Climate Action Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Climate Action Committee's first meeting of 2025, 01/24/2025. And welcome, Angie, our clerk. And can you please take the roll call?

The technology is still coming back from the holidays,

I guess.

How about we pass one of ours? Oh, here we go. Hello?

Yep. Member? Testing.

You.

Sorry about that. Member Lamitina? Here. Member Joseph?

Here.

Member Eisenberg?

Here.

Member Alessio? Present. Member Summers?

Here.

Member Tripp? Here. Member Gallagher? Here. Thank

you. Great. And Rex, would you like to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance? Thank you.

Please join me in the pledge.

Pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America

and to the republic for which it stands,

one nation and the God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Before we go to our next item, we are going to actually move up administrative items 5A and B, and then we'll move on to public comments. So item 5A is staff request that the CAC accept nominations and vote for a chair for the 2025 calendar year. The elected chair would take office immediately. Do I have oops. Yes, Member Alessio.

Thank you. Member well, Vice Chair Gallagher, I'd like to nominate you as Chair. I think that's appropriate. And I'd like to nominate Member Eisenberg as Vice Chair.

Okay. We do have a nomination. Do we have a second?

Second the motion.

And second by Summers. And do we have any public comment on the item? All right. We are going to take a vote. So all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. I will go on. Thank you. And thank you, Liz, for all the work that you've done. We could talk about that later during our comments. But thank you. You've worked really hard on this committee. Okay, B, staff request that the CAC accept nominations. Oh, we did it all in one. Is that okay?

I think that's okay. The motion Yeah. Both A E.

I think it's okay. Okay. So I think we're going go back to public comment now, and then we will come back to our items. So this is a time for the public to comment to address the CAC regarding any subject over which the CAC has jurisdiction, but which is not on today's posted agenda. Is there anyone in the audience who would like to comment?

Hello. I'm Chris Benz with NAPA Climate Now. And I would just like to thank Member Alessio for all of her work leading this committee. Under Liz, things actually got done. So the ReachCo got approved, the reusable foodware ordinance got approved, and we moved very far forward with the regional climate action and adaptation plan. Thank you so much, Liz.

Thank you, Chris. Anyone else? Anyone on the phone?

Yes, we do.

We do. Okay. Great. Thank you. Caller, please go ahead.

Aurea, you'll have three minutes.

Good morning, members of Climate Action Committee. My name is Aria Athe, and I'm a junior at Vintage High School as well as as well as a member of Napa Schools for Climate Action, a youth climate advocacy group. Our motto, no school should be a silent witness to climate injustice is a message which resonates deeply with not only myself, but other young students of our community. Unfortunately, as we all know, climate change is worsening every minute. Human activities such as transportation and electricity generation using nonrenewable sources pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane methane, only to name a few.

These greenhouse gases have warmed our atmosphere significantly. We are now almost at the 1.5 degree threshold, which so many scientists have warned us about for decades. We are running out of time to stop irreversible damage to every part of our Earth's systems. We are running out of time to create change, which will save our future generations. We are running out of time to save the future of all life on Earth.

A live a livable Earth hangs in the bounds, and the choices we make now are more critical and essential than ever. Our 2030 net zero emissions deadline approaches fast, and we cannot afford to wait another five years to take serious and decisive steps in climate policy. Therefore, it is my request to you all that you consider taking action with us. As you know, Navajo Schools for Climate Action has been hard at work these past few years. This past November, we worked with congressman Mike Thompson to introduce the climate restoration resolution into congress.

With we introduced it with four dedicated original cosponsors supporting us. In addition, at our urging every town and city within the county implemented prohibition language for new and expanding gas stations. This is a step in the right direction and will hopefully lead to a safer future where we are no longer dependent on fossil fuels. However, we are hoping to take further action to implement a county wide ban on new and expanded gas stations incorporating jurisdictions not included in the past. This is where we need the climate action committee and the county of Mapas Health.

We hope that the youth's action, courage, and passion for our environment will inspire you and others in the community to take swift and immediate action for our planet. Finally, I would just like to thank you all for being stewards of our environment. On behalf of all of Natapolis youth, we are incredibly grateful for this committee. We thank you for joining us in raising awareness for our future and the future of our planet. Again, we hope you take our message to heart and remember that our 2030 deadline is racing towards us. We must change the system which currently works to add fossil fuel infrastructure rather than reduce it. We must set a better example for the future, and we must believe in ourselves and be the people the planet needs us to be. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Thank you, Aria.

We do have one more. Okay. Liliana, you'll have three minutes.

Good morning, climate action committee members. My name is Eliana Koresh. I'm currently a senior at Napa High School and now an incoming freshman at Stanford University. For the past three years, I've been leading, the incredible climate organization, NAPA Schools for Climate Action. And as RESN, our motto is NAPA schools no school should be a silent witness to climate injustice.

And we take that message seriously with every project we initiate. Similarly, I ask you to take the issue of anthropogenic pollution, which continues to increase global warming with a sense of urgency, seriousness, and dedication. The World Meteorological Organization has officially confirmed 2024 to be the warmest year on record with it being 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels. It is now critical more than ever before that we, as a community, shift our dependence on fossil fuels to clean energy. One way to do this is to implement a countywide prohibition on the building of new gas stations and the expansion of existing ones.

Our group champions this as a part of our fossil free future project, which has the goal of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions far before the year 2030. With it now being 2025, we are counting down the years to make the critical changes we need to reach sustainability before the decisive year of 2030, which will unleash natural disasters and climate tipping points beyond our control. As a result, we must take action now and not wait until our community is engulfed in flames to make strides in climate focused policy decisions. So instead of allowing new permits for gas stations to be built, we urge you to initiate the countywide prohibitions prohibition on new and expanding gas stations and to simultaneously create policy solutions that will provide a smooth and equitable transition to zero emission vehicles within the Napa County. Napa Schools for Climate Action has grown tremendously in the past year.

And as a result of our advocacy, we are grateful to say that every city and town within the county has agreed to implement prohibition language. Today, we call on the county of Napa to issue the countywide ban on new and expanded gas stations and to to incorporate the jurisdictions not included within the cities and town and to also innovate policy solutions to make zero emission vehicles more accessible and affordable within our community. My team and I would like to thank all of you for your efforts in raising your awareness about the climate emergency. We hope you take our message seriously and implement a countywide ban on new and expanding gas stations without further delay. This would demonstrate powerful climate action and also set a positive precedent for other government officials and communities.

We hope our youth advocacy inspires you all to mirror our courage, bravery, and passion for fighting for our climate. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Liliana. All right. Okay. Thank you. We need to approve our minutes from the regular meeting. This is 4A, our consent items. Do I have a motion?

I'll make that motion.

Motion by Joseph.

Second the motion.

Second by Summers. Is there any public comment on the consent items? All right. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? Okay. Great. We are going to now move on to Item 5C. This is a discussion and direction regarding the Climate Action Committee's orientation for the new year, roles and responsibilities, introduction of fiscal year 'twenty five'twenty six priorities and budget. Mr. Melendez, I'm guessing that's you.

Yes. I'll start it off.

Thank you.

Go. We've got some slides. Did the remotes work? Okay. Yes.

Welcome to the New Year Climate Action Committee members. And, yeah, we just wanted to give a chance to have kind of an orientation for any new members or and a reorientation, bit of history, and, speak about the priorities, coming up for this year. Again, we'll go through the introduction and kind of some history of the CAC. We have some proposed roles and responsibilities taken from the joint powers agreement, and some proposed changes as this committee has evolved over time and speak on the last year's this this current fiscal year's priorities and start to speak on the upcoming priorities for this upcoming fiscal year as we start to think about our budget memo that we will present to you at a future meeting. So the climate action committee was formed in 2020.

In recent years, 2021 and 2022, all six jurisdictions adopted either resolutions or proclamations declaring the climate emergency and the need for immediate and urgent action. And in 2019, the jurisdictions came together and decided that that this was needed even before those resolutions and proclamations were adopted, that this was a big need. And so the jurisdictions took action and formed in 2020 the Climate Action Committee. It has historically been a forum of information sharing, coordination, being able to share what's going on in in our individual jurisdictions, as well as what's going on at a regional, state, and federal level, mostly the sharing of information in this in this coordination, to help meet kind of individually these these climate action goals. We've hosted presentations from local leaders, both within our own county as well as in the region and state on all kinds of topics for sustainability in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, air quality, nature nature conservation, energy recycling, wastewater, fire, and more.

And as I mentioned, yeah, historically, this was information sharing on programs and resources that were available that each jurisdiction could take individually to help address climate change and its effects. And the in 2021, the joint powers agreement, enabled us to start start sharing the cost of this committee and, the information sharing, these meetings, and looking into funding resources and other programs available. And as we've gone on, the need, and the desire to kind of move from this information sharing forum to a more strategical approach to a regional climate action plan has developed. You know, we've we are right in the middle of our regional climate action adaptation plan, as many of you know. And this evolved from looking at these kind of individual approaches to to climate action plans and and, you know, utilizing this committee as kind of a launching off point for each of the jurisdictions, now evolving into more of a kind of collaborative regional approach to climate action.

