In a press release issued Wednesday evening, a coalition of local environmental groups accused city and county planners of employing a harmful and dishonest “accounting trick” in the process of developing a regional Climate Action Plan.The groups say Humboldt County, as lead agency in the plan’s development, has resorted to “adopting fuzzy math” to achieve state targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.Specifically, the environmental organizations argue that the county plans to sidestep meaningful action on reducing GHG emissions by taking credit for the emission reductions already achieved over the past three decades through the closure of industrial polluters, including the local sawmills and pulp mills.“Through clever accounting, Humboldt County is proposing a Climate Action Plan that fails to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Matt Simmons, staff attorney at the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), says in Wednesday’s press release.“In other words,” adds Humboldt Waterkeeper in a release of its own, “the county wants to take credit in the Climate Action Plan for plant closures over the last three decades that the county government had nothing to do with.”Read More
