San Jose is falling behind its ambition to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, according to an administrative update approved by the City Council on Dec. 2 that reflects the city’s latest greenhouse gas inventory.
The council formally acknowledged the city is not on track to meet the 2030 carbon neutrality milestone. The admission came as part of the Dec. 2 update to Climate Smart San Jose, the city’s plan to cut carbon emissions, and it is based on findings in San Jose’s most recent emissions inventory.
The inventory found emissions increased slightly between 2021 and 2023. City data put 2023 greenhouse gas emissions at roughly 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, about 0.2% higher than emissions in 2021.
The update marks a reversal from early gains after the Climate Smart plan launched in 2018. Between the 2017 benchmark year and 2021, San Jose cut its overall emissions by about 16%, a shift that city leaders had leaned on as evidence the program was driving reductions.
District 4 Councilmember David Cohen said during the Dec. 2 meeting that the situation should prompt continued effort rather than confidence that the 2030 targets will be reached automatically. He told the council, “That should be a wake-up call for all of us that our 2030 carbon neutrality goals are not just going to happen — that we’re going to have to keep working for them and find ways to push even further.”
City leaders said that despite the slowdown tied to the later inventory, San Jose remains on track for more modest original targets that existed before the city adopted a more ambitious timeline. Officials said the newer 2030 carbon neutrality goal, adopted in 2021, sets a harder schedule than the earlier Climate Smart targets.
Climate advocates said the stagnation is alarming. Linda Hutchins-Knowles, co-founder of Mothers Out Front Silicon Valley, called the lack of progress “alarming,” adding that she was not surprised the city is missing milestones but surprised it appears to be going backward. She told San José Spotlight, “I’m not surprised that we aren’t on track,” and “But what I am surprised about is that we’re actually going backwards.”
The Climate Smart plan update said San Jose has launched more than 40 initiatives intended to reduce emissions. Those efforts include a rebate program intended to support the transition to electric home appliances such as heat pumps, an initiative deploying hundreds of e-bikes, and a pilot that has installed dozens of charging stations for electric cars. The city also established San Jose Clean Energy in 2019, a city-run energy program that provides hundreds of thousands of customers with electricity generated from 95% carbon-free sources.
Hutchins-Knowles said the city had done well in early efforts that were easier to implement, but that further steps are more difficult. She said, “I think the city has done a really good job at plucking that low-hanging fruit,” and “Where we’re at now is having to really look at things that are not so easy to accomplish.”
The city’s own emissions-reduction planning sets targets that have not matched results in recent years. One example in the plan calls for raising the share of electric vehicles to 79%, but city data showed that the figure was 8% as of 2024.
Zachary Struyk, assistant director of the Energy Department and the official whose agency oversees the Climate Smart program, said the 2030 timeline is unusually difficult and pointed to cost and demand pressures. He told San Jose Spotlight that “It was an ambitious target,” and that “No one else is doing carbon zero by 2030.”
Struyk said electricity costs have risen substantially in recent years, discouraging some residents from buying electric appliances or vehicles. He also pointed to “growing pains” within industries that support electrification work and to a decline in public transit ridership that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Struyk said the Energy Department is drawing up a list of proposals intended to speed emissions reduction efforts. He said the proposals could go before council as soon as next summer.
Advocates said the city’s momentum also was hurt by decisions at the council level. Hutchins-Knowles pointed to a September council vote that failed to pass two climate measures aimed at creating new code requirements for electric heat pumps and “electric-ready” wiring in homes. She said the measures were expected to face major financial burdens for homeowners, and she said they failed on a 5-5 tie vote with District 6 Councilmember Michael Mulcahy absent.
A youth climate advocate also expressed alarm about the pace. Calvin Sridhara, a 10th-grader at Leland High School and a member of Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action, told San Jose Spotlight that the plateau is especially serious for young people because they will live with the consequences the longest. He said, “As a young person, this plateau feels especially serious because we will live with the consequences the longest,” and he added that “City leadership needs to recognize that their current pace is no longer enough and be willing to reengage with this 2030 zero emissions goal,” saying it is “the right thing to do, even if the next steps are politically harder than the initial steps they’ve been taking.”