By Mike Taugher Contra Costa Times

Posted: 12/06/2009 12:00:00 AM PST

Last month, the city of Berkeley wrapped up a one-year experiment in which 13 residents were able to install solar panels with little out-of-pocket expense. The effort was part of a city plan to combat global warming.

The pilot hit a few snags but was promising enough that a coalition of as many as 14 counties is now seeking a grant of federal stimulus funds to dramatically expand it. In October, the Obama administration announced plans to foster similar programs across the country as part of its “Recovery Through Retrofit” initiative.

As environment ministers from around the world gather in Copenhagen this week to try to reach agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the nitty-gritty work of doing that falls on state and local shoulders. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than in the Bay Area.

The steps are early ones, to be sure, but as the international debate focuses on how deeply to cut global emissions and how much financial assistance to offer developing countries, cities and counties in the Bay Area and beyond already are measuring emissions and drawing up plans to reduce them.

“It has been a bottom-up, state and local government-led effort,” said Richard Frank, director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC’s school of law.

In a state already struggling financially and politically, the progress in California on climate protection “is a very encouraging bright light in an otherwise dark scene,” Frank said.

Three-fourths of the Bay Area’s cities and counties have already voluntarily inventoried their emissions and most have at least begun to draw up plans to reduce them, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Innovative solutions

And as those plans develop, local governments are finding innovative ways to make emissions cuts.

In Berkeley, city officials allow residents to avoid the steep upfront costs of installing solar panels while also ensuring they won’t be stuck with the bill if they move.

The solution: The city borrows money from investors by selling bonds, which are repaid through a supplemental property tax. The upfront costs are kept down, and the repayment obligation stays with the property when the house is sold.

“It’s more natural — you pay for your energy bills each month instead of all at once,” said Neal De Snoo, Berkeley’s energy program officer.

In Sonoma County, officials may ask to be regulated, in one respect, like a refinery, said Mike Schmitz, California director for ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, an association of 600 local governments working on climate and energy sustainability.

Under a cap-and-trade emissions trading plan taking shape in California, Sonoma might asked to be “capped.” That would force it to cut emissions but also give it the opportunity to sell credits to businesses who are not meeting their reduction targets if it can cut its emissions more than required. The county could generate revenues by greening up.

“Those kind of thought-leader projects are happening, particularly in the Bay Area and throughout California,” Schmitz said.

California takes action

In the absence of an international treaty that obligates the U.S. to cut emissions and the reluctance from Washington to tackle climate change, California took major steps, first with a 2002 law to reduce emissions from cars sold in California and then four years later with a sweeping bill, Assembly Bill 32, that is meant to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 — a 30 percent cut in projected emissions.

That, by itself, will not do a whole lot to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because California accounts for about 1.8 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

But California is having an outsize effect through new mandates, like the 2002 law that effectively forces automakers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles, and new strategies, like municipal financing for residential solar panels.

Relying on ice cores and air samples, scientists have determined that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere held relatively steady for 10,000 years at about 280 parts per million, but then began increasing rapidly in the mid-19th century and now stand at 380 parts per million and rising.

The increase in carbon dioxide, along with the presence of other greenhouse gases, are believed by scientists to have contributed to a rise in average temperatures around the world. Scientists have measured an increase of more than 1 degree Fahrenheit in average temperature and about a 8-inch rise in sea level off San Francisco over the last 100 years, leaving little if any doubt that the climate is warming and human activity is at least partly to blame.

How quickly the climate will continue to warm and what the impacts will be is much less certain, but the picture taking shape suggests things might be more serious than scientists generally thought just a few years ago. Arctic sea ice, for example, is melting much faster than anticipated in a 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Also weighing on delegates to the climate talks in Copenhagen are thousands of e-mails that were apparently taken illegally from a prominent climate research center at a British university. The e-mails have raised an international controversy over the quality of some climate research and whether conflicting data and dissenting voices have been improperly suppressed.

At least two investigations are under way and the head of the climate unit at the University of East Anglia has stepped aside pending the result of an investigation started by the university.

Skeptics of the prevailing view of climate change are seizing on the e-mails as evidence that there is no climate crisis, while others say the e-mails do nothing to change the underlying reality that the climate is responding in worrisome ways to increases in greenhouse gases.

Sold out in nine minutes

The Berkeley solar program was launched in November 2008 with the idea that the first 40 residents to apply would be accepted if they met certain criteria.

It took only nine minutes for the program to sell out.

But with a new program, no track record and the financial markets in turmoil, borrowing rates were relatively high, Berkeley city officials said.

The average installation of about $26,000 cost about $200 a month in increased property taxes, said Dan Lambert, Berkeley’s sustainable energy programs manager.

Of the 40 applicants, only 13 used the program to install solar panels. Several found it cheaper to use a home equity line of credit to finance the installation, Lambert said.

But Lambert and others said the program could end up garnering a cost savings to participants because they think a bigger program will be cheaper to run and the increase in property taxes will be more than offset by the decrease in energy bills.

Berkeley is also exploring how to expand the program to finance home energy-efficiency improvements and “solar thermal,” or hot-water systems that warm water on the roof before sending it into water heaters.

Although there are plans to make municipal financing available for any local government in California that wants to participate in the solar program, the Bay Area counties involved in the initial grant application include Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Solano.