And particularly for new members, but, as a reminder, we are in the middle of this R CAP process. We have completed the greenhouse gas inventory and forecast for 2030, 2035, and 2040 under different emission scenarios. We have looked at both GHG mitigation measures and adaptation as well the climate vulnerability assessment to see what vulnerabilities we do have building upon many of the hazard mitigation plans and other safety elements, in each of the jurisdictions, and then looking at how the measures to adapt to those climate stressors and and effects of climate change. And we've conducted extensive community engagement with a public survey, our public facing project website, and community meetings and online focus group discussions, and this process is is ongoing. And we are nearing the end.

We have a draft that is in the works for the public facing document that will be a lot less technical than many of the documents we've reviewed thus far to be able to show kind of a step by step process of how we're gonna get to our climate action goals in the future. And I'll pass it off to my colleague. If you have not met him yet, this is Jesse Gutierrez. He started in November, and we'll be working together on this committee and on the regional climate action adaptation plan and other initiatives.

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, committee chair. Yeah. Happy to be here, happy to be part of the team and supporting the CAC and the Regional Climate Action Plan. So I'm just going to go over a few of the kind of suggested roles and responsibilities, just kind of what's expected of county staff and what the county staff kind of hopes to get back from you all.

And these are all pretty much in the joint powers agreement in the terms. So they kind of pulled from that. So they're not necessarily new. So they're in there, we're just kind of highlighting them just so we're all on the same page. So as is probably obvious, Napa County and our department and Ryan and I are kind of like the lead agency providing staff to the community action climate action committee.

That includes putting together these meetings, facilitating the meetings, sharing information, bringing in presenters, things of that nature really supporting this group. And also that includes facilitating joint actions taken such as, yes, getting the RCAP together, working with the consultants, facilitating meetings, making sure that we are providing the CAC with all the right information, bringing those consultants to the meetings so they can update not only the committee, but also the public on actions or developments with the different projects that we're working on. As part of that, we kind of develop and manage the contracts for those activities. We've been doing that so far. I do want to give a shout out to Deborah Elliott from the City of Napa, who I think has also been kind of a co facilitator in working on the regional climate action and adaptation plan, which has been a from I mean, short time here, I've noticed that's a big lift.

It's a lot of work. As Ryan mentioned, a lot of kind of substantial technical memos and adaptation measures. So props to the public, the community, and the committee for really kind of working on that. And really, from what I have seen, the fact that it is a joint project, the fact that all six jurisdictions are behind it, I I think is very important and very telling of the work that is going on in this committee. So we will continue to facilitate and support that.

I think one of the important things is also to develop and present a draft budget to you all in terms of what you can expect in terms of costs from these activities, from these projects. Obviously, the RCAP was big. I think it was somewhere around $600,000 to kind of get that going. Luckily, there was a $500,000 budget allotment that was secured by the former state senator, Bill Dodd. So that really pushed us through that.

So I think, in turn, we'll develop and propose these budgets to you all and we ask that obviously you review and in a timely manner kind of relay that information to your jurisdiction, city managers and department staff to kind of get that moving. Another important piece that I think we want to really emphasize is organizing kind of a new staff level implementation working group to make sure that staff from the different departments in the different jurisdictions are not only on board with the regional climate action plan and its different strategies and measures, but that we're working in a unified manner where not all the measures apply to every jurisdiction, but this is a plan that really is working under the assumption that the jurisdictions are going to work together to meet these different kind of emissions reduction strategies and adaptation measures. So it's kind of critical that we work together and I think, you know, up to now the county being facilitator has been important because we kind of have direct contact, but I think moving forward and with implementation, it's going to be crucial to have staff from all the different jurisdictions who are the knowledge keepers of those different jurisdictions, who know how those jurisdictions work, who know the people from those areas and what's needed.

So I think that's going to be crucial moving forward when we move towards implementation. So those are some of the roles and responsibilities that we suggest for county staff for the oh, sorry. I'm not moving my own, sorry. County staff, okay, CAC appointees. So for CAC appointees, obviously you're all important points of contact to share information from gathered in these meetings to not only the public and the constituencies of your jurisdictions, but really to jurisdictional leadership, to department heads, and department staff.

Like I mentioned, I think it's important to not only hear the information gathered here, but take it down and make sure that it's kind of being fed down to the people that are going to be implementing these actions and these measures that we're working on now. CAC appointed members will facilitate internal municipal approval of annual budget request and potential amendments and be prepared to vote on a final budget item in March's CAC meeting. So we'll present a budget proposal next month to you all and then hopefully consider that, talk to your jurisdictional leadership and come back with some notion of where we would go from there, hopefully by the March meeting. I think that's very important and we want to definitely emphasize that you all have direct contact with your jurisdictions and your leadership and it helps us to kind of keep things moving when those processes are just kind funneled down in a way that works best. CAC appointed members will facilitate and designate and assign at least one staff person from each agency jurisdiction to participate in the staff level working group.

I know we've had a similar type of working group in the past, but I think it's such a big multi agency group that we want something that's a little tighter and it's really just staff or department leadership that can really kind of get these measures moving once we kind of adopt the plan and figure out an implementation framework. We don't have an implementation framework just yet. I think that's one of those goals moving forward. But just to start thinking of who are the staff, who are the people within the departments that can that maybe are already champions, already thinking about this, are already doing the type of work that we can incorporate into a plan like this, right, a regional climate plan. And CAC appointed members will disseminate information to residents of the respective municipalities through channels such as newsletter, staff reports, etcetera, Earth Day, Harvest Festival, Yountville Days.

And on that note, I think we're also here to support not only that, but like, yeah, like if there's presentations that you want to make to your jurisdictions, we're here to support that. I think I would be supportive of the tabling to talk about the RCAP at different events. We're here to support that as well. I guess one final thing is since this is the first meeting, making sure that we RSVP and are able to if we can't make it to the meetings, that just notify us. So we make sure that we're starting and have to notify everyone on time. So next, we're going to talk about ongoing projects or projects that were priorities for fiscal year 2024 and 2025. I could run through them, or Ryan, if you want to do it.

Yes, sure. So many of you are here for the discussion on the fiscal year priorities. And we set I think we highlighted five or six of them, and we wanted to narrow down so we could have a with limited staff time and resources, we wanted to really make sure that we were focusing our efforts on a few things that we could do really well rather than than so many things that we maybe couldn't do as well if we tried to do everything. And the three priorities we've set for this past fiscal year, our current fiscal year, were the planning and implementation of electric vehicle infrastructure electric vehicle charging infrastructure, you know, whether we needed a full plan, a region wide plan, or just shooting from the hip and wanting to install as many chargers as possible. We ended up looking at and working with a PhD candidate from UC Berkeley to help us to help us expedite a statewide it's gonna be a statewide tool for EV charging, planning, and site selection and prioritization.

So rather than hiring a consulting firm, we were able to work with him for a cheaper amount than would have been likely with a consulting firm. And that tool is up and running. It is ready to go. We will have I'll announce it for a future agenda item to do a live demonstration here as well as a demonstration to staff at each of the jurisdictions. And but that's really exciting for site prioritization and selection so we can can help.

And that that tool will incorporate equity constraints, looking at, you know, pollution burden and looking at lower income folks as well as incorporating and bringing in PG and E's power lines to make sure that there is electrical capacity at each site. So that work is underway and closing up, but happy to report that we are we worked on that this year, and it's it's coming to fruition. The next priority was set for new building reach codes, for we ended up looking at a model reach code at the county for a flex path so as to not outright ban natural gas as we saw with with Berkeley's litigation with the California Restaurant Association, but to not outright ban natural gas, but to look at a flexible path to all electric construction for new buildings. The county took it, earlier in 2024, in the summer, and was adopted. And I I have not heard much from the other jurisdictions.

I know San Helena was delayed with their, their reach code, and I'm not sure about the other jurisdictions. But, but the county did draft a model ordinance that was presented to this committee, and then could have been taken to each of the jurisdictions. And the last and the biggest priority that was set was this initiative for developing the regional multijurisdictional climate action adaptation plan with a framework to show measurable actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and these strategies to adapt to climate change. And as many of you have been on this committee, we have had working sessions. We have looked at countless pages and of technical memorandums and and documents to prepare us for this draft administrative cap that will be coming out later this year.

And now as we are approaching kind of the end of this fiscal year and and getting into priorities for the next fiscal year. Staff is recommending as many of the the EV charging, the reach codes, the solid waste, every sec you know, every sector we've looked at in the inventory and many of the activities that the climate action committee and staff have been working on in previous years, it's kind of all encompassed in the R CAP. We are proposing to set a priority of implementation of this R CAP for the the next fiscal year. We are hoping to have the plan finalized by the end of this fiscal year. There have been several delays and budget amendments and and, you know, kind of other additional items that we've we've started to look at upon request from this committee.

