Evaluating Greenhouse Gas Emissions from California: Recent Results and Open Questions

To help protect climate, California is currently pursuing 40 and 80% reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (below 1990 levels) by 2030 and 2050, respectively. While carbon dioxide from fossil fuel consumption is estimated from sales tax receipts, non-CO2 GHG emissions are much more difficult to account for accurately and hence require independent verification. This talk describes a decade of collaborative work with multiple research groups and State agencies to develop and apply atmospheric methods that quantify emissions of the three major GHG sources: fossil fuel CO2, methane and nitrous oxide across spatial and temporal scales.

Speaker: Marc Fischer, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs