Green suburbia?

My hometown--Redlands, CA--is situated right smack in the middle of the inland empire in the south western part of San Bernardino county, a tract of land which connects the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles with the Nevada and Arizona borders. I don't have any data to support this, but I would have to guess that it's also one of the least energy efficient counties in the country. It's plagued by the worst of California's development problems, including traffic, suburban sprawl, excruciatingly hot summers, and size. It's huge. It is, in fact, actually the largest county, geographically speaking, in the continental United States.

Is that about to change? Well, not imminently. But there's hope:

California Attorney General Jerry Brown settled his global warming lawsuit Tuesday against San Bernardino County, working out an agreement on what had been a stumbling block to obtaining a deal on the state budget.

Under the terms of the deal announced by Brown in a Los Angeles news conference, the fast-growing county in the heart of the Inland Empire of Southern California will amend its general plan within 30 months to include a greenhouse gas reduction policy. The process will include an inventory of all "known, or reasonably discoverable, sources of greenhouse gases" in the county.

In addition, the county will conduct an inventory on its 1990 emission levels and make projections for 2020. Then, the county will create a target for the reduction of emissions from discretionary land use by 2020.

The details are a bit murky to me, but there will have to be teeth here. It's difficult for me to imagine that San Bernardino county can continue to grow at such a breakneck speed without running the Schwarzenegger plan into the ground. These sorts of plans are, I think, important whether or not the federal government ever passes broad climate change legislation. If the federal government fails, then yes we're screwed, but mitigating the problem even marginally is still responsible. If the federal government pulls through (and if this is a serious plan) then San Bernardino will be well prepared to handle even the more difficult of the coming changes.

Obviously, it would be better still if the state of California were willing at the same time to flip incentives so people might actually move back into cities and lead generally greener, more responsible lives. In good time, perhaps.