Ahead of Climate Week NYC, Governor Newsom announces California cut climate pollution again as economy keeps growing
California is delivering results
The statewide inventory, California’s annual accounting of climate pollution from transportation, electricity, industry, homes, businesses, and other sources, reflects continued emissions reductions across California’s economy:
Two decades of climate leadership
Signed into law 20 years ago, AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, established California’s climate leadership and the state’s first greenhouse gas reduction goal — get back to 1990 levels by 2020. The target was met six years early in 2014.
AB 32 spurred the development of California’s groundbreaking climate policies, including the Cap-and-Invest Program, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, clean car programs, and more. California has built on that foundation with increasingly ambitious climate goals:
California by the numbers
Today, California’s success has become a blueprint for governments around the world, and every Californian can take pride in the state’s accomplishments:
- 28% drop in emissions since 2004
- 2.7 million zero-emission vehicles sold
- 216,445 public and shared EV chargers
- 67% clean energy
- 21,860 MW of battery storage
- 70% renewable diesel
- $36 billion raised by Cap-and-Invest auctions for California Climate Investments statewide
- #1 in the nation for clean energy jobs with 552,300 employed
Why it matters
The science behind climate change is irrefutable. California has tracked its impacts for more than two decades, finding rapidly accelerating effects on the state. With the increasing severity and frequency of drought, flooding, wildfire, extreme heat, and other impacts, Californians only have to look out their windows to know that climate change is real and rapidly worsening.
The impacts once thought decades away are happening now. The Indicators of Climate Change in California Report and other recent research detail some of the impacts:
California’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality will help curb these impacts and deliver significant benefits:
- Reduce air pollution 71%
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 85%
- Reduce petroleum demand 94%
- Create 4 million new jobs
- Save Californians $200 billion in avoided health costs
California’s clean energy leadership
Since Governor Newsom took office in 2019, California has added more than 37,000 megawatts of utility-scale clean and renewable energy to serve the California grid — and battery storage has ramped up from fewer than 700 MW to more than 21,000 MW, helping make the grid more reliable and pushing the state further along its clean energy transition.
Batteries play a key role in California’s goal of getting all of its electricity from clean sources by 2045. The most recent numbers, from the end of 2024, show real progress: 67% of retail electricity sales in the state already come from clean energy. Last year, clean energy met 100% of the state’s electricity needs for at least part of the day on 279 separate days. So far in 2026, that’s happened on more than nine out of 10 days during the first half of the year.
California is building this fleet safely. In 2024, Governor Newsom launched a State Battery Storage Safety Collaborative that has already delivered updated fire codes, new state oversight of battery facilities, and stronger safety standards statewide. The CPUC helps maintain electric grid reliability for the public by ensuring power plants and energy storage systems comply with CPUC standards for operations and maintenance.
Clean energy is also good for the economy. California leads the nation in total clean energy jobs, with 552,300 workers employed across clean energy technologies, nearly twice as many as the second-ranked state, Texas, according to a 2025 report from E2. California’s clean energy workforce grew by nearly 7,300 workers in 2024, outpacing job growth in the rest of the state’s economy by more than three times.
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