We have taken big steps to reduce our emissions from power plants—so much so that transportation is now the #1 source of California’s carbon footprint.

• The best way to reduce our emissions is build homes in cities. “Infill construction” adds new housing near jobs, buses, and trains. The connection between housing, economic vitality, and transit creates a win-win for the environment in two ways.

First, it reduces the number of people who have to drive to work. If you live closer to your job, you can choose to commute by bike, bus, train, or walking. Even if you don’t do this every day, this will lower your carbon footprint. With millions of Californians involved, this will create a big carbon reduction.

Second, even if you keep driving to work, you will drive a shorter distance. You’ll save money on gas and maintenance as you save the environment by emitting less CO2.

• Louis wants to make it easier to take public transit by matching city funds with state dollars to add buses and trains to existing lines. More transit means more transit users, which means lower emissions and less traffic––another win-win.

Cities can raise money to build new transit lines but find it harder to add capacity to existing ones. This is great for extending transit to more places—which we want—but it keeps wait times long—which we don’t. If Sacramento covered half the cost of new buses and trains, it would jumpstart a positive feedback loop: more transit means more transit users, which means lower emissions and less traffic––another win-win.

• Louis wants to add more solar storage capacity and connect it to the grid. Right now, CA burns fossil fuels to make electricity mainly for a few hours around sundown when solar is no longer producing and demand is high from people coming home from work and turing on lights and TVs. California generates so much solar power during the day that it’s often more than the grid can handle, however, so, if we could store this juice, we could use it later instead of activating our gas and oil-fired plants.

CA has a tax break to help people with solar panels buy those batteries, but they don’t have to be connected to municipal grids. This means that we can’t distribute that stored energy equitably across all of our communities, which means we still can’t use all the solar we generate. Louis wants to ramp up programs for battery distribution and start programs to connect batteries to municipal power grids so all; their energy is used.