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What’s driving California’s emissions? You guessed it: Cars.

by JaiLongwell7 Posted on October 8, 2019

California received plenty of praise back in 2016 when it hit its target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions four years ahead of time. But the Golden State’s progress has slowed, according to a report out Tuesday from a nonpartisan research center. California is now on track to hit its 2030 goal in 2061. Three whole decades late.

The biggest problem: California’s beloved cars.

“This is a sobering report,” said F. Noel Perry, a California investor who founded the center behind the report, Next 10. “We are at a very important point: California is going to need major policy breakthroughs and deep structural changes if we’re going to meet our climate goals.”

What happened? Over the last three years, California has reduced emissions at a rate of only 1.15 percent. At that pace, it would take a century for the state to zero-out carbon emissions. But a law ex-Governor Jerry Brown signed in 2016, requires the state to reach zero emissions by 2050. Since falling behind, the state would need to step up emissions reductions to 4.51 percent every year, according to the report.

Next 10

Next 10’s report, the California Green Innovation Index, shows that the state has plucked most of the low-hanging fruit, mainly by cleaning up electricity production. California’s next challenge is the tougher job of eliminating climate pollutants from transportation, industry, and homes, and offices. And, yes, all of those cars.

Passenger vehicles alone produce nearly a third of California’s emissions, more than all of the electric plants, livestock, and oil refineries in the state put together. Vehicle ownership has reached an all-time high, as has the total miles that Californians are driving. Moreover, “even in climate conscious California we’ve seen a consumer preference shift to favor SUVs and light trucks,” said Adam Fowler of Beacon Economics, which prepared this report for Next 10.

Next 10

Since early 2017, more than half the new passenger vehicles Californians bought were SUVs and trucks.

Another big, related problem is housing. California’s economy is booming, but cities haven’t built the homes needed by all the new workers. That’s forcing more people into suburbs far from public transportation. The report found that the percentage of people choosing public transit “declined substantially throughout most of California between 2008 and 2018.” Failure to build housing is doubly bad because new buildings are much more efficient in terms of insulation,climate control, and energy efficiency. Every new home even gets solar panels.

“This is one of the gnarliest challenges,” Perry said. “How do we reduce commute times and how do we build denser housing?”

It’s not all bad news. California continues to prove it’s possible to cut carbon emissions while the economy expands. From 2016 to 2017, California’s economy per capita grew 3.1 percent while each person’s emissions decreased.

And the authors said that the state still deserves a lot of credit. “California policies have made appliances more efficient, renewable energy cheaper, and given cars better gas mileage all across the country,” Perry said.

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What’s driving California’s emissions? You guessed it: Cars.

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The Midwest braces for yet another major storm

by LadonnaClune Posted on April 8, 2019

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It’s been less than a month since a bomb cyclone hovered over parts of the Midwest, dumping a mix of snow, sleet, and rain on the region. The system wreaked havoc on people, animals, infrastructure, and destroyed over $440 million in crops in Nebraska alone. Now, a similar weather event is headed that way again.

Wyoming and Colorado will get a healthy coating of snow in the mountains tonight and tomorrow, but the storm won’t get really worked up until it moves into the central portion of the country midweek.

Forecasters aren’t yet sure if we can call this storm bomb cyclone 2.0, but it will bring snow, high winds, and possibly thunderstorms to the Plains and Upper Midwest starting on Wednesday. Winter storm watches are in effect in six states. Folks in the High Plains, Northern Plains, and upper Midwest are bracing for what could amount to more than 6 inches of snow, though models show the heaviest band of snow potentially delivering upwards of 30 inches in some places.

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While the snowstorm itself is certainly cause for concern, it’s the snowmelt that will occur after the system dissipates that’s truly troubling for a region still struggling to recover from the March deluge.

Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has experienced twice the usual amount of precipitation. More than 50 flood gages — devices that monitor water levels — across the country are at moderate or major flood stages. Many of those are located in the Midwest. (For reference, moderate flooding as defined by the National Weather Service is when some buildings, roads, and airstrips are flooded or closed.) April temperatures will quickly melt snow brought in by the storm, adding more water to already-saturated areas.