And we still have a long way to go in terms of the looking at a, you know, CEQUA environmental impact review and to streamline future development projects and then developing this framework, this kind of implementation framework for the R CAP measures and strategies. So those are our proposed priorities for the next fiscal year. Happy to field any questions or discussion on anything that's been presented, the roles and responsibilities, the last year's priorities and upcoming priorities.

Great. Thank you both for presentation. The Before we get to the members, I'd like to just see if there's any public comment on the phone. Okay. All right. Since our lights we have too many people for the lights. So I'm going to start with Member Joseph and then Member Chip.

Number one, thank you for the report and the update. Because I've been here for a while, I'm not as focused on roles and responsibilities as much as the priorities. And I would agree getting the RCAP finalized and adopted is probably the most critical for now. But the other two are important and it does sound exciting about the EV charging app for lack of a better term. And I think that may be more than sufficient to for us to declare victory and say, okay, we've addressed this, we can now give that app to the jurisdictions and go out and look for sites and come up with money.

On the REACH code, and I'll bring this up again, I think I've mentioned it in the past, in the City Of American Canyon, we have been very successful at getting all new construction to be without natural gas, to be energy neutral, I guess, in the sense of solar panel installations. We haven't adopted the building reach code. Presumably, we embraced a Cal Green Tier one or two standard. And so by requiring everybody to just exceed the existing codes by 15%, the path of least resistance apparently is to simply go ahead and be all electric without gas. And so I guess my point is there may be an easier way to accomplish the second priority, just adopt the Cal Green standards and call it a day and it might be worth it just to have staff review and compare so that my opinion, which may be completely wrong, can be kind of validated at the staff level.

And if that's the case, it seems like a much easier course of action to simply encourage every jurisdiction to look at the Cal Green standards instead of something more unique that I believe requires more effort to formally get approved by the state. So those are my comments. I like the idea of what I'm interpreting is the need to start creating a technical advisory committee as we get further into the RCAP. I think all jurisdictions need to become or the staff of all jurisdictions need to become more engaged. And I'm looking forward to asking somebody to come down before we adopt the RCAP to come to our council to kind of go into the more details so that Board Member Lamatina and myself might be able to summarize some things, but if anybody has questions, we're liable to have the deer in the headlights look.

So we'll be following up as we get closer. But thank you.

Thank you. Member Tripp?

I just wanted to thank Chair Alizio for her excellent work and then also Mr. Melendez. I was never sure who was moving things along, but it was delightful to be part of a group that was moving things along. And not just delightful, but really makes you feel you're doing something worthwhile. And I also wanted to say I really appreciate it, and I know there's always Brown Act implications.

But when Ryan has been Mr. Melendez has been sharing information, I don't always have time to read it all, but it's just really helpful. So I would like to encourage that. And then I just wanted to make a general comment. I think your description of the roles and responsibilities was quite brilliant and necessary because as a council member, you end up on these committees and it's not always and very worthwhile participation, but you're not always clear on what it is you should be doing vis a vis your constituents and the rest of your counsel and staff.

So I thought that was really excellent. And also the idea of we, as a jurisdiction, think of NICR new planning director, Erin, is here. We have a formal thought and just designate somebody as kind of an interface. So I thought on a practical and also just general, it was a great description, and I might crib it and change some names. But thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Member Eisenberg? Okay.

Thank you. I do concur with most of the recommendations proposed priorities from staff. I absolutely believe the R CAP is our prime goal and we do need to get more information that is still coming. So I'm really looking forward when we get the financial information for how this will affect jurisdictions so that we can work together to get a final R CAP that can be recommended. As far as the current priorities that we've looked at just a few slides ago, I believe the other than the other two besides RCAP really have been subsumed by RCAP.

They're part of RCAP. And I think our big goal should be working together to adopt the final RCAP plan. And then I would like to add, putting in a joint set of priorities in the RCAP. No jurisdiction can possibly do it all in one fell swoop. And then if we can agree on some priorities, and of course this will take a lot of consultation with staff, then as consultation with our jurisdiction staff, But as Mr.

Melendez said, was talking about the cooperation between jurisdictions, I think that's going to be essential. If we have some priorities that we can get, then there can be the kind of jurisdictional cooperation that will save jurisdictions money so we don't all have to have our lawyers look at every in each jurisdiction look at every word. We can have some sort of shared resources that allow us to implement these in an efficient way. So and if the CAC agrees, oh, okay, the electric charging stations are really, really important, we should pursue it, let's make that one of the top priorities that we're going to be looking at in RCAP because it is at least in the last draft that plays a significant role. Or and the reach codes, I think that that for me, that would be my top priority is implementing a building code that discourages natural gas.

And I I think that was one of the CAC's best moves or best actions, which was to make it a reach code that will discourage natural gas without challenging legal objections. And I I think we should be pursuing that particular piece. So in essence, I appreciate what staff did. I think it's great. Let's get the R CAP done.

Let's get all the information for the R CAP. Let us then set some priorities that we can all agree on working with our jurisdictions and share resources so that on the priorities, so that we can actually get things done because really, our goal is not completing an RCAP. Our goal is implementing actions in our jurisdictions that will make a difference in our climate. Thank you.

Thank you. Member Alessio and then member gift.

I like how you ended that. I almost want to say, Mic drop? Let's move on to the next. Yes. Thank you, Steph, for this report, both Jesse and and Ryan. Since we kind of went back in history, I do also want to acknowledge our retired supervisor, Brad Wagon Connect. He started an ad hoc committee, I think it was 2018. Is that correct? Remember it '18 or '17? Anyways, I remember I think it was '18. Maybe it was '19. It doesn't matter. It was It's a all a blur. But he did start an ad hoc committee with one person representing each jurisdiction. I was fortunate enough to be invited to that.

Member Joseph was. Gary Krausz out of Calistoga. Anna Shutow out of St. Helena. And my recollection is Marita Doerenbecher out of Yontville.

And then from there, it was after we met for probably a year, we knew that we were on the right path and now to formalize it. And so then he reached out to Supervisor Pedrosa to help with that formation. And here we are. And again, I also wanted to thank Deborah Elliott, because at that time she was with the county and very, very involved in that process. And the county lost Deborah to the city, but she's very much in tandem and in partnership in what we're doing today and what's brought us to this point.

I think that the priorities are really spot on. Thank you for that. I agree. We have to we've been waiting. The community's been waiting a long time to have a regional climate action plan.

And I think by doing this regionally within Napa County is the best path forward. And I can see that in the evidence of just what we've already achieved as jurisdictions come together. The weak point the weak area, which is mentioned, is really, as Member Tripp said, is being confident in our roles and responsibilities of informing our own councils or board the updates and what is happening in this process. In addition, not every city or town jurisdiction has had staff available because our smaller jurisdictions just have very limited staff and budget, and that's just the reality. The other reality is is that we need somebody from those jurisdictions to take to be a partner because we need to work with our staff as electeds in moving forward.

So I strongly encourage that a public works director or planning director from every jurisdiction, even the small ones, get involved and work with their elected officials on this. I think in terms of looking at another model of Napa Valley Transportation Authority, that's very much how they work. There's a technical advisory group or technical working group that are staffed in those areas of public works for transportation. And when that was developed, just because transportation was such a regional issue just like climate is now. And so I think that's a a a good model to follow.

So let me see. I've got all these notes here. Did I hit everything? I know that we have to move forward and make this CEQA. I think that's a California requirement that this has to be be CEQA and aligned with CEQA. Is that correct, Mr. Melendez?

We could develop a cap that is not CEQA qualified, but

But that doesn't make in order to

yeah, the CEQA qualification is to help expedite and streamline the CEQA approval of future development and redevelopment projects. So that is the purpose of the CEQA qualified. So to help really help with several especially the building energy, but, you know, many of the measures, the CEQA qualification will be very important.

It would really help every jurisdiction in the long run. So I do think that's worthy, including that. And then in terms of what Member Joseph said, I totally agree with the Cal Green Tier one or Tier two. As I've mentioned with others, my husband's a general contractor. He's been using the Cal Green model, and his projects have been very popular.

It's actually these homes are worth more money, and there's more people that are interested in homes that are sustainable and green. So I think it's I think it fits the market, and I think it fits with our goals. In terms of our goals, you know, I always look at and this comes from my past working in health care is looking at the mission and priorities of the organization and making sure that those are in line with the budget. And I know we all have different budgets and ability, but we also want to say we know this is a priority. Everybody already has a resolution that this is an emergency.

And so I guess it's up to us to really you know, support that in our in each of our budgets while being realistic. I'm gonna plant a seed real quick because I feel like the time is right during when we get to future agenda items. I also think I'm gonna ask that we look at potentially transitioning at the appropriate time, because this has been thought about, even originally in the formation, whether we want to stay as a joint powers of agreement or if we're ready to make this a body of an authority to joint powers of authority. There's a lot of benefits to that. It includes often, you know, the tag team, and it can really save time and create more action in terms of the implementation.

But that, I'll ask that during for future agenda items, but just to plant that seed. Thank you.

Thank you. And not to be too repetitive here, also I'll try and make this as brief as possible, but thank you to Zaffermer, Melendez, and Gutierrez. I really appreciated this report and just a reminder of what we're what we're here to do. I just want to echo a few of the sentiments, and one of the big ones that has been said a few times are the staffing needs. And for us as a really small jurisdiction, I think that is essential, but for us as electeds, I I really like the direction of going back and speaking to whether it's our public works or our planning department because we've already received pushback from our city manager on what this is going to take, the lift this this is going to take within our communities.

And with that said, I really appreciated the recommendation by Member Joseph of kind of comparing it to the Cal Green standard or one or two. It seems like it could be something that we can have our staff look at, go back and prepare both the standards so we're not kind of reinventing the wheel since something already exists. I really like that as a recommendation. And then just to take it back a little bit more, as we know, our Grain Committee in Calistoga is fairly aggressive, and I'm really proud of all of the work that they do. And while I understand that the program from the PhD student is going to come to us on a future agenda, our green committee has prioritized this as their number two priority.

So if I could get access to that in advance because they are chomping at the bit and then just bring it to them, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other members that want to comment or ask questions? Mr. Melendez, did you want to comment?

Sure. I'll just make respond to a couple of comments on the reach code and the EV charging tool. The re the building energy code is updated every three years. So the 2025 code was just adopted by the state and will be implemented on 01/01/2026. So we will be in the process of looking at new reach codes for that new building energy code.

And, there are a lot of good updates, already for energy efficiency and electrification, in the new code from what I've seen thus far. And I'm not a code expert, but I know many of them at the state level. So working with them and, yeah, the the there are still gonna be the CalGreen tier one and two for the new code, we can look into that. But, again, those that will be something that is an action that is encompassed in the R CAP. So I think the to memorize in Bruce's point of not looking at priorities necessarily for this committee, but for the implementation of the R CAP and having that staff level working group to be able to to come up with priority actions.

You know, we we still have this larger monolithic RCAP of so many actions and and measures, but we can't do it all all at once in one fell swoop, as you mentioned. So we can, you know, definitely work on those, the prioritization of those actions. And to memory gifts point of the EV charging tool. It is active. It's live.

I can send it out right after this meeting to to members, to the staff. There's a public facing tool, and then there will be kind of a a staff level tool that has a bit, you know, a bit more information, but, you know, some data constraints that we don't necessarily want in the public facing tool, but that staff will have access to that will give a bit more granular details on that. But I can send the public facing tool out right after this meeting.

Just to follow-up on that, Ryan. So we do have a the presenter, Ari, coming to the next meeting to provide to show the tool. But after that, there's gonna be a session for staff. So that's maybe a good opportunity to ask who from your jurisdiction would wanna see this tool and be trained on this tool because he'll be here. And I think it might be in the same room.

So that's another opportunity to kind of get some staff involved. And then the other thing is that we're going to receive a sequel memo from our consultants, which will really kind of walk us through the different kind of options on what a CEQUA not CEQUA approved, but, you know, what the CEQUA element of the RCAP would mean and the kind of the different options that we might have for that. So that's also coming up next month. So be on the lookout for that. That should hopefully clarify a lot about what a CEQUA memo or a CEQUA piece component means and how important it is.

Thank you. I did also want to say congratulations and thank you so much for all the work on the EV tool. That was kind of a dream that we were able to have a student work on that and actually get there and create this great accomplishment. So thanks so much for all the work. I know Jameson and others of you have worked on that.

I think it would be great if maybe we could ask that the various members come back to the next meeting or between this meeting and the next meeting and give you, Ryan, the name and contact information of a staff member that you can be in touch with. Maybe that isn't the permanent person, but at least for now, that could be the person that you know that you can go to and work with in that particular city or town. I think that's going to be pretty important. And I think it probably bears just continually repeating that the real work is going to come when we're in the implementation phase, and we will need to have that group. And we will need the CAC members to act as conduits to their city councils and to their staff members.

So we are depending on everyone on the CAC to be those people who make sure that things are discussed and pushed forward in your various jurisdictions. Okay. So I'm just going to check on the public one more time to see if anybody wants to comment. Okay. Thank you so much for a great presentation.

Very helpful. So now we get to move on to Doctor. Drew, an introduction to climate science and climate change by Professor Andrew Isaacs of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. I've seen Doctor. Drew present, and it's incredibly informative and also fun. He's a great presenter and so we're really excited to have him here today. Brian, we can do an introduction.

Sure. I can introduce as he comes up. But yeah, Andrew Isaacs is a professor at the climate science professor and an expert in the industry of climate science at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. He's an excellent, excellent presenter. He lives here in Napa County and has done excellent, awesome work with volunteering for community education, for elected officials, for staff members at different agencies and businesses, and just general members of the public. So we're extremely lucky and thankful to have him here, and I'll let him take it away. Give him as much time as possible.

So how much time is that, Ryan? What is what is our hard I'm gonna have you do that. What is our hard stop? 11:30. Okay. Then let's make it 11:20.

Okay.

A little bit of buffer in there.

That's per yeah. $11.20 is per ticket to the rest of the hours.

Okay. Do we need a break before we dive in?

I think we'll have a do what you need to do rule, so people may come and go, but All let's just keep

right. We're going

to go

ahead and dive in then. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. This is the first time I've given a talk before the committee. It's also the first time I've given any talk where I have my back to half of the people in the room. So my apologies for that. It's also great to see some old friends and to meet some new ones too. I'll also start by adding that, yes, I've been a resident in Napa County for twenty five years. I've been teaching at Berkeley for twenty six years. And I've been teaching climate science here in the community, I don't know how many times, but over the last several years.

And so any number of you have maybe taken a class from me. I'll also point out that this is not actually a class that I'm going to teach because there really isn't enough time. So I can I'm going to skim over a few things, touch on a few maybe high points. But my actual formal classes at Berkeley, as you're aware, would be a semester long, fifteen weeks or so. And they involve homework and reading and a lot of things that you're not going to be doing.

So what I will start by doing is offering, if you would like an actual class where we're in a classroom that's where there's Q and A is more more amenable to Q and A, I'd be delighted to do that for this group as I do for the community at large. You had two callers call in from high schools and it occurred to me, that's the one group in the county I haven't addressed. I have no connection to their high schools. You do. And if you wanna put me in touch with the principals or whoever the right people are at those schools, I'm happy to teach climate science.

I can do it for undergraduates. By none, I can do it for high school students, and I'd be happy to do that once or twice a year or whatever the administration of those schools would like to do, and that's for both public and private schools here in the county. Be delighted to. And that's another way to sort of bring the public up to do some level setting across the community. You have a hard job.

I don't. I just teach and do research, particularly around climate science. I don't have to make any decisions other than what time of day I would like to teach my class. You have hard decisions to make. You represent the citizenry of the county and all of the players in the county, including businesses and, of course, families and households and all the different entities that are here.

My job is to provide scientific backup for the decisions that you're making. That's my job. That's an easy job. Your job is to go from there. And so to the extent that you want to put me to work figuratively speaking, because I don't want to be paid, I have a job.

I'm just not doing it right now. To the extent that you want to put me to work supporting Ryan, which I've met many times and others on your staff, both at the city and county level, for heaven's sake, please do. I live here. I'd be delighted to do that. And also, in addition to supporting your committee and those who support you, the more knowledgeable your constituents are, the more enabled you will be to bring things forward in the community.

I get lots of questions when I speak in the community. It teaches me what people know and don't know. I'm delighted at the Q and A that comes up in those sessions. And I get questions from your constituents, things like, hey, sea level is rising. How come it's not rising in the same at the same rate in every location? I love stuff like that. That's exactly what I'm trained in. So happy to, again, help not just yourselves and those who support you and but also high school students who can then go bug their parents about buying an electric car and also just give talks in the community. I was very delighted to do that. I'll tell you just a little bit about myself.

I'm a geochemist by training. Forty years ago, when I finished graduate school, that would not be called climate science. Now I'm introduced as a climate scientist. I'm fine with that. My particular field is the physics and chemistry, biology and earth science that happens as a result of the fact that we're altering the surface of the planet that we happen to live on.

And so what I'm going to try to cover here is, again, some sort of high some of the high points, I suppose. And Ryan, if you'll take us to the next slide. We can skip this and this and this. We're going to go to the yes, this one. So as one of the high school students mentioned you can see, I assume, the colorful picture of the earth on your screen, right?

So I'm not going to use a pointer. I'll just describe this. So this is the most recent data we have on Earth's surface temperature right through December 31. So it's as up to date as you will get. On all of my slides, and these are available to you, in the lower right hand corner, you will see the source.

If you teach climate science, you'd better say where you got your data from, as I always do. And then you can go as deep into those links as you wish. What this is, is a color coded map of the earth showing how much 2024 was different from the mid-twentieth century. There's a note here that in the lower left corner that says this is relative to a thirty year period of the 1950s through 1980. And that's typically how climate science is done.

