Calculating the carbon emissions associated with San Jose's Green Vision goals

In 2007, the City of San Jose adopted a Green Vision that includes 10 measurable goals, which aim to promote job growth in clean tech and preserve the environment. The goals include a 50% reduction of per capita energy use, a 100% diversion of waste from landfill, a 100% recycling or reuse of wastewater, and the building or retro fitting of 50 million square feet of green buildings. While there are clear benefits from these initiatives, it is unclear how these changes will affect emissions of greenhouse gases and what contribution the Green Vision will have on the total carbon emissions of the city. Using San Jose as a case study this work will first estimate citywide baseline carbon emissions using data from the last decade. We then will describe efforts to compute the change in carbon emissions associated with each of the city's green vision goals. The intention of this work is to develop a set of metrics that other cities and institutions can use to better quantify the carbon emissions associated with their current and future ‘green' initiatives.