“This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities,” Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, told CBS News.

An April storm on the heels of a March downpour isn’t just a bad coincidence. Research shows that spring flooding is one of climate change’s many disastrous side effects. As warmer springtime temperatures arrive earlier in the year, the risk of damaging floods worsens. Case in point: Over the past 60 years, “the frequency of heavy downpours has increased by 29 percent over the past 60 years” across the Great Plains, my colleague Eric Holthaus writes.

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The Midwest braces for yet another major storm

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Ryanair’s budget flights could blow the E.U.’s carbon budget

by AraceliDominiqu Posted on April 2, 2019

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“Europe’s Greenest Airline” just made the list of the top E.U. climate polluters, ranked 10th after nine coal plants. One of these things is not like the others?

The E.U.-commissioned study looked at major, measurable carbon sources like power plants, manufacturing companies, and airlines. This year’s study marks the first time that a non-coal plant has made it into the fabled top 10.

While the study showed total measured emissions fell 3.8 percent, Ryanair’s emissions rose 6.9 percent in 2018, and a whopping 49 percent over the past five years.

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The Irish airline has its frequent flier customers to thank for its climb to carbon-emitting fame. Since its founding in 1984, Ryanair has worked hard to keep its costs as low as possible. This means $12 tickets from Dublin to Amsterdam, but it also includes hiring contract pilots, flying to secondary rather than main airports, and hidden fees, like charging for a second carry-on. Despite all this, Ryanair has quickly become the largest European airline, with over 2,400 flights daily.

To put things in perspective, the next airline company, EasyJet, doesn’t appear on the list until No. 31.

Still, the company claims to be “Europe’s greenest and cleanest airline,” despite its sizable carbon emissions and climate change-denying CEO.

What does this all mean for the E.U. going forward? The E.U. uses a cap-and-trade system to monitor and decrease carbon emissions, but aviation companies are privy to a large amount of untaxed emissions. So Ryanair and other airlines have been able to increase their carbon emissions dramatically over the past couple of  years with few economic consequences. Without any policy changes, E.U. airline carbon emissions are expected to grow 300 percent by 2050.

Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, told The Guardian, “If we genuinely care for our children’s futures, we need to drive down the demand for aviation. This will require stringent regulations focusing on frequent fliers rather than those taking the occasional trip.”

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Ryanair’s budget flights could blow the E.U.’s carbon budget

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It’s time for climate change communicators to listen to social science

by FrancisHaber Posted on March 17, 2019

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This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

David Wallace-Wells’ recent climate change essay in the New York Times, published as part of the publicity for his new book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” is, sadly, like a lot of writing on climate change these days: It’s right about the risk, but wrong about how it tries to accomplish the critical goal of raising public concern. Like other essays that have sounded the alarms on global warming — pieces by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and George Monbiot come to mind — Wallace-Wells’ offers a simple message: I’m scared. People should be scared. Here are the facts. You should be scared too.

To be sure, Wallace-Wells and these other writers are thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people. And that is precisely how they try to raise concern: with thought, intelligence, and information, couched in the most dramatic terms at the grandest possible scale. Wallace-Wells invokes sweeping concepts like “planet-warming,” “human history,” and global emissions; remote places like the Arctic; broad geographical and geopolitical terms like “coral reefs,” “ice sheet,” and “climate refugees;” and distant timeframes like 2030, 2050, and 2100.

It’s a common approach to communicating risk issues, known as the deficit model. Proceeding from the assumption that your audience lacks facts —that is, that they have a deficit —all you need to do it give them the facts, in clear and eloquent and dramatic enough terms, and you can make them feel like you want them to feel, how they ought to feel, how you feel. But research on the practice of risk communication has found that this approach usually fails, and often backfires. The deficit model may work fine in physics class, but it’s an ineffective way to try to change people’s attitudes. That’s because it appeals to reason, and reason is not what drives human behavior.