You say, what are things like right now relative to a pretty long benchmark period, at least ten years, typically 20 traditionally thirty year period of time. And that's precisely what's done here. The color coding at the bottom is sort of self explanatory. And so you can see if you pick a spot, say, Northern California, we're a shade of, I guess, that's orange. And so maybe that's about two degrees warmer in 2024 on average over the course of the whole year than was this location in the mid-twentieth century.

That's what that's telling us. And that's about right. We are about two degree this is all Celsius, by the way. So that'd be about four degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That means day and night, winter, summer, through the seasons, if you were to take a temperature measurement, and this is how we do it about every five minutes and just average those many thousands of temperatures, and then for 2024, January 1 to December 31, and then compare that to what the temperature of this area was mid-twentieth century, which looking at this group means when you were young.

When I was born, when I talked to my students, that would be when your grandparents were born. But it depends. You get the idea. So this is about how much the planet has warmed up. And there's some patterns here that are really important and really fundamental to to understanding climate change. Pattern number one is that the land areas are warming up faster than the oceans. That's been predicted. That's well understood why that's happening, and it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate because most life on Earth is not in the oceans, it's on the land. Humans are mostly on land.

The food that we produce is mostly on land. Most ecosystems, particularly the most sensitive ones are on land. And so we're warming up the land. We the land is warming up faster than the oceans. And the physics is really simple.

The oceans are made of water. Water conducts heat downward faster than does rock, and therefore, the oceans are able to push heat downward. And we can now track that down to a depth of about four kilometers, and we're seeing heating down in the oceans to about two kilometers, about one miles. Point We can detect the human signature of heating on the planet down to a depth of about one mile in ocean water because of how we measure the oceans. The second reason is simply that oceans are made of water, they circulate, and so there's more mixing, which again pushes heat downward.

So the land is heating up faster than the oceans. The second thing you'll notice is that the higher the latitude, the more the heating there is. It's not your imagination. Northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Europe, Northern parts of The U. S. Are hotter than other parts of the world. And that's the result of the fact that because the planet has begun heat began heating up several decades ago, snow melts earlier in the spring. And snow means snow falls at higher latitudes. It doesn't stick around as long because summer arrives earlier. And snow being white reflects sunlight back into space.

And so the and the dark ground that snow after it has melted exposes absorbs heat. This is referred to as Arctic amplification. Again, we've been predicting this for decades. That signature has started to show up over the last ten or fifteen years or so, and it's very apparent in recent years, including 2024. So pattern number one, the land is heating up faster than the oceans.

Pattern number two, higher latitudes are heating up faster. Here in Northern California, we're not at thirty eight degrees north. We're not particularly high latitude, but you get the picture. Places like Europe are being impact which is a fairly high latitude, is being impacted more than, say, Northern California on average. The other thing you'll notice is that everywhere is heating up except for a couple of spots.

So the whole planet has warmed, in some cases, more in some places more than others, but the whole planet has warmed up since the mid-twentieth century. There's no ambiguity about that. There's no debate about it. There's there these are thermometers we're using. It's not modeling. There is I'm not forecasting the future. I'm not saying what will happen in 2100. I'm saying this is what happened last year. Past tense, it has occurred. It's ongoing.

And nor was 2024 particularly anomalous. It's a pattern that's been in place now for decades. The only place that's really cooling is the area between Greenland and Iceland. You can see a blue splotch there. And if you sort of look, you can see the Northern North Atlantic is sort of coolish compared to much of the rest of the oceans.

And the reason that's happening is because the ice in Greenland is melting. And that very cold water, one or zero or one degree Celsius water, is flowing into the North Atlantic, and that's cooling both the North Atlantic, the ocean and also the air above the ocean. So that's why you see that blue dot or slash between Iceland and Greenland. I also want to pause for a second because I can yammer on forever. In my real classes, we stop a lot for Q and A. Any questions or anything I've covered so far that's you want more info on?

Just pipe up as a Yes.

Pipe be a student.

Okay. As so the implication is instead of that being a good thing, it's actually bad because if Greenland is melting, then that's a problem. These are even the places that look hopeful are really just a bad indication. Want more?

Check out India. Notice how India is surrounded by red, but the Indian subcontinent is not as warm as adjacent areas. Can you see that? A little odd because the Middle East, the the Arabian Peninsula is orange, and the Mediterranean Basin is orange, North Africa is orange, China, much of Southeast so India is cooler because they burn so much coal that all of that ash in the air reflect sunlight feeling better? Yeah.

There's no there's no there's no good news here. And my students, you know, will ask early on in in these discussions, when do we get to the happy part? Well, the happy part to any problem because when you start doing something about the problem. There is no happy news here, none. And you'll be occasionally presented with something like, oh, more CO2 in the atmosphere, crops grow better.

We've been studying this since the 1990s, not really. I don't want to go into that digression, but there is no good news. The Earth's ecosystem, very, very finely tuned. And by pulling a string on really any part of it, or as one of my biology teachers put it, think of the earth as a very finely tuned Formula one race car. Now take a high powered rifle and start shooting at the engine, will you improve its performance?

The answer is no. There's nothing you can do that sort of makes the equilibria of how the earth works, living systems and inorganic systems. There's no way you like make it better. You alter it in ways that are typically unhelpful. So yes, there's a few others like that where we now see the patterns.

India, if they were to stop burning coal, and hopefully they will someday, things get much hotter. Southern India is just almost at the Equator. So let's go to the next slide. This is what you see if you go back farther in time to 1850 right through to 2024. So this is one hundred and seventy five years of Earth's temperatures.

The red line is simply a moving average that goes through Earth temperatures, and this is, again, as up to date as it gets. The black dots are the global average temperature. So if you were to take that colorful map that we looked at and sort of average all of Earth's temperatures for the year, we'd be about 1.6 degrees Celsius above the pre industrial levels. Here, that's defined as eighteen fifty to 1,900. That'll do.

But it's a sort of pre industrial temperature measurement. The farther back in time you go, the poorer the precision. And that's what those black tick marks are that you see for each year. You can notice they're pretty tall. There's a lot of imprecision associated with temperature measurements from the 1850s, not because their thermometers were no good, they were perfectly fine.

It's just there weren't many of them. And nobody was writing this stuff down. So weather records from the eighteen fifties are dependent on just a few locations, New York, London, Paris, maybe a few maybe a few other places that were making records, and that's why the the precision is poor. Therefore, the error bars are are biggish. And if you follow those black tick marks from left to right, you can see they get smaller and smaller, and by about the nineteen eighties have all but disappeared.

And the reason for that is not that thermometers got better, it's that thermometers got more numerous. In the Bay Area, there are 80 approximately weather stations that record continuously temperature, barometric pressure, other things. We get, I think, 500,000 temperature measurements a month in the Bay Area. So our precision is outstanding. And that's why if you look at recent data for the planet, there's really no error.

And in fact, the error for that temperature is 1.62 degrees Celsius over pre industrial, that's plus or minus 0.06 degrees C. We're not going to get much. You could add another 10,000,000 thermometers and it wouldn't improve the precision much more. So we know this really well. And of course, what you see is the temperature is going up and what you also see is that the last two years have gapped up from previous two years.

Initially, was due to El Nino. That was how we explained 2023. And I'll be honest here, we in the climate science community are still trying to figure out what's caused that big jump. El Nino has gone back to neutral. We haven't started a La Nina yet, we've seen a couple of years now, 2023 and 2024, that are very much warmer.

And that's just unambiguous again if you look at this chart. We've seen jumps like this in the past. It's a little hard to see it there. 1998 was one of these. But now 1998 just sort of fits right into the pattern. If I didn't mention that year, you would notice it at all. But that was a big El Nino year, one of the big ones. I think 2006 is another, I've sort of forgotten them. But you get the idea. An El Nino year seems to accelerate sort of the an El Nino involves the heat coming out of the Equatorial Pacific.

That's what the event really is all about. And then we don't go back. It's sort of like a ratchet that is helping tap things up. Heat is released from the Pacific, where it had been stored for maybe a couple of years, And we just stay at that new that becomes sort of a new baseline. If you go to the next slide, you can see this rendered in another way.

This is month by month global temperatures going back to January 1850. They have helpfully color coded this to make it easier to see what's going on. So this let's start with, say, you can't really find it in this mess of lines, but January 1850 is a dark blue color, it looks like. And as you sort of go up, you can see, well, of 1951 looks like it's warmer and you can sort of see is the way they've done the colors that, in fact, throughout the year, it's not just that the summers are hotter, it's that the winters are hotter. And it's not just that the daytime is hotter, the nighttime is hotter, too.

Just the overall warming of the planet is what you can see here looking month by month. The other thing that jumps out is the last three years, 2022, 'twenty three and 'twenty four, which are in bolder colors up at the top. And you can see that 'twenty two was sort of fitting into the previous years or so. And the red line, which is 2023, pops up in around May or June, which was the emergence of El Nino and continues through the end of the year, and then the black line, which is twenty twenty four, stays at that level. That is that gapping up or that ratchet effect that we saw in earlier data.

