Independent, Environment Bits & Pieces
Post
from The Independent:
02/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, California sets global example with historic deal to reduce emissions, (Source).
01/09/06, Andrew Grice, Conservatives make pledge to increase 'green' taxes, (Source).
01/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, US direct action: How American cities have bypassed Bush on Kyoto, (Source).
01/09/06, Rupert Cornwell, Setting trends: State that has blazed an environmental trail, (Source).
02/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, California sets global example with historic deal to reduce emissions, (Back).
The state of California is embarking on a ground-breaking effort to curb global warming, following an agreement between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state's movie star Republican Governor, and the Democrat-dominated state legislature, to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020.
The agreement, the result of months of fractious negotiation and considerable bad blood between Mr Schwarzenegger and his fellow Republicans, sets California far apart from the Bush administration, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and questioned the very existence of global warming.
It also opens the way to an outpouring of technological advances in alternative energy in the Golden State - from solar panels on homes and businesses to battery-powered cars and biodiesel trucks.
Like others, Mr Schwarzenegger argues that fighting global warming makes good business as well as environmental sense.
"We can now move forward with developing a market-based system that makes California a world leader in the effort to reduce carbon emissions," the Governor said in a statement. "The success of our system will be an example for other states and nations to follow as the fight against climate change continues. [This deal] strengthens our economy, cleans our environment and once again, establishes California as the leader in environmental protection."
Environmentalists and Democratic leaders with whom Mr Schwarzenegger hashed out the deal on Wednesday were equally ecstatic. California state assembly speaker Fabian Nunez said the deal was "the most important day in my legislative career". Bob Epstein, of the business lobbying group Environmental Entrepreneurs, said: "This is the tipping point in the country's climate-change debate."
The deal settled the final wording of Assembly Bill 32, which is expected to sail across the Governor's desk. Mr Schwarzenegger is also expected to sign a second bill from the state Senate, prohibiting California from importing new energy sources that did not meet strict emissions standards.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the legislation is the creation of a system of emissions credits. If a company exceeds its targets on emissions reduction, it can sell the excess to a company lagging behind, creating a financial incentive for businesses to do their bit for the environment.
This was one of the talking points when Mr Schwarzenegger and Mr Blair signed their UK-California partnership agreement on global warming in Los Angeles at the end of last month.
There are signs that the idea may now be copied in other states, starting with Illinois, which sent a delegation of lawmakers on a fact-finding trip to California a few days ago.
The deal is a political coup for Mr Schwarzenegger as he faces a race for re-election in November and may emerge as the signature achievement of his first term. After his popularity slumped to record lows by steering his administration too far to the right last year, he has now gone in the other direction, in part under the influence of his die-hard Democrat wife Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan.
His environmental advisers are not former energy industry lobbyists, like many of President Bush's appointees, but are long-standing green activists. They have encouraged him to offer incentives for Californians to build solar panels on their roofs. He has also championed research into alternative energies, especially hydrogen fuel cells, and pushed for cleaner car exhausts.
Such initiatives make eminent good sense in an environmentally conscious state like California, which is always at the forefront of regulations to curb pollution - not least because of numerous smog crises suffered first in Los Angeles and, more recently, in the agriculture-intensive Central Valley.
Mr Schwarzenegger has nevertheless broken several rules of modern-day partisan politicking. The Republican minority in the California legislature has opposed the greenhouse gas initiative all the way and has not offered a single vote in favour of either of the bills.
George Plescia, who leads the Republican delegation in the California assembly, condemned the deal almost immediately. "Adopting costly and unattainable regulations will drive businesses and jobs out of California into other states," he said, "and even into other countries with no commitment to improve air quality."
Industry lobbyists and their political allies are unlikely to give up. History suggests they will press to water down Assembly Bill 32, continuing all the way to 2012, when the first emissions mandates kick in.
But there are also reasons to suppose some business interests will continue to support the bill. "Imposing environmental regulations and cleaning up the air clearly hasn't hurt the Californian economy in the past," said Mark Bernstein, a senior policy researcher specialising in energy and environmental issues at the Rand Corporation.
"Now there's money to be made on developing technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. California is where a lot of the research and development is going to take place."
01/09/06, Andrew Grice, Conservatives make pledge to increase 'green' taxes, (Back).
A shift away from taxes on income and wealth to "green" taxation has been promised by the Conservative Party.
George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, declined to spell out any detail but committed a future Tory government to raise the share of revenue raised by environmental taxes.
David Cameron has resisted pressure from Tory right-wingers to fight the next election on a firm pledge to cut income tax but the proposal might allow him to do so while at the same time boosting his green credentials.
