Opinion: An Earth Day Report for Irvine, and a Response to the Climate Misinformation Circulating at City Hall

  • April 22, 2026, 8:29 am America/Los_Angeles

On Earth Day 2026, I submitted a report to the Mayor, the City Council, and my colleagues on the Sustainability Commission titled Climate Crisis Action Report: A Report in Observance of Earth Day 2026. It is the 2026 update to the report I wrote in April 2021 for the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee on the physical and financial potential of a solar-powered Irvine, revised and broadened five years later with the benefit of the City’s 2019 Greenhouse Gas Inventory and the September 2025 Public Draft of Irvine’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP).

I write the report as a commissioner, not as a spokesperson for the Commission or the City. But I write it with a specific concern that goes beyond the usual scope of a technical document: much of what is being said about climate action in Irvine right now, at the dais, in residents’ social media groups, and in the comment sections of news and blogs sites, is not true. Some of it is honest misunderstanding. Some of it is repeated talking points that originated with the investor-owned utilities whose business model our climate policies threaten. Either way, the arithmetic doesn’t support it, and residents deserve to know where the numbers actually land.

So in addition to laying out what I believe Irvine must do to honor the 2021 ACHIEVES Resolution, the report confronts, one by one, the specific claims that have been shaping our city’s climate conversation. I want to summarize those here.

Misinformation #1: “OCPA is why your energy bill went up.”

This is the most damaging falsehood currently circulating, because it’s being used to justify opting out of the cleanest electricity product most Irvine residents can buy, or withdrawing from Community Choice Energy altogether.

It is not true.

The line item driving recent rate increases for Orange County Power Authority customers, and for customers of every one of California’s 24 Community Choice Aggregators, is the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA), a pass-through fee that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) requires CCE customers to pay to their former investor-owned utility. In June 2025, under an abbreviated four-month proceeding, the CPUC adopted Decision 25-06-049, which changed the methodology for calculating the market-price benchmark that drives the PCIA, and applied the new methodology retroactively to rates already in effect.

The California Community Choice Association has filed a Petition for Writ of Review with the California Court of Appeal challenging the decision, arguing that retroactive ratemaking is prohibited under California law. Rehearing petitions on the 2026 ERRA decisions for both SCE and PG&E followed in January 2026.

OCPA doesn’t set the PCIA. OCPA doesn’t collect the PCIA. OCPA has no choice but to pass it through on your bill, and, because OCPA is the cleaner provider, it’s OCPA that takes the political damage when the PCIA rises. The effect, and in my assessment the intent, is to tilt the cost of clean electricity upward while shielding incumbent fossil-heavy providers from competition. This is the single greatest external threat to Irvine’s decarbonization pathway, and the report’s Appendix A is devoted to documenting it in detail.

If a resident tells you OCPA’s rates prove Community Choice Energy has “failed,” the honest response is: no, it proves the regulator changed the rules retroactively after SCE lobbied for it.

Misinformation #2: “We can plant our way out of this.”

Every few months, someone proposes that Irvine can meet its climate commitments through tree planting. It’s an appealing idea. Trees are tangible, they’re photogenic at ribbon-cuttings, and the City’s Urban Forest Master Plan is one of the best-resourced municipal tree programs in Southern California.

The arithmetic does not cooperate.

The 2019 Greenhouse Gas Inventory, prepared by Ascent Environmental for the City and released in June 2023, measured Irvine’s community-wide emissions at 2,247,593 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent per year. A healthy mature urban tree in a favorable climate sequesters about 0.030 MTCO₂e per year at the high end of the published range.

Divide one by the other and you get the uncomfortable number:

Offsetting Irvine’s emissions through urban trees alone would require approximately 75 million new trees every single year, in perpetuity.

The Urban Forest Master Plan calls for 1,900 per year. The City currently manages about 61,000 trees in total. We would need to multiply our planting rate by a factor of roughly 39,500, and find the land, water, and workforce to do it, forever.

I want to be clear: I support the UFMP unreservedly. Trees cool our streets, mitigate the urban heat island, reduce stormwater runoff, support wildlife, and improve the quality of daily life. Each of those benefits independently justifies the program. But offsetting emissions is not one of the things trees can do at the scale Irvine’s climate commitments require. A tree is a good thing. Seventy-five million trees is not a policy.

Misinformation #3: “The Berkeley decision killed all-electric reach codes in California.”