Now as I said, I've got an easy job. I just do research and I teach the subject of climate change. The hardest part of my job is staying up to date on the refinements that are coming. The basic picture hasn't changed now in decades. And the physics hasn't the physics has been understood since the 1890s when a person named Svante Arrhenius got the Nobel Prize for doing this.

He's the third guy to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry back when the Nobel Prize was a new thing. Climate change was understood, the physics of it. It's that well understood. What's what we're getting is refinements, the sort of data that I'm showing you, a clearer picture. Climate models are very good, but I like don't even use them anymore.

When I started, I did, but it's like there's so much that's happened. It'd be like saying, what would a car accident be like should one ever happen? You might model it. But now that you've got, say, hundreds of thousands of car accidents, you can describe what happens and deal with it. I feel that for your committee, we're almost at that sort of stage where, okay, we kind of know what's happening. We're starting to see the earliest stages of warming and other effects due to climate change. What shall we do now? And that, of course, is both mitigation and adaptation, as you're well aware. But there's no question that it's happening. And you, thankfully, don't have to really rely on projections and models.

You can use them if you wish. Go for it. I personally, as a teacher of the subject, don't rely on models because then people can poke a stick at it. I tend to rely on empirical data, things that have been measured, observed and aren't really up for debate or he said, she said kinds of things. Let's go to the next slide.

Okay. This is the main driver of warming. It is, as the two high school students correctly pointed out, the burning of fossil fuels. When you burn coal, oil or natural gas, what you're doing is taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air. That's it in one sentence.

So you mine coal or you pump oil or natural gas out of the ground. Those are hydrocarbon compounds, meaning that they are molecules made up only of hydrogen and carbon. That's why we call them hydrocarbons. And we want them for their heat, so we burn them because they're flammable. And we use the heat for something directly, like heating a home or cooking an egg.

And we use the heat indirectly for things like generating electricity or moving a car, truck, boat or airplane. The some of those are more damaging than others for reasons that are some of which are obvious, some of which are non obvious. If you're heating your home with natural gas, you're burning a fossil fuel and that the the flue gases that come from your boiler are going directly into the atmosphere as CO2, carbon dioxide. Not great. But you wanted the heat, that's why you burn the natural gas in your home to warm your home.

That's not an irrational use. We should use less fossil fuel, but it's not boneheaded. What is boneheaded is to burn a fossil fuel, not to get heat, but because I wanted to get to the office. I wanted the kinetic energy. And so to get to the office, I had to burn gasoline for its heat, convert chemical energy into heat energy, thermal energy.

And then the expanding gases in my engine in my car's engine in the cylinder head force a piston down. So I've converted chemical energy to thermal energy. I'm converting the thermal energy into mechanical energy, pistons moving down in the cylinder. And then I convert that mechanical energy into kinetic energy and make the wheels go around through the transmission. So chemical energy converted to thermal energy, thermal energy converted to mechanical energy, mechanical energy converted into kinetic energy.

Each one of those conversions is about 50% efficient. So 0.5 times 0.5 times 0.5. And that's why you have to burn a lot of gasoline to get to the office. You're only driving a short distance. That's I don't think it's polemical to say that's a boneheaded way to get to the office because you're putting an awful lot of CO2 into the air because all you got was heat and you didn't want heat.

Most of that energy in that gasoline went to heating up the air around your car. So your car has a radiator. It's to give off heat if you're driving a gasoline powered car. Anyways, what you're looking at here is global CO2 worldwide emissions from fossil fuel combustion since 1900. And there's a few things worth noting. The red dot is 2023. We don't have these data yet for 2024, but it's a little bit higher. You'll notice there's the pandemic. Can you see it? A little blip there.

Ten years from now, I'll have students say, what was that? That was when the world ended. And the economy shut down exactly five years ago, February, March, April, May, especially of 2020, globally, the economy sort of stopped. And that was the impact, about a 7%, I think it is, reduction in emissions that year. If you go back a little farther, you can see the previous time the world ended, which was 2008, that was the global economic crisis.

You see a little down dip right there. It's like you could easily not notice that, but significant economic downturns, pandemics, financial crises, do actually show up in emissions. You can see various oil shocks and embargo effects through the 1970s and 1980s. If you look in 1945, you'll see a little down dip from the deindustrialization that occurred following World War II and so on. But the little zigs and zags aren't the story.

The story is that it's going up. The combustion of coal, oil and natural gas, although it has slowed in The U. S. And so on, is not significantly going down. And globally, it's continuing to go up. If you go to the next slide, I've just stuck a line through here. This isn't a regression. It's just a straight line. That's all that it is. But it helps to sort of see that, in fact, since about 1950s, 1960s or so, the emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas sort of are kind of linear ish.

This is going to turn out to be important because although emissions are linear, the of CO2 are linear, roughly, The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is accelerating. This is a huge oops. And again, we've been predicting this in climate science for decades. We're now starting to observe it. We're going to see that next, if you can go forward. I think you know what these are. Yes, let's keep going. Keep I'll stop there. So you're familiar with this is Lake Hennessy, by the way. It's a nice picture of Napa.

There you go. So when you look out at the sky, 99% of what you're looking at are these three gases, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. Oxygen is about 21% of the air that you breathe, the atmosphere that is. Argon is about a percent. The rest is nitrogen. That's about 99% of what's in the air. The other 1%, much of it are greenhouse gases, meaning heat trapping gases. Let's take a look at those. That's next. Here's a list of most of them.

CO2 is up at the top. These are the names and the formulae for the various gases. So CO2 is up at the top. Don't worry about the numbers for a second that are next to them, methane, which is CH4, nitrous oxide, N2O. Those three gases up at the top are naturally occurring. They can be manmade as well, and they are, but they also occur in nature. All the other ones, starting with sulfur hexafluoride and going down, those are all man made. They do not occur in nature. They're mostly refrigeration gases used in air conditioners, freezers and the like. There's other uses for them, too, but that's rough cut.

Those are mainly refrigeration gases. You'll notice they all have fluorine in them. And so we tend to call those the fluorinated gases or F gases just because they're all synthetic. They're very useful for things like making your air conditioners work and so on. And I'm sure you're following, there's regulations, in fact, that just recently changed regarding what refrigerants you can and cannot use here in California, things like that.

Now let's talk about the numbers. So the that last column of numbers, one hundred year global warming potential is what GWP stands for. AR4 is just a reference to the source. So we assign carbon dioxide a global warming potential of one. Now we can ratio all the other gases to that.

And so the way to think about these gases is how potent they are, how effective they are as heat trapping gases. So CO2 is one, methane 25 times more potent, nitrous oxide about 300 times, sulfur hexafluoride about 22,000 times more potent molecule for molecule. And so this gives us a sense of like, wow, if I could cut back emissions on some of these, I'm doing God's work. So CO2 is the least potent of the greenhouse gases that we emit. It is, however, the one that we emit the most of, so much more than the others that CO2 accounts for about two thirds of climate forcing, right?

So even though these other compounds have really high heat trapping ability, that's what those huge numbers are telling you, we don't emit a lot of them relative to the enormous amounts of CO2 that we emit. So that we're going to see a little bit later is why we want to focus a lot on CO2, in particular, the burning of fossil fuels. Why? Because when you burn coal, oil or natural gas, you've taken carbon that was sequestered in the ground for tens of millions of years and instantaneously put that carbon into the atmosphere in not only in large amounts, but in a form that is incredibly stable. The other thing that's worth knowing before we move on is that of all of these this alphabet soup of chemicals here, CO2 is the only one that doesn't break down.

All the others have half lives, meaning so methane, for example, has a half life of 10 about ten years. So that means if you emit a pound of methane into the atmosphere, ten years from now, there's a half a pound left. And twenty years, there's a zero two five pound left. And thirty years from now, there's oneeight of a pound left. That's how half lives work. All of these have half lives, some longer, some shorter, where they break down. CO2 doesn't. CO2, once you put it into the air, cycles through the oceans and back out into plant life and back out and so on. It doesn't ever go away. Questions?

This

is incredibly helpful. Thank you.

You're welcome. Can I stop now?

No. You can't. As a matter fact, we may make this meeting longer. I'll invite you back. Question, I've heard two priority approaches. One, the priority approach in terms of addressing the CO2 emissions. And this is so helpful because I have heard, and because I'm a student at this, have been, that methane is 25 times more potent than CO2. But, you know, and now the way you're presenting it, and that methane will break down, we don't want either one. I mean, we know that. We don't want either one.

Methane breaks down into CO2 also.

Methane breaks down into CO2 also. Okay. So, you know, the way that we're approaching the mitigation adaptation is really, my understanding, more driven at the CO2, but also not ignoring the methane, obviously. Is that the best approach since we there is so much CO2 in terms of the quantity of CO2 that's being emitted through our human actions, if And you so focusing that as a measurement, because we're really looking that as the measurement to reduce. While also, I think that was probably my understanding is that that's probably the measurement that we're looking at the most.

And also keeping an eye on methane and reducing that landfills and those kind of things. Is that the best path forward in your recommendation as we start the implementation of our Regional Climate Action Plan?

Remember when I said your job is hard? Yes. So you just opened the door to why your job is hard because you're not going after if we look at just CO2, you're not just going after one source of CO2. People heat their homes with it. We make electricity, not in Northern California, we don't make electricity from it, thankfully.

So don't have to worry about that, from fossil fuels by and large. But vehicles are wildly inefficient, cars, trucks, airplanes, boats, wildly inefficient use of fossil fuels. They're tiny these are tiny engines. How big is the engine in your car? Three liters?

Maybe five at the most. And a lot of vehicles those are incredibly inefficient, we would say thermodynamically inefficient. They're not good at converting chemical energy into those other things I rattled off. And so you have to choose again, is why your job is hard, should we be going after long haul trucks, short haul trucks, garbage trucks, buses, personal vehicles that individuals own? And that's just CO2.

When you talk about methane, there's multiple sources of methane. Number one, there's really two sources of methane going into the atmosphere, anthropogenic, human caused methane that's being added to the atmosphere. Two main sources are kind of equal. One of them is leaky natural gas pipelines, coal mining and oil production. I can go into the details on that if you want.

And the other is beef and dairy. You want a heavy lift? Go after beef and dairy. But there you have it. And that's because cows ferment the grass that they eat in a large organ called a rumen.

It's a huge organ in a in a cow. Ruminates, which is cows, goats, sheep and deer and some others, the big one being cattle, burp out the fermentation gases, which is methane. So that's why there's a large carbon footprint associated with beef and dairy production. So the part of the heavy lift that a committee like yours is involved in is deciding where to take the science. The science is unambiguous.

This is like This is like your happy place because all of this is demonstrable, derivable science. It's not he said, she said. Taking this and deciding what your priorities are going to be.

And how to measure the outcomes. I think that's what I'm trying to determine. Is it a best path forward to focus our measurable outcomes to get to net zero, which is what we're striving for, by making CO2 the priority or making methane the priority or making them both the priority. You know, how do we what's the best path forward? And then the warming factor. So methane warms more than CO2?

It also breaks down.

But it also breaks down. So which is the worst of the two evils, I guess I'm asking.

Yeah. And there's unfortunately, there's no singular answer that you can get from that because they're both impactful. The question the the way folks will usually address your questions so that they can give a quick easy answer to it is to say, which one will have a faster effect on the climate? The answer is methane because it breaks down quickly. And so that's why you'll see from the EPA on down statements that say we're going to focus on methane because by collecting and flaring landfill gas or through composting properly, things related to methane collection in farming operations, especially beef and dairy, weak we're going after methane, and that will have a quicker impact, quicker kind of sooner.

Very good. Thank Okay.

Let's continue. We'll go for maybe fifteen more minutes or so. Let's skip this. And we're going to skip the whole history of how this was figured out. Next, next, next, next, next, next, next. Stop. Go back to this guy. Charles David Keeling, professor at the University of California in San Diego, 1958, started making measurements on a daily basis and then hourly of CO2 in the atmosphere. It had never been done before. And he started making those measurements on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla and quickly realized if he's measuring CO2 in La Jolla, what he's actually measuring is San Diego's rush hour.

More people drive at certain times of day. So he moved his lab, Ryan, to Hawaii, but not this Hawaii, keep going, this Hawaii. He put his lab, so this is University of California, San Diego, built a lab on top of Mauna Loa, one of the two giant shield volcanoes in Hawaii. Next. And that's what it looks like.

It's now a NOAA facility, but this is the first place where continuous measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere were made. And there's many other places it's been done since, but we use the Mauna Loa record because it is the longest continuous record, except for a couple of times when there was volcanic activity and the lab had to go down and a couple of other things like that. Otherwise, it is a continuous record from 1958 through to the present. Next slide. This is what it looked like when I downloaded the data yesterday.

So this is the week ended just basically yesterday. The CO2 concentration in Earth's atmosphere measured at Mauna Loa, It looks kind of like a flat line. Go to the next slide. And this is one month of data. So now we're looking back a month. That's the trend. And if you look closely, you can see it's just creeping up a little bit. There's a little bit of zigzaginess to it. But a month ago, we were at about four twenty five parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2, and maybe we're at four twenty six now, something like that. Next slide.

Here's a half a year of data. You can see that the last half year or so, we've seen a pretty steady rise in CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. And by the way, the Earth's atmosphere mixes pretty quickly. So you could make this measurement anywhere, but we love Mauna Loa because it's far from civilization, it's far from rush hour and it's halfway up into the atmosphere. It's a perfect location that Keeling chose and that's why we stick with it. It's just a great record. But you'll also notice at the beginning of this six month record, CO2 is actually going down for a while. Can you see that? Last summer, August, maybe into September, kind of bottomed out and then started rising again. Let's go to the next slide.

This is one year of CO2 measured at Mauna Loa. Notice that CO2 was rising from about February to June or July, and then it went down a little bit and then started rising again. This is because there are green plants on Earth, and they take up CO2 during the summer, but pretty much only during the summer. And although there's a Southern hemisphere on our planet, South Of The Equator, there's not much land there. So there's not a lot of plants.

And therefore, this annual cycle of plants taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, so much so that we can see them doing that, that's what this curve shows you, is really dominated by the Northern Hemisphere. But for the rest of the year, you can see CO2 is rising. Next slide. Here's a two year record. This is quite telling.

So this is two years, and you now know why CO2 goes up and down each year. It goes down during the summer months when plants are growing and taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. But then in the winter, the leaves fall off the trees, grasses die, CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. What you'll also notice, it's little bit subtle, but you can see it, the highs are getting higher and the lows are getting higher. If you look at this sawtooth wave, sawtooth pattern, the highs are getting higher and the lows are getting higher.

So where is that annual cycle, photosynthesis by plants during the summer pulling CO2 out of the air and then those plants die in the winter and CO2 goes back up? That's nature. That's been going on as long as there have been green plants on our planet, which we know from the geological record is several 100,000,000 years. So that for several 100,000,000, we've seen that zigzag. However, that tilt this way, the way you're looking at it going up, that's us. That's anthropogenic. Want to see the whole pattern, 1958 to the present? Let's go to the next slide. There you go. Damn.

So this is the accumulation of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. This is known as the Keeling Curve named for that professor. And you'll see the reference in the corner, keelingcurve.ucsde.edu. And so yes, there you have it. And this has been replicated in many other places in the world.

So CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere, which is the main reason why we're getting warming. The other gases account for about a third of that climate forcing CO2 all by itself about two thirds. It's the least potent gas molecule for molecule, but we're putting so many of those CO2 molecules into the air that it is about twothree of the climate foresee. Okay? Next slide.

Back in the '60s, my predecessors in I was around, but I wasn't teaching, the it attempted to fit a straight line. And again, I'm not I just stick in a straight line there so you're it makes it easier to see. And quite obviously, CO2 is accumulating in Earth's atmosphere, not in a linear way, but in possibly exponential. Certainly, it's curved it's curving up. Next slide.

Here's a more recent attempt to draw a straight line through the Keeling curve. You can't draw a straight line through the Keeling curve. What we're observing is that CO2 is accumulating in Earth's atmosphere faster than we're putting it in. Remember when I drew a straight red line just like this through the emissions of CO2? But that's just emissions.

That's how much coal, oil and gas we're burning, which we have a pretty good handle on. But it's accumulating in the atmosphere faster than we're putting it in. So where's that extra CO2 coming from? Well, because we've started to heat the planet already, the planet in effect is outgassing. The oceans can't hold as much CO2 as they used to, so you get a little bit outgassing there.

Warm liquids don't hold dissolved gas as well, which is why if you pop open a warm beer, it foams, the gas comes out, where a cold beer doesn't foam as much. So that physics is well understood. So the oceans aren't taking up as much dissolved CO2 as they used to nor is the land, some of which is under farmland. Most land on our planet is not farmland. Forests aren't taking up as much.

And also, they're burning. So you probably know, you're well aware of what we're going through here in California. Two years ago, '23, there were massive fires in Canada, both Eastern And Western Canada. Western Canada, that didn't sound like news, but Eastern Quebec is on fire? It's like that's like very strange.

Right? The CO two that went into the atmosphere from the Canadian fires of twenty twenty three was roughly equivalent to the emissions of The United States. Forest fires aren't small. Those are pretty nearly instantaneous releases of stored carbon in forest land and other plant material pretty rapidly up into the atmosphere. That, combined with some other effects that are happening in the warming of permafrost.

We don't have permafrost in Napa, but about onefour of the Earth's surface is permanently frozen ground, what we call permafrost. When you warm it up, it melts and the organic material in that soil decays and goes into the atmosphere as methane or CO2. So the reason I'm showing this the Keeling curve with the red line there is you can start to see that, yes, it's a curve. It's not a straight line. CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere slightly faster than we're even putting it in.

