Your high carb diet may be helping California achieve a low-carbon future. The state’s aggressive low-carbon fuels mandates have increasingly encouraged large-scale fuel consumers to purchase biofuels from restaurant “brown grease” in order to meet the requirements.

This renewable diesel from plants and animal fat can be used without blending because of its similar properties to petroleum diesel (see our Planting Fuels report for more information). Biodiesel, on the other hand, is more limited, as it typically maxes out at 20 percent as a blended fuel with petroleum, due to automaker restrictions.

While the state aims for a future of battery-powered vehicles to reduce transportation emissions, biofuels like renewable diesel are currently picking up most of the slack. As Robert Tuttle in Bloomberg describes:

In recent years, cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, and San Diego, as well as Sacramento County, have transitioned to using renewable diesel to power buses, fire engines and other city vehicles. Alphabet Inc.’s shuttle buses in Silicon Valley also burn it, and UPS said two years ago that it would buy 46 million gallons of the fuel to run its fleet of delivery trucks.

As the article shows in the chart below, the result of this readily available, if not unhealthy, feedstock is a growing percentage of brown grease-based renewable diesel offsetting petroleum fuel usage:

Of course, meat-heavy diets are making climate change worse. But at least in the short run, this is one fat solution to the problem.