For more than 50 years, the cognitive sciences have amassed a mountainous body of insight into why we think and choose and act as we do. And what they have found is that facts alone are literally meaningless. We interpret every bit of cold objective information through a thick set of affective filters that determine how those facts feel — and how they feel is what determines what those facts mean and how we behave. As 17th century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal observed, “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.”

Yet a large segment of the climate change commentariat dismisses these social science findings. In his piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells mentions a few cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of behavioral economics, including optimism bias (things will go better for me than the next guy) and status quo bias (it’s easier just to keep things as they are). But he describes them in language that drips with condescension and frustration:

How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless. And they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases, and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.

Moreover, behavioral economics is only one part of what shapes how we feel about risk. Another component of our cognition that has gotten far too little attention, but plays a more important part in how we feel about climate change, is the psychology of risk perception. Pioneering research by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and many others has identified more than a dozen discrete psychological characteristics that cause us to worry more than we need to about some threats and less than we need to about others, like climate change.

For example, we don’t worry as much about risks that don’t feel personally threatening. Surveys suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. The most recent poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 70 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, only around 40 percent think “it will harm me personally.”

We also worry more about risks that threaten us soon than risks that threaten us later. Evolution has endowed us with a risk-alert system designed to get us to tomorrow first — and only then, maybe, do we worry about what comes later. So even those who think climate change is already happening believe, accurately, that the worst is yet to come. Risk communication that talks about the havoc that climate change will wreak in 2030, in 2050, or “during this century” contributes to that “we don’t really have to worry about it now” feeling.

Risk perception research also suggests that we worry less about risky behaviors if those behaviors also carry tangible benefits. So far, that’s been the case for climate change: For many people living in the developed world, the harms of climate change are more than offset by the modern comforts of a carbon-intensive lifestyle. Even those who put solar panels on their roofs or make lifestyle changes in the name of reducing their carbon footprint often continue with other bad behaviors: shopping and buying unsustainably, flying, having their regular hamburger.

Interestingly Wallace-Wells admits this is even true for him:

I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now.

Yet he writes that “the age of climate panic is here,” and he expects that delivering all the facts and evidence in alarmist language will somehow move others to see things differently. This is perhaps Wallace-Wells’ biggest failure: By dramatizing the facts and suggesting that people who don’t share his level of concern are irrational and delusional, he is far more likely to offend readers than to convince them. Adopting the attitude that “my feelings are right and yours are wrong” — that “I can see the problem and something’s wrong with you if you can’t” — is a surefire way to turn a reader off, not on, to what you want them to believe.

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Contrast all this deficit-model climate punditry with the effective messaging of the rising youth revolt against climate change. Last August, 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg skipped school and held a one-person protest outside her country’s parliament to demand action on climate change. In the six months since, there have been nationwide #FridaysforFuture school walkouts in at least nine countries, and more are planned.

Thunberg has spoken to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in Davos, with an in-your-face and from-the-heart message that’s about not just facts but her very real and personal fear:

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope… I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

By speaking to our hearts and not just our heads — and by framing the issue in terms of personal and immediate fear of a future that promises more harm than benefit — Thunberg has started an international protest movement.

The lesson is clear. Wallace-Wells’ New York Times essay will get lots of attention among the intelligentsia, but he is not likely to arouse serious new support for action against climate change. Risk communication that acknowledges and respects the emotions and psychology of the people it tries to reach is likely to have far greater impact — and that’s exactly what the effort to combat climate change needs right now.

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It’s time for climate change communicators to listen to social science

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A bunch of representatives got Fs on their environment report cards

by KathrinN44 Posted on February 27, 2019

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Every year since 1970, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) tallies how members of Congress vote on environment and public health-related legislation and has released a scorecard that shows where they stand on all things environment.

The report is a bleak reminder of just how wide the chasm between America’s two political parties has grown at a time when swift climate action is a matter of life and death.

In 2018, Republican caucuses in the House and Senate each got a collective average score of a mere 8 percent from LCV — meaning their members supported pro-environment legislation 8 percent of the time. On the other side of the political aisle, Democrats scored 95 percent and 90 percent in the Senate and House, respectively. This daylight between the parties has only shrunk by a couple of percentage points since last year’s scorecard. Good thing this contrast isn’t happening amid the backdrop of a worldwide crisis, right? Oh wait, scientists have said humankind has around a decade to take action against catastrophic global warming.

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On the left, 35 Democratic senators (including one independent senator — can ya guess who?) and 29 Democratic representatives received perfect scores. That means they voted pro-environment every single chance they got. Those perfect-scoring Senators include a large handful of 2020 presidential candidates: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bernie Sanders (the answer to the above question).

On the right, seven senators and 77 members of the House earned zeroes. In other words, they cast anti-environment votes every single time such an issue came up. And keep in mind: These votes include topics like exposing waterways to invasive species, confirming former coal lobbyists to run the EPA, undermining clean air standards, and more.

The gap between the parties throws the growing momentum around a comprehensive climate action plan called the Green New Deal in sharp relief. As enthusiasm for the economy-wide plan grows among progressives and moderates on the left, centrist Republicans may soon be forced to come out of their hidey holes and make some kind of climate stand. As Justin Worland wrote for Time Magazine, the great leftward migration toward the progressive Green New Deal “has given conservative lawmakers an opening to present centrist policy proposals without looking like they are giving Democrats a political win.”

The growing consensus that the U.S. political establishment needs to come up with some kind of plan to tackle climate change isn’t a perspective shared by all in Congress. On Wednesday, a conservative group called the Western Caucus invited a bunch of climate skeptics to bash the Green New Deal at a press conference on the steps of the Capitol.

Utah Representative Rob Bishop, former chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, literally ate a hamburger at the podium in protest of the progressive proposal. The Republican wasn’t just hungry at an inopportune time. Fox News and some Republicans have criticized the Green New Deal for being a thinly veiled liberal plot to eliminate the nation’s cows. Nevermind that the resolution being championed by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey doesn’t actually call for a ban on cattle.

For what it’s worth, Bishop got a 3 percent score from LCV last year.

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A bunch of representatives got Fs on their environment report cards

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What would a national emergency over climate change look like?

by StaciAndersen Posted on February 15, 2019

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Well, it finally happened: President Trump declared a national emergency in order to secure funding for his barrier between Mexico and the United States. We are under virtually no threat from illegal immigration through the southern border. Phew! But don’t put up your feet just yet, the U.S. actually is facing a pretty terrifying threat, not from immigrants, but from climate change.

Now that Trump has set a precedent, some are raising the point that a different president could use the same maneuver to declare a national emergency over rising temperatures. After all, rising sea levels, worsening hurricanes, wildfires, invasive species, and droughts threaten millions of Americans. Talk about a national security crisis.

Shortly after Trump made his declaration, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar took to Twitter to call on the next president to declare climate change a national emergency upon taking office. If the idea catches on, 2020 Democrats might have to decide not only whether they support the Green New Deal, but also whether they would be willing to take that commitment to the next level.

Hold your horses, can a future president use emergency power to combat climate change? And if so, what would that even look like?

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Dan Farber, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, examined the idea of a climate change national emergency in a blog post. It turns out there are a few things a future president might be able to do to mitigate climate change through such a move. Here are the areas Farber thinks are worth exploring (these options are as of yet untested, could look different in practice, AND, as Farber told us in an earlier story, just ’cause it’s possible in theory doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea):

Oil drilling could be put on pause. “Oil leases are required to have clauses allowing them to be suspended during national emergencies,” Farber writes. If climate change is causing the emergency, doesn’t it make sense to pump the brakes on the stuff causing it? Hmmm?
The Secretary of Transportation, who is in charge of transportation coordination during national emergencies, could restrict use of gas-powered vehicles.
The renewable energy industry could get an influx of financial support, because a provision allows “the President to extend loan guarantees to critical industries during national emergencies,” Farber writes.
There’s even an act that could be invoked to give the president power to “impose sanctions on individuals and countries.” In a national climate change emergency scenario, the act could be used to sanction oil-producing countries.

In a national emergency, the president gets nearly 150 special powers. The options listed above are just a few of the ways those powers could be used in the name of climate change mitigation.

