Posted on January 29, 2021

With the release of the City’s 2019 Community Carbon Inventory on January 27, 2021 (about a year late, understandably due to the lag in the reporting of critical data by the EPA), residents can see where we truly stand with our progress towards our 2020 goal. It is clear that we still have a lot of work to do.

The goal is a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2020 compared to 2005 levels, but as the report shows, we had only achieved a 7 percent reduction by 2019 — a 13 percent gap with only one year left!

The City could help make considerable progress in meeting our goal by pressuring Broadcom – the largest producer of GHGs in our community – to do its part. Unfortunately, while Broadcom’s emissions declined between 2016 and 2018, they shot up by over 32,000 metric tons in 2019, as shown in the following graph provided by the EPA:

Source:https://ghgdata.epa.gov/ghgp/service/facilityDetail/2018?id=1008734&ds=E&et=&popup=true

Why did the downward trend from 2016 to 2018 not continue? What can Broadcom do to reduce these climate-damaging emissions? Those would be good questions for City Councilmembers and staff to pose to Broadcom.

The City’s Climate Action webpage states that GHG emissions are projected to be 17% lower than the 2005 baseline in 2020, and 26% lower in 2021. We wonder what assumptions these forecasts are based on, and in particular, whether staff assumed that Broadcom’s emissions would increase, decrease or stay the same in the coming years.  Active engagement with Broadcom would be more helpful than glossing over how far away we appear to be from our important 2020 goal.