ScienceInsider

California regulators yesterday laid out a plan to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 15% over the next 12 years. That blueprint is the most ambitious greenhouse gas–reduction plan in the United States and could serve as a model for the incoming Obama Administration. The move is designed to combat the effects of the state's fast-growing population, which is expected to cause by 2020 a spike in greenhouse emissions by 30% over 1990 levels. Among the plan's hallmarks: producing at least one-third of all electricity from renewables, the most of any state.

—Robert F. Service