Last week, there were celebrations and educational events across the U.S. and around the world to commemorate Earth Day, the first of which was held on April 22, 1970, but it got me thinking—isn’t everyday Earth Day?
Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson started organizing the first Earth Day on a return flight from his visit to see the impacts of the largest oil spill in U.S. history—the 1969 Santa Barbara disaster (1989’s Exxon Valdez and the subsequent 2010 Deepwater Horizon have since relegated this spill to third place).
Not only did this drilling rig disaster wipe out thousands of sea birds, numerous sea lions, elephant seals, otters, and countless fish, it desecrated beaches from Goleta to Ventura and as far offshore as the Channel Islands. The spill’s toxic sludge also took an historic economic toll on the postcard-perfect Central Coast of California, upending commercial fishing, tourism, and property values for years.
Sen. Nelson had few allies in Congress that wanted to take action at the time, so he decided a public pressure campaign was needed to address the troubling pattern of tradeoffs between a fossil-fuel dominated economy, and the consequences to people’s health and well-being. With the growing damage to our air, water, and earth, Nelson decided to pull a page from anti-war sit-ins, working to make Earth Day a nationwide day of ‘teach-ins’ to galvanize support across the breadth of American society.
At the time, ‘environmentalism’ was a vague term and its adherents fragmented. But the success of Earth Day (it is still the largest single day of protest in America, with an estimated 20 million in over 12,000 events) turned the page and unleashed the modern “environmental movement.” Earth Day awareness and participation brought enough public pressure to bear that not only did the University of Santa Barbara introduce the country’s first environmental studies department, but Republican President Nixon formed the Environmental Protection Agency, and Congress, and in short order passed both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Today, the definition of environmentalism has expanded beyond securing protections against point-specific industrial harms to localities (i.e., regional conditions for air quality, bodies of water, or geographic sites), to encompass the very survival of our planet’s life-supporting climate system. Heat-trapping pollution from over a century of combustion and emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) threatens the survival of not only crops, plants, and countless insect, marine, and animal species, but also human life as we know it.
But unlike the 1970s, when there were literally no viable alternatives to oil, coal, and gas for our energy and transportation needs, in 2026 clean, renewable alternatives are abundant and often cheaper. The age-old, zero-sum arguments that pitted environmental against economic interests, are moribund.
A case in point: In 2006, California’s Republican Governor Schwarzenegger signed AB 32 (the Global Warming Solutions Act), into law. The Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) was one of a group of programs designed to reduce the state’s GHG emissions.
Despite lawsuits from petroleum interests that delayed implementation until 2011, the LCFS launched the nation’s first compliance-based credit market based on how fuels performed against annual carbon intensity (CI) benchmarks (standards or targets) relative to a 2010 baseline CI score. The difference between a fuel’s CI and the benchmark determined the fuel’s credit (or deficit) values—values that counted all the GHG emissions in a fuel’s production, distribution, and use (i.e., beyond just the tailpipe) for a full lifecycle assessment.
Since adoption, the LCFS has consistently overperformed, not only meeting but exceeding every carbon intensity reduction goal set for CA’s transportation fuel pool! As a result, California’s drivers have now displaced as much as 80% of their petroleum diesel use with cleaner, cheaper low-carbon liquid fuels. And, at the same time, California drivers have adopted more electric vehicles than any other state, due in significant part to the lower purchase costs and more available charging infrastructure enabled by its LCFS program.
When alternatives like ethanol, biodiesel, renewable diesel, renewable natural gas, and electricity exist to break our long-term reliance on petroleum-based transport, we can free ourselves from polluting energy sources that carry such high inherent risks to our personal health and the future and well-being of the planet on which we all rely to live.
When we drive, we can choose to make every day, Earth Day.