California Has a Climate Deficit

California’s budget deficit requires the governor and legislature to make difficult choices to balance the budget. But, in making those difficult decisions, our elected leaders need to consider another more critical deficit: the climate deficit. As lawmakers grapple with the budget deficit, the governor is pulling money from climate programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at a moment when we should be spending more, not less, on these projects. And the May Revise balances the budget on the back of the Active Transportation Program (ATP), while the freeway lobby protests potential shifts in funding away from climate-killing highway expansion to bolster biking and walking.

It will take resources — money, time, programmatic and policy changes — to mitigate climate change. Without funding, climate policies are meaningless. California’s landmark Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure (CAPTI) called for additional funding for the ATP, which provides grants to fund projects that encourage biking and walking.

The ATP received an additional $1 billion in 2022, bringing its total funding for Cycle 6 to $1.6 billion, which still wasn’t nearly enough to fund all the worthwhile projects. Still, in each of the past two years, Governor Gavin Newsom has tried to claw back those additional funds. In his May Revise, he cut almost $600 million from the program, effectively canceling the next biannual funding cycle, a cut that makes no sense since California’s transportation budget is not in deficit.

This is how bad the climate situation is

The best way to describe our response as a species to the threat of climate change is that we’re driving toward that cliff, Thelma and Louise style. Faced with a choice between making the big changes we need to stave off climate chaos — many of which would reduce pollution and traffic violence, saving more than our climate — and pushing off tough choices to a tomorrow that never comes, we are choosing the latter.

In 2023, scientists estimated the world has just 250 gigatons of carbon left to burn ever (our carbon budget) if we have any chance of limiting the climate catastrophe. The world burned over 37 billion metric tons (gigatons) in 2022, so we have less than 10 years at that rate before we burn through all the carbon we can afford to burn.

The IPCC estimates that we need to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (and start reducing emissions much sooner) to have high confidence of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

California is far from immune. We are losing coastal roads, railroad tracks, and homes to a warmer and wilder ocean. Precipitation extremes challenge our water supply and infrastructure. Residents across the state aren’t able to get home insurance because of cumulative disasters, as wildfires, floods, and landslides threaten ever broader swaths of our state. Temperature changes threaten our most valuable industry: agriculture.

So what are we doing about it?

We can’t drive our way out of the climate crisis

Much of California’s investment in green transportation has focused on the transition from gas to electric vehicles. In March, as the governor was slashing the ATP, he celebrated a $1.9 billion investment in EV charging stations. EVs are an important part of the solution to the climate crisis, but they aren’t enough on their own.

California has made significant progress on the conversion to green energy. The California Energy Commission estimated that, in 2021, 59% of our state’s energy came from non-GHG-producing sources, including more than a quarter from wind and solar. That still leaves more than 40% from polluting sources. Even if everyone switched to EVs tomorrow, almost half the electricity to power those vehicles would come from gas and coal.

And we won’t switch to EVs tomorrow. In 2023, 25% of new cars sold in California were electric. That means 75% were not. That means, of the 1.78 million cars sold in California last year, 1.34 million were non-electric. The average car on the road is 12 years old; every year, we add millions more years of petroleum-fueled driving.

All new cars sold in California will be electric by 2035, but many gas-powered cars will remain on the roads. If we have less than 10 years to drastically reduce our carbon footprint, we need other solutions.

Carbon-free transportation, not freeways

The transportation sector is the largest contributor to California’s GHG emissions. To make the changes we need in the timeframe necessary to avoid further climate disaster, we need viable low- and no-carbon transportation options. We need walkable neighborhoods and protected, connected bikeways — things the ATP pays for.

Copenhagen, Denmark, was just as car-dependent as any U.S. city in the 1950s; it made a choice to prioritize biking over driving and now has a bicycling mode share of more than 50%. Paris, France, increased traffic on its bike lanes by 71% in just three years and reduced car traffic by 50% between 2002 and 2022, thanks to an ambitious plan to build 112 new miles of bikeways between 2021 and 2026.

Active transportation would be a viable option for many more Californians if we had safer streets with lower vehicle speeds, protected intersections, and better biking and walking infrastructure.

Yet, the governor’s proposed budget preserves full funding for highway projects that make the problem worse while cutting the Highways to Boulevards program, which removes unneeded freeways to reconnect neighborhoods, and decimating the Active Transportation Program.

A budget deficit, however challenging, can be solved. However, if we don’t resolve our climate deficit, we become Thelma and Louise sailing over that cliff into climate chaos. Now is the time to devote much more funding to the ATP and other Complete Streets programs that alleviate the climate crisis and stop spending money on freeway-expanding projects and programs that worsen climate change.

Speak up for the Active Transportation Program