And that's a result of what we've committed to through our emissions over the past fifty, seventy five years. We've started warming the planet. The planet is responding as it always has. Warm it up, CO2 evolves. Next slide. Yes. So we have data that go back a lot farther than 1958. This is starting in the year 1700. This is CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. The Keeling curve is now pretty steep.

It's over on the right hand side. It's that zigzag you were just looking at from 1958 to the present. Data prior to 1958 is from ice core data that we geologists love to look for historical things. And if you drill into rock, you may be going back into time. If you drill into ice cap on Greenland or Antarctica, you're definitely going back in time that ice formed long ago.

And so here we've drilled not very far, about 30 feet, and we're already back to the year 1700. And we have the reason this works is because snow that fell in 1700 on Greenland was nice and fluffy, trapped a little air in it. As it compressed, that air just formed bubbles in the ice. And year after year after year after year, kind of like tree rings. So as you drill down, you can get samples of ice from hundreds of years ago.

Next slide. Or thousands of years ago. Here we're drilling back to the year zero, gone down into the ice a few 100 feet. And what you'll notice is that the CO2 concentration in Earth's atmosphere was pretty flat, flattish, some minor zigs and zags at about two eighty parts per million until we started burning fossil fuels, most of which happened in the twentieth century and now twenty first century. And you can see with the helpful little arrows on the right hand side, the years 1960, 1980, 2020, those are twenty year intervals.

Notice the space between the intervals is getting bigger because the line is getting steeper. That's the Keeling curve. You already know that, in fact, the Keeling curve is curving upward. Next slide. We've now drilled even farther down. We're going about ten thousand years ago into Earth history. Again, CO2 is about two eighty parts per million or so through the entire development of human civilization. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunters and gatherers. There were no cities. There were no domesticated animals at all except for the dog, which had been domesticated already.

Otherwise, we weren't farming, we weren't herders, we were hunters and gatherers ten thousand years ago. So I keep going back. Well, we'd keep drilling through the ice and eventually we hit rock and we have we're done. And that's at about 800,000 years ago. And the zigzag pattern that you see here are the ice ages.

We've now gone about halfway through the ice. Ice age has been around two million, two point five million years through to the present. And so the ups and downs that you see are the ice sheets expanding, which we would think of as the ice age, glacial events and then contracting with about one hundred year at one hundred thousand year interval. If you can see there was a warm period about four hundred thousand years ago, that would be the tippy top of that peak and another one about 300 roughly and so on and clearly one about 120,000 years ago. And I used the word warm intentionally.

Now is probably a good time to tell you that CO2 is the main in the atmosphere, it's the main driver of global temperature. CO2 goes up, temperature goes up. CO2 goes down, temperature goes down. It doesn't matter which one leads, the other follows. They move in exact lockstep.

And the reason for that is the oceans our planet is mostly water, 70% ocean. The ocean's ability to absorb CO2 gets better when it's colder and worse when it's warmer. What actually drives these changes is the orbital mechanics of Earth's position around the sun. And that is was that was figured out about one hundred years ago by a Serbian mathematician named Milankovic. And so these are called the Milankovic cycles, and it's absolutely mind bending to to to think of it.

But in fact, Earth is just a planet floating in space and the other planets pull and push us a little bit in our orbit, particularly Saturn. Saturn's very far away, but it's very massive. And the shape of Earth's orbit around the sun is in a 100,000 resonance with the orbit of of Jupiter. And it's more than a fun fact, it's been driving the climate on our planet for millions of years. So let's go to the next slide.

I'm gonna just do the time check at 11:20 Okay.

And I need your

Probably just a few more minutes. And we could go on for hours on this.

We can. Yes, we So that's it. Thank you for the time check. I'll take a couple of minutes. We'll close. And if folks want to stay after, we can do that. Okay.

Great. Yes. Thank

So this is this colorful plot, maybe this will be one of my last, shows the correlation of temperature with CO2 in the atmosphere. The red curve is the temperature of our planet, degrees Celsius. On the right hand scale, the blue is CO2 in the atmosphere. This particular chart goes back not quite half a million years. We know this really well.

Therefore, if we increase the CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, Earth will warm up. You can't not have that happen. And we know how much it will warm up. That's about a six to eight degree swing between a glacial maximum and a glacial minimum. That's what that min max is that you can see on the right hand side, the red numbers.

This has been confirmed and refined over and over again, most recently in a beautiful paper that was published in September. We now know this relationship extremely well going back to the Ordovician. It was about four million years ago. So we know what the relationship is. We know exactly what happens when you put greenhouse gases into the planet's atmosphere because we've got the record. You'll notice I haven't shown you any projections at all because we have data, historical data. Next. Next. Next. Next. And we're going to skip all these dots. Keep going. Stop. Right. There.

One more. One more. That's it. So these dots, which is where we'll close, this is the actual warming effect. The vertical the horizontal axis starts in, I think, eighteen eighty. This is a NASA dataset. I updated this yesterday when we got new data for 2024, which is unfortunately literally off my chart. I'm going have to redo the chart. I put this dot there and I said, I'm not going redo this whole thing. We're just going to go with that.

So I've run out of space. 2024 is up at the top. It's 1.62 degrees of warming over the late 1800s. And you can see that the warming on our planet had been kind of steady from maybe about 1960 up to the present. But and again, this is the current discussion in the world of climate science, stuff's changed. We're warming up much faster now. The high school students referred to urgency. Oh, yes, there's no question about it. I think one of them used the term, we need to act very soon. Yes, that's right.

And this is also why I stand before you because the more your constituents know about what's happening, the easier your job becomes. The less they know about that issue of urgency, the more nothing the less they know about it, the harder your job. And you correctly pointed out, your job is action. It's not the climate discussion committee. It's the Climate Action Committee. You're supposed to actually do something of consequence. And there's lots of things that can be done. In my little family, we started making changes about thirty years ago, and we continue to. And I'm not going to rattle on what those are, but there's

a bit of

a curse. I can't pretend to not know this. And so I've we've changed our lives and how we live and many other things, too. I'm going to go ahead and close there. Ryan, thank you for keeping me honest, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

Thank you so much. Obviously, there's so much more to learn and discuss, but thank you for giving us an hour of your time. And I know that we have been actually trying through Jim and some of the students to put together a youth seminar with you, so we're working on that one. Great. Well, we have our work cut out for us, as we know, but it's important to check-in and get those reminders and continue to learn as the science evolves.

Is there any reports, announcements from members, Member Joseph?

Other than a sense of depression. But in next month, in February, member LaMatina and myself won't be here nor will Pierre our alternate because that just happened to be a date for the council retreat.

So we

will watch or do something. So, unfortunately, we won't be here next month.

Alright. Thank you for letting us know. And future agenda items? Member Palacio? Oh, go ahead.

Sorry, I just had one report.

Yes, go ahead, Brian.

Announcement, we have another sustainability workshop coming up in partnership with the Napa County Library on Wednesday, February 12, from six to seven P. M. The topic at hand will be solar and battery and home resiliency. We'll have a couple external speakers, including a solar and battery and home resiliency expert with contracts up in the Redwood Coast area and a couple representatives from MCE who can also will be there with Spanish speaking capabilities too. So, yeah, Wednesday, February 12, six to 7PM at the Napa County Library here in the city of Napa.

And I have flyers up here, and I can send out the flyers to the members and staff as well.

Great. Thank you, Ron. Liz? In

regards to the future agenda items, I would like to go ahead and request, with the support of this committee, that at appropriate time that staff recommends that we receive information for a discussion on transitioning our current joint powers of agreement into joint powers of authority. It may or may not be the right time, but I think that the information for this committee, and especially being a new committee, and we've been doing this for a few years, and we're at this pinnacle point of the actual more action, though we've made action, even more action, this might be a worthwhile presentation.

Great. Thank you. Member Justice?

And I'd just like to I think we've asked it in the past, but a reminder that I think Napa Climate Now has a heat reduction strategy or at least a perspective that might be educational to the Board. And if we could schedule that ideally not for February, but in the near future as well.

Okay. Great. Thank you. And anyone else?

Just also will announce that the BayREN public programs, which helps develop helps local government agencies to develop road mapping and with technical assistance in reaching carbon net zero goals for your count your your your jurisdictional operations, not necessarily all the other sectors, but in your own buildings and operations, helps to guide with technical assistance and funding sourcing. Those programs have launched. And I would request also the two public program leads employed with AABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments, to come present on those for the committee members as well.

Great. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Well, it is 11:31, and thank you all for being here. And look forward to seeing you next time. We'll work on that date and talk a little bit about our members from American Canyon. Maybe we'll have to move it. I'm not sure. We'll talk more about that. But thank you to the audience for being here and for all members. And for now, we will adjourn until our February meeting. What? Oh, yeah. We want to get a group picture.

So after the meeting's adjourned, if the members could just come to the front, just a picture for our newly constituted committee with our staff as well. All right. Thank you.