Jeff Cohen is a busy man. On a recent Tuesday, he was in Atlanta, in an Uber car on his way to a meeting with a company that recycles chemicals used in refrigerants. Then he had another meeting, this time with an appliance recycler, and finally he rushed to catch a flight to New York for a series of climate events pegged to the U.N. General Assembly.
“All these things are common threads to the stuff we’re doing in the California markets,” said Cohen, who is a co-founder of EOS Climate, a company that develops and sells greenhouse gas reduction projects for businesses that need to cut their emissions.
California has been important to Cohen, who started his business in 2009 in the hope that either the state or federal government would create a viable carbon market. As the 10th anniversary of California’s landmark climate change law draws near, policymakers say its push to slash emissions has been a boon not only to industries like Cohen’s but also the economy in general.
Former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the 2006 measure known as A.B. 32 into law, “guaranteed it wouldn’t be a choice between the economy and the environment, that we could do both, and Governor Schwarzenegger was right,” said state Sen. Fran Pavley (D), who wrote the bill.
“It’s been a success story, and we’ve got businesses here today who wouldn’t be here without the passage of A.B. 32,” she said.
By all accounts, California is indeed on track to reach its 2020 target of reducing its emissions to 431 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon dioxide, the level that researchers estimate the state emitted in 1990. Emissions in 2014, the most recent year for which the state has released data, were 441.5 MMT, a decrease of about half a percentage point compared to 2013.
Meanwhile, California’s economy since 2006 has jumped from the eighth- to the sixth-largest in the world. Yet the amount of greenhouse gas emissions it produces per person, as well as per dollar of gross domestic product, have fallen. Since 2001, state agencies have reported, its carbon emissions per unit of GDP have fallen 28 percent. Last year, the state was home to 68 percent of all clean technology investment nationwide and led in clean-tech patent registrations, as well, according to environmental advocacy group Next 10. And from 2007 to 2015, California outstripped the United States as a whole in job growth and personal income, according to an analysis released in June by Chapman University.
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