Amador County – Amador County Board of Supervisors was critical of numbers contained in a carbon dioxide and equivalent gasses emissions inventory it received from several organizations last week.

The Amador County Community-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory was written by Sierra Business Council in partnership with PG&E and California Public Utilities Commission. It estimated emissions using various models, which Supervisor John Plasse pointed out that the report itself called “an approximation of reality rather than an exact value.”

The report used data from 2005 and will be used to guide the county to meet 1990 emissions levels, as required by a 2005 state law. Plasse and supervisors questioned how that could be done with such faulty numbers.

Ken Larson of the Sierra Business Council said a 2005 inventory was made because it is the year in which data used in the inventory was most complete, and data will be “extrapolated backward based on population and housing” to estimate 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Supervisor Brian Oneto said they were encouraged to promote public transportation and bike lanes, but it just ends up with empty busses going around the county, and getting a “10 percent return on our investment” in transportation. Supervisors Chairman Louis Boitano said “this is not great country to ride bicycles around here.”

Plasse said all of Amador County’s power in the report was hydroelectric, but what about generators off the grid. He said the GHG inventory listed only 38 homes in Amador County that use wood to heat their homes, and it listed only five diesel generators in the county. Plasse said “there are 60 diesel generators around Silver Lake, at least. These numbers are just out of thin air.”

Oneto said listing only 38 homes to be heated with wood was off on a scale of hundreds, and there were thousand of homes that use wood for heat.

Lead author of the inventory, SBC’s Scott Legg said the number came from Amador Air District. Plasse said he would like to “inflate the heck out of these numbers now then we can meet the 1990 numbers.”

Oneto said: “What good is Utopia if you can’t survive in it?” Oneto said “so much stuff is flawed I don’t know where to start on it.” He asked about “enteric fermentation,” which in the report accounted for 24,600 metric tons of emissions from livestock. Legg said that was from gas emitted from livestock dung and waste emissions. Ag made up 7 percent of emissions in the inventory, and Transportation made up 63 percent.

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.