Already, Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer has announced he will be introducing a “congressional emergency declaration on the climate crisis” in Congress. Get ready, GOP! Even if the Supreme Court ends up striking down the border wall, Trump just opened Pandora’s Box.

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What would a national emergency over climate change look like?

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

by MajorJeffcott Posted on February 15, 2019

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On Friday morning, President Trump declared a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Opponents of the wall argue the issue does not warrant national emergency status. In usual Trumpian style, the president told journalists exactly what many were already thinking.“I didn’t need to do this,” he said. “But I’d rather do it much faster.” Whoomp, there it is!

The wall isn’t just an expensive political maneuver; its construction poses a threat to Tohono O’odham Nation land and culture, as well as biodiversity, wildlife refuges along the border, and endangered species. Case in point: One study shows that the wall threatens 93 endangered species.

Elected officials and the environmental community came out swinging against the executive order mere minutes after it was announced, promising lawsuits and counter-bills.

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The Sierra Club vowed swift legal action against the declaration. “We are repulsed by this unprecedented attack on the borderlands and on our democracy, and we intend to resist it with every tool possible,” the organization’s executive director said in a statement.

The League of Conservation Voters, an organization that keeps tabs on how Congress votes on environmental legislation, called the wall “xenophobic, racist and environmentally destructive” in an emailed statement.

And the National Butterfly Center, home to “the greatest volume and variety of wild, free-flying butterflies in the nation,” has already filed a restraining order to keep federal workers from trampling all over the sanctuary and its delicate inhabitants as they plan out a wall that would cut directly through the property.

On the congressional side, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on Twitter that she plans to introduce a bill with fellow Democrat Joaquin Castro to block the executive order. “[We] aren’t going to let the President declare a fake national emergency without a fight,” she said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement calling the order “unlawful.”

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing for battle. “I expect to be sued,” he told reporters. You got that right, buddy!

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

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This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat

by JeanetteSiemens Posted on February 13, 2019

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What will your city feel like in the year 2080? If you’re a frequent traveler in these United States, you might already know. A study out Tuesday in the science journal Nature Communications breaks down future warming by drawing parallels for 540 North American urban areas.

In 60 years, New York could feel like today’s Arkansas. Chicago is on a crash course for Kansas City. San Francisco’s blustery weather is destined to warm to Southern California temperatures. Raleigh, North Carolina, will feel like Tallahassee, Florida. You get the picture. The study used the highest warming scenario, an outcome where we don’t mitigate emissions and the planet warms around 8.8 degrees F, to map it out.

As a New Yorker, I’m tempted to think a winter that’s 5 degrees warmer and around 20 percent drier wouldn’t be so bad. Fewer hours spent on a freezing subway platform? Sign me up. LA is supposed to feel like Cabo by 2080; does that mean residents of the City of Angels should be prepping for a permanent vacation? Hell no! If emissions stay on their current trajectory, the only vacation we’ll all be taking is a direct flight to purgatory.

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Late last year, Grist took the latest federal climate science data and used it to break down what we can expect climate change to do to different regions by the end of the century. It’s not pretty. If warming temperatures existed in a vacuum, sure, why not take a permanent trip to Arkansas or Cabo, but rising temperatures are accompanied by a host of plagues that rival the ones Moses brought upon the people of Egypt.

My neck of the woods, the Northeast, is looking at the “the largest temperature increase in the contiguous United States.” That means more ticks, fewer dragonflies, a maple syrup deficit, delayed ski seasons, and “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder” following extreme weather events. Fun!

The Southeast can expect hot nights that turn hotter days into a living nightmare. And don’t even get me started on the lionfish, which is going to make it’s creepy way closer to the Atlantic coast as waters warm. And what of California, where Los Angelinos can expect destination-wedding temperatures? The state has mega-droughts and wildfires in store for it, among other horrors.

Now that you’re sad (sorry!), here’s the good news: If we reduce emissions and get on track for a lower emissions scenario where the planet warms 4.3 degrees F, the temperature forecast looks less scary. Case in point: in this lower scenario, New York feels like Lake Shore, Maryland, Raleigh feels like Louisiana, and LA feels like neighboring Monterey Park, California.

