s 50th Anniversary, along with Earth Day Network, and the Foundation for Climate Restoration, I helped to launched a local governments campaign that called on all cities and counties to adopt climate restoration. For this work, I was honored to address the first annual Climate Restoration Forum at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City which led into the 74th Session of the U.N. General Assembly.
Last year, the state legislature passed SB 596 authored by Senator Josh Becker that established the intent of the Legislature to attain net-zero or net-negative emissions of greenhouse gases from the cement and concrete sector. Accompanying this, I was a principal co-author of SB 582 authored by Senator Henry Stern, the Climate Emergency Mitigation, Safe Restoration, and Just Resilience Act of 2021, that focused on carbon removal leadership, and I authored a suite of bills around greenhouse gas reduction through building energy use.
SB 1297 follows on an announcement at the recent 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland from the Pacific Coast Collaborative, that partnering jurisdictions – including California – will work to accelerate innovation, investment and market development for low carbon materials. It also comes on the heels of the recent announcement by the Biden Administration regarding new actions to advance the production and use of low carbon building materials made in America and guidance on the responsible deployment of carbon capture, utilization and sequestration to help achieve a carbon neutral economy.