1. The Impact of Local Action
Mike Steinhoff
Program Director
Tomorrow’s Energy System,
Lewis and Clark Law School
February 9th, 2019

2. Brief History of Local GHG Accounting
First City-Wide GHG Inventories
Standard Protocols Developed
LGOP – 2008
USCP – 2012
GPC
Today:
Online Tools, Disclosure, Performance Tracking

3. Growing Performance Database
many of the inventories are unverified, though some care was taken to ensure that the individual records analyzed were complete and without obvious error. This means that individual communities may have fallen out of different aspects of the analysis.
all data used is self-reported and should be considered in light of the typical data challenges that many communities face when doing this work, such as inconsistencies in utility data and the fact that most transportation data is modeled, not measured.
To reduce the amount of skew those cities have on the overall results, only a single pair of inventories were analyzed from each city. Where multiple inventories from a single community were removed, the earliest and most-recent were selected to remain in the analysis.

4. Typical Multi-Year Inventory Pattern
But the pattern may look something like this – does it inspire confidence? Inform target setting or mitigation planning?

5. Contribution Analysis
Warmer Summer
Population
Efficiency
Job Growth
Evaluating progress in open dynamic systems by attributing the change that comes from sources of noise in the data.
Cleaner Grid
Inefficiency!
Warmer Winter
Toolkit Developed through grant from
US DOE Cities-LEAP Program

6. Population vs Efficiency
Anything below 0 means there was a decrease in residential electricity emissions

7. Population vs Efficiency + Grid
Anything below 0 means there was a decrease in residential electricity emissions
Greater shift in negative emissions seen, but behavior change is still important
Emissions factor may also mask lack of internal progress and fail to send the right local policy signals

9. Longer Timelines Reveal More
When we look at long time periods other patterns become more apparent. Yes fuel economy is a big factor and balances out increases from population growth. The battle for performance year over year is determined by what is happening with VMT per Capita. What happens if we can’t rely on large scale improvements in fuel economy? Local action becomes even more important.

10. Next Steps
We have new techniques to infer the association between policy and performance.
Need more cities institutionalizing
GHG Inventories
Project/Program/Policy Evaluation and
Need better data to illustrate market impact of RE purchasing instead of just claims on clean energy attributes