You will occasionally hear, from people who should know better, that the Ninth Circuit’s 2023 ruling invalidating Berkeley’s natural-gas-infrastructure ordinance made it impossible for a California city to pursue electrification standards in new construction.

That is not what the ruling did, and it is not what has happened since. Many California jurisdictions have adopted all-electric or electric-preferred building standards structured under state building code authority,  a different legal pathway that avoids the federal preemption issue that tripped up Berkeley’s ordinance. The legal landscape requires care. It does not prohibit action.

Irvine can, and in my view should, pursue an all-electric reach code for new residential and commercial construction, an electrification standard for substantial remodels, and a standing policy that no City-owned facility is ever retrofitted or built with new natural gas service.

Misinformation #4: “Natural gas is the clean fossil fuel.”

The framing that positions natural gas as a reasonable bridge, cheaper, cleaner, familiar, has survived long past its expiration date. Burning natural gas in Irvine homes and businesses released an estimated 335,322 MTCO₂e in 2019, plus another 4,507 MTCO₂e from non-residential backup generators. Unlike transportation and grid electricity, natural gas combustion happens at the point of use: inside kitchens, laundry rooms, and mechanical rooms, releasing not only CO₂ but nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds into the spaces where our children sleep and do homework. Peer-reviewed research has documented substantial methane leakage from the upstream system and from appliances themselves, including when those appliances are turned off.

Heat-pump water heaters, heat-pump HVAC, induction cooktops, and heat-pump dryers are all mature, available, and at lifetime cost parity or better. The technology question is settled. What remains is policy courage and a financing instrument that makes the upgrade accessible at zero upfront cost. The report proposes one. I’ll come back to that below.

Misinformation #5: “The Irvine CONNECT shuttle is one of our climate wins.”

I want to address this carefully, because I support the CONNECT shuttle as an equity, accessibility, and mobility program, and because the people who launched it are my colleagues, not my opponents.

But it is not presently a climate program. Using standard emissions factors, the on-road transportation factor of 0.393 kg CO₂e per vehicle-mile derived directly from the 2019 Inventory, and the CNG-bus tailpipe emissions implied by the current fleet schedule, and the program’s public first-year ridership of about 141,000 boardings, a central-case analysis finds that the CONNECT shuttle currently emits approximately 329 MTCO₂e per year more than it displaces from private vehicles. The CNG buses run the same schedule regardless of who is on them; the replaced car trips are limited by today’s ridership and by the fraction of riders who would otherwise have driven alone.

The path to net carbon reduction is not mysterious. Section 2.3 of the report lays out the breakeven ridership under three scenarios:

  • Current CNG fleet: breakeven at about 700,000 boardings/year: roughly 5× today.
  • Battery-electric fleet on today’s SCE grid: breakeven at about 119,000 boardings/year: already below current ridership.
  • Battery-electric fleet on 100% renewable OCPA power: breakeven at about 8,000 boardings/year: essentially any level of operation becomes a substantial net reducer.

The dominant lever, by a wide margin, is fleet electrification, not ridership growth. I recommend the Council direct staff to scope and fund battery-electric replacement of the CONNECT fleet in the next vehicle procurement cycle, and to pair it with a ridership target of 250,000+ annual boardings by 2028. Both levers together make CONNECT a genuine climate program. Neither lever by itself is enough, and asserting that CONNECT is already a carbon reducer is not supported by the numbers.

Misinformation #6: “The municipal government needs to lead by cleaning up its own operations first.”

This one is sincere and well-intentioned, and it’s still misleading. Municipal government operations account for less than 1 percent of Irvine’s community-wide emissions. Decarbonizing every City building and every City vehicle tomorrow, worthy and necessary, would retire less than one percent of the problem.

The City’s primary role in climate policy is to enable community-wide change: through codes and standards, through financing instruments like a scaled One Irvine program, through infrastructure deployment (chargers, reach codes, grid upgrades), and through protecting the Community Choice Energy option. Leading on municipal fleet electrification and building retrofits is good practice, but it is not the program. The program is the 99 percent.

