California has slashed its greenhouse gas pollution while growing its economy faster than the US as a whole.
For years, President Trump has insisted that environmental regulations hurt the economy, pledging to roll back Obama-era policies aimed at curbing climate change, bring back the coal industry, and open US coasts to oil drilling.
“I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations,” Trump, flanked by coal miners and coal company executives, said last year at the Environmental Protection Agency.
But it turns out there’s a place in America that shows the opposite can be true: California, where the economy has grown rapidly despite the state’s toughest-in-the-nation policy on greenhouse emissions.
This week, the California Air Resources Control Board (CARB) announced the state had reduced its carbon emissions by 13% since 2004, dropping below 1990 levels for the first time, and reaching its target four years early.
The news was hailed by environmental groups, regulatory officials, and Gov. Jerry Brown.
But perhaps even more significantly, California managed to reduce its pollution emissions while simultaneously growing its economy at a faster rate than the US as a whole. According to CARB, California’s economy grew 26% since 2004, when emissions peaked.
The exact relationship between the state’s environmental regulations and its economic success isn’t entirely clear, and experts caution against tying the trends together too directly. There isn’t a “one-to-one casual relationship” between economic growth and California’s environmental regulation, said William Fulton, the director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research and a former official of multiple California cities.
And while the regulations didn’t explicitly produce the overall economic growth in the state, it is abundantly clear that California’s environmental policies didn’t hurt its economy.
“What we do know is the economy has grown and carbon emissions have gone down and so has the carbon intensity of the economy,” said Jim Bushnell, an economist at the University of California, Davis. “The reduction in carbon has not significantly impaired the economy in any way.”
But could the state’s economy have grown even more without its stringent environmental regulations?
“It’s unlikely that it would’ve been significantly different if we hadn’t pursued the same goals,” said Bushnell.
Despite the tough emissions goal, California’s economy has also outpaced other large states with a deeper investment in fossil fuels.
“Texas’s economy grew faster out of the recession,” Fulton explained, “but now California is growing faster.”
The state’s attempts to cut emissions have also had a direct, positive impact on specific industries, experts said. Colin Murphy, an analyst at clean energy research nonprofit NextGen Policy Center, said that in recent years California has invested billions in solar energy, expanding public transit, funding greenhouse gas reductions, and retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient.
“All of this stuff is the kind of infrastructure investment that Economics 101 says will spur growth,” he told BuzzFeed News.