Balancing the Climate Ledger: What Are We Forgetting to Count?
California knows how to measure progress.
We count megawatts of renewable energy installed. Miles of transmission approved. Battery storage brought online. Greenhouse gas emissions reduced.
But what do we count when building that infrastructure permanently alters an intact ecosystem?
That question is at the heart of Balancing the Climate Ledger: How California Can Build a Clean Energy Future Without Sacrificing Its Greatest Climate Assets, a new thought leadership paper from Anza-Borrego Foundation Executive Director Bri Fordem.
California has made ambitious commitments on both sides of the climate equation. We are working to transition away from fossil fuels and build a cleaner, more resilient energy system. At the same time, the state has committed to protecting biodiversity, conserving 30 percent of its lands and coastal waters by 2030, preserving wilderness, and strengthening ecosystems so they can withstand a changing climate.
These should not be competing goals.
The Climate Ledger asks us to consider whether our current planning systems fully account for both.
Healthy, intact landscapes already perform essential climate work. They store carbon, regulate water systems, support biodiversity, maintain wildlife connectivity, protect cultural resources, and provide resilience as temperatures rise and drought intensifies.
Yet when new energy infrastructure is evaluated, those functions are rarely placed on the same balance sheet as transmission capacity, reliability, or projected energy benefits.
The proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink provides a timely case study.
The 500 kV transmission project would travel approximately 135 miles from Imperial Valley through San Diego County and would cross Anza-Borrego Desert State Park—California’s largest state park and one of the most biodiverse and highly protected landscapes in the state.
The paper looks beyond the footprint of the transmission towers themselves. It examines the route’s history, including the California Public Utilities Commission’s 2008 decision finding substantially similar Sunrise Powerlink routes through Anza-Borrego “environmentally unacceptable and infeasible.” It explores the absence of a binding clean-energy commitment for the proposed line, changing electricity-demand forecasts, and what happens when high-capacity transmission infrastructure creates the conditions for additional industrial development.
That last question is especially important.
The history of the Sunrise Powerlink demonstrates that a transmission corridor does not necessarily end with a transmission line. Generation projects, substations, battery storage, and other infrastructure can follow. Yet those projects are generally evaluated individually, leaving no single process responsible for accounting for what the landscape may cumulatively become.
This is the gap the Climate Ledger seeks to illuminate.
The paper does not argue against renewable energy or transmission infrastructure. ABF supports California’s clean energy transition and wants it to succeed.
It argues for something more fundamental: complete accounting.
If California counts the climate benefits of what we build, we should also count the climate value of what we may permanently lose.
The paper proposes several places to begin: net climate-impact assessments for projects affecting protected lands, programmatic environmental review of reasonably foreseeable corridor buildout, binding clean-energy commitments when climate benefits are used to justify infrastructure, meaningful consideration of 30×30 commitments, and greater community and Tribal participation in how impacts are evaluated.
California has the expertise and innovation to lead on both clean energy and conservation.
The question is whether our planning systems are designed to recognize that both belong on the same ledger.
The debits are real. The losses are permanent. And right now, nobody is counting them.
Read Balancing the Climate Ledger: How California Can Build a Clean Energy Future Without Sacrificing Its Greatest Climate Assets and learn more about the proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink.