If an irresistible force meets an immovable object, one possible outcome is a stalled Climate Action Plan. Caught between the realities of an ever-warming climate and a culture that is embedded in fossil fuels, city, state and county planners have been trying for years to come up with some acceptable and realistic ways of staving off disaster. It is a daunting task and, perhaps not surprisingly, has taken years of effort with little to show for it. In 2006, under the leadership of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California passed Assembly Bill 32, a law requiring California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. This goal was met, largely through the implementation of the cap-and-trade program, which basically placed a market value on the right to pollute. Companies by and large found it was cheaper to clean up their technologies than to pay pollution fees to the state. Ten years later, under the leadership of Gov. Jerry Brown, the state passed Senate Bill 32, which required further cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of their 1990 levels by 2030. This deadline is now less than eight years away. A variety of similar state laws and executive orders have since been issued. To hurry the process along, the state altered the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to make greenhouse gas emissions a pollutant that had to be measured, reported and mitigated. The resulting amendments to the CEQA guidelines were finalized in 2018. Calculating greenhouse gas emissions is a difficult and expensive task. To simplify matters, the state now allows an entity — such as a city or a county — to create a Climate Action Plan (CAP), in which the emissions for a whole community are calculated, and ways to reduce them identified and, eventually, codified. It is similar to the logic behind a building code: Everybody must go by the same set of standards, rather than each individual builder creating his or her own standards, and then convincing the buyer that the walls will not collapse or the electrical system catch fire. Once the CAP is approved and adopted, any project that the city or county approves must conform to the plan’s goals. Some recommended ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are to substitute electrical energy for oil or natural gas, to situate new buildings in areas that do not require a lot of…