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This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat

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Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

by RemonaAllen924 Posted on January 24, 2019

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As the interminably salty April Ludgate of Parks and Recreation once said, “Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge.” Well, there’s something about pizza you knead to know: It’s helping the coal industry.

Before you freak out, you should know that not all types of pizza are equally guilty in harming the planet. We’re specifically talking about pizza cooked in coal-fired ovens (though wood-fired pizza is also pretty bad for the environment). Now you may be thinking, “Dude! It’s just pizza,” but slow down there, Ninja Turtle. It turns out the pizza-powered coal market is pretty significant.

Pennsylvania mining company Blaschak Coal Corporation had a blockbuster 2018, selling a record-breaking 382,000 tons of coal. That’s because it mines anthracite coal, the super hot-burning fuel used in many personal pizza ovens. Demand for the centuries-old style of cooking has been growing since 2015. And anthracite coal isn’t just used to cook pizza; it’s also used by steelmakers and for home heating.

Not ready to think about a pizza-less planet yet? One option is to cut down on coal-fired pizza and, y’know, just eat oven-baked pizza like a normal person. But there’s also good news about the coal industry in general: coal is on the decline. Last year was a terrible year for the toxic stuff — the U.S. retired around 15 gigawatts of coal capacity.

So if Americans can keep their insatiable desire for coal-fired pizza under control, we might be able to kick our coal habit after all. But I’m not holding my breath. Also, I’m hungry?

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Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

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Will this human dressed as a receipt convince Californians to ban paper receipts?

by OliviaPortillo1 Posted on January 23, 2019

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In the wild world of U.S. politics, it isn’t unusual for elected officials to use props to illustrate their points. As you might recall, Republican Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to argue against the validity of global warming. But San Francisco Assemblyman Phil Ting might have just won the award for best political prop.

Earlier this month, while introducing a bill that would require California businesses to issue electronic receipts instead of paper ones (unless a customer specifically asks for a paper copy), Ting brought a dejected-looking adult man dressed up as a literal receipt onstage and made him stand there for the entire 20-minute announcement. (The cashier at CVS hands me a two-foot scroll every time I buy a roll of toilet paper, but God bless Ting for ensuring that none of us has to rely on that memory alone to conjure up the image of a freaking receipt.)

I promise you that whatever you’re imagining right now isn’t as good as the actual footage of this poor man standing in front of a crowd with his face sticking out of a receipt-hole: 

Oh yeah, about the actual bill: California Assembly Bill 161 is aimed at reducing paper waste in the state, because unlike a lot of other types of paper, receipts aren’t recyclable. Champions of the bill point out receipts are often printed on thermal paper, which is coated with chemicals, often including bisphenol A (BPA), a known endocrine disruptor that can be transferred to the skin in small amounts and is linked to some kinds of cancers.

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BPA can contaminate recycling, so putting receipts in your blue bin (or, you know, excessively licking your fingers after handling them) is probably a bad idea. And considering California has already passed bills banning single-use plastic grocery bags and straws, making receipts an opt-in paper product could seem like a logical next step. If Ting’s new receipt reducing bill passes, businesses will have to go electronic by 2022 and would be subject to a small fine if they fail to do so.

But is a receipt-ban really the best way to go about reducing our environmental impact?

In the weeks since Ting brought his man-receipt on stage, critics have argued that, much like California’s plastic straw ban, the new bill isn’t exactly a ground-breaking win the environment. First of all, some businesses have pivoted away from BPA-coated receipts in recent years anyway. But more importantly, there isn’t a ton of evidence that receipts pose a huge environmental burden in the first place.

“Even 314,000 tons of paper receipts amount to less than .08 percent of the more than 400 million tons of all paper products — receipts to cardboard — used globally on an annual basis,” wrote Adam Minter of Bloomberg News. He argues spending time and energy on banning something as small as receipts “diverts attention and effort from bigger and far more pressing waste and recycling issues that are negatively impacting the state right now.”

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Will this human dressed as a receipt convince Californians to ban paper receipts?

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