What the Report Actually Recommends

The report’s core recommendations are concrete:

  1. Halt new natural gas infrastructure now: all-electric reach code for new construction, electrification standard for substantial remodels, no new gas service at any City-owned facility.
  2. Direct City outreach to recommend 100% Renewable Choice, not Basic Choice. According to OCPA’s 2024 Power Content Label, Basic Choice delivered electricity at approximately 942 lbs CO₂e per MWh, nearly twice as carbon-intensive as SCE’s standard mix at 515 lbs CO₂e per MWh, driven by heavy reliance on unspecified-source power. The climate product is 100% Renewable Choice. The City should ensure its own accounts are enrolled in 100% Renewable Choice, align all resident and business outreach accordingly, and work with OCPA’s Board to improve the carbon content of every tier over time. The CAAP’s Measure BE-3.1, enrolling 100 percent of communitywide accounts in 100 percent renewable OCPA service, is the correct policy.
  3. Scale ‘One Irvine’ into a universal Solarize-and-Electrify revolving loan: rooftop solar, battery storage, heat-pump water heating and HVAC, induction cooking, and Level 2 EV charging, delivered at zero upfront cost to every willing household and repaid at property transfer. This is a direct generalization of the revolving-fund concept I proposed in 2021. The financial case is strong: a typical participating single-family household can reasonably realize a twenty-year net benefit on the order of $100,000, net of loan repayment. Extended across roughly 100,000 eligible Irvine households, the aggregate twenty-year benefit approaches $10 billion, and it is a transfer of wealth away from out-of-state fossil-fuel suppliers and IOU shareholders and toward Irvine households, retained in the local economy. Berkeley FIRST, Montpelier’s Net Zero Revolving Loan Fund, Plano’s Smart Energy Loan Program, Florida’s SELF, and the Texas LoanSTAR program are all working precedents.
  4. Launch a municipal EV purchase-loan program in 2027, structured to stack with (not duplicate) state and federal incentives, with specific provisions for low- and moderate-income households and for residents of multi-family buildings.
  5. Deploy DC fast charging at every city park and multi-family site that will accept it, using CALeVIP and Communities in Charge state funding as the foundation.
  6. Accelerate the Irvine CONNECT transition to battery-electric buses in the next procurement cycle, and grow ridership to 250,000+ annual boardings by 2028.
  7. Defend OCPA and the CCE model at every available venue: publicly support CalCCA’s legal challenge to Decision 25-06-049, send a formal letter from the Mayor and Council to the CPUC, support AB 1761 on PCIA transparency, coordinate with peer CCE cities and our state delegation (Senator Choi, Assemblymember Petrie-Norris, and Congressman Min).

None of these actions is speculative. All of them are already contemplated, in some form, in the CAAP or in the ACHIEVES Resolution itself. What’s missing is pace and scale commensurate with the 2030 timeline the Council committed to when it adopted Resolution 21-50 under Councilmember Treseder’s leadership.

A Word on the September 9, 2025 Vote

On September 9, 2025, the Council voted to rescind the notice of intent to withdraw from the Orange County Power Authority. In my assessment, that is among the most consequential climate decisions the Council has taken since adopting the ACHIEVES Resolution itself. I delivered the public comment that evening in which I first presented the 17-million-trees comparison: the arithmetic that OCPA’s 100% renewable offering delivers the annual climate impact of planting approximately 17 million trees, roughly 8,800 times the UFMP’s annual planting rate. That comment is included in full as Appendix C of the report. The underlying math is developed in Section 3.

I restate it here because it remains foundational. The City’s single most important climate policy decision of the past decade is our choice to join OCPA and to offer 100 percent renewable electricity to our community. Defending that decision, and the residents it serves, against the current regulatory pressure described in Appendix A must remain a top priority.

Irvine Has Done This Before

Four decades ago, under Mayor Larry Agran’s leadership in 1989, Irvine became the first city in the United States to ban chlorofluorocarbons. The Los Angeles Times called it “the most comprehensive law in the nation.” Other cities followed, then states, then the nation, then the world. The Montreal Protocol is today one of the most successful environmental treaties ever negotiated, and the ozone layer is recovering. It is not hyperbole, in my view, to say that Irvine helped save our planet.

The climate crisis demands the same kind of action, at a larger scale and on a shorter timeline. We have the ACHIEVES Resolution. We have the 2019 Inventory. We have the draft CAAP. We have OCPA. We have One Irvine, ready to be scaled. We have a sunny climate, a wealthy tax base, an educated citizenry, and a world-class research university within our borders.

What we do not yet have, and what residents can demand of their Council in the coming months, is decision at pace.

If you hear one of the claims I addressed above repeated in a council meeting, on Nextdoor, or in the comments under an article on this very site, I hope you will be willing to push back, politely and with the numbers. Climate policy is too important to be decided on the basis of things that are not true.

The full report, including all figures and the detailed Appendix A on the PCIA, is available at this link.