Mr Osborne said yesterday: "Conservatives should take a lead in making the changes that are needed to promote green growth. I believe we in Britain should move some of the burden of taxation away from income and capital, and towards environmentally damaging behaviour."
Ed Balls, the Treasury minister, challenged Mr Osborne to spell out whether taxes on motorists should rise when petrol prices were so high.
He said: "If you are going to be a serious opposition you need to come along and say what are your proposals, how would you pay for them, and until then people won't take you seriously."
01/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, US direct action: How American cities have bypassed Bush on Kyoto, (Back).
It is not just the state of California that is bypassing the authority of the US government to take action on global warming.
The mayors of more than 300 cities across the country have signed a Climate Protection Agreement in which they have pledged to meet the emissions-cutting timetable laid down by the Kyoto Protocol - regardless of what the Bush administration decides.
Some of those cities, such as Seattle, which took the lead on drafting and lobbying for the agreement, are bastions of liberal politics and environmentalism, acting out their ideological convictions. Others, though, such as the exclusive Colorado ski resorts Vail and Aspen, are also motivated by a powerful self-interest. If global warming continues unabated, the Rocky Mountain snowpack will melt and there will be no skiing in Vail, Aspen or anywhere else by the end of this century.
Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels, proposed the mayors' agreement whenKyoto came into effect at the start of last year. By June 2005, he had 140 signatories, and the number has more than doubled since.
The goal is to "meet or exceed" the Kyoto target of cutting global warming pollution to 7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The agreement also contains a 12-point action plan, urging signatory cities to discourage sprawl, promote public transport, car-pooling and bicycle lanes, turn to alternative energy sources including alternative fuels for the municipal vehicle and bus fleet, plant lots of trees and introduce environmental education programmes in schools and community colleges.
Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest, is the perfect poster-child for many of these initiatives, since it sits between two heavily forested mountain ranges and is surrounded by water. Despite a long history of environmentalism and commitment to public transport, it has been struggling with smog problems in recent years because of heavy car commuter traffic from the ever-expanding suburbs.
The Colorado ski resorts, meanwhile, have taken robust action to convert to renewable energy to power their ski lifts, shops, hotels and administrative buildings.
Vail just signed a deal to buy more than 150,000 megawatt-hours of wind power per year - the greenhouse gas-saving equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the roads. Aspen, meanwhile, commissioned a study in April that revealed the severe damage done to the environment by private jets landing at its airport. It is now working to curtail air traffic.
Aspen's top city lawyer, John Worcester, described the city earlier this year as the global-warming equivalent of "the canary in the miner's cage". "It is incumbent on all of us," he said, "to face the potential threat upon our economy and way of life as we would any other potential threat".
01/09/06, Rupert Cornwell, Setting trends: State that has blazed an environmental trail, (Back).
Today California, tomorrow America, and the day after tomorrow, the world. So it has been in matters ranging from fashion and music to high tech and healthcare. But nowhere has the state's role as trendsetter par excellence been as great as in the field of the environment.
The deal announced between Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature, ordering a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in the state by the year 2020, is but the latest in more than half a century of trailblazing measures that have frequently become the national, and on occasion the international, norm.
Back in 1947, Los Angeles set up its own Air Pollution Control District, the first in the country, to tackle the smog created by wartime industry. Not until 1955 did the US government follow suit at a national level.
By then, Los Angeles in particular and the state in general had become the land of the freeway. After smog forced the shutdown of LA's schools and industry in the autumn of 1954, California became the first state to establish a board to set standards for car emissions.
Other moves followed. In 1967, the state had already inaugurated Carb, a state air resources board, three years beforesetting up a national equivalent, the Environmental Protection Agency. In the mid-1970s, it led the way in requiring cars to be fitted with catalytic converters. Next, it made unleaded petrol compulsory.
New decades brought new initiatives. In 1990, Carb took its most ambitious step yet, the Zev, or Zero Emission Vehicles, programme, stipulating that 2 per cent of vehicles for sale in 1998 should be totally clean, and 10 per cent in 2003.
In July 2002, Democratic Governor Gray Davis (who the following year would be replaced by Mr Schwarzenegger) signed a landmark state bill requiring carmakers to limit emissions, starting in the 2009 model year. Before long, the cream of Hollywood - the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Natalie Portman and Cameron Diaz - were going nowhere without aToyota Prius.
Quirky it may be, but California cannot be ignored - the state accounts for 14 per cent of the entire US gross domestic product. The Bush administration may have scorned the Kyoto agreement. California, however, is another matter - as Tony Blair demonstrated when he skipped Washington and went straight to the Golden State in July to announce a deal with the Governor for Britain and California to co-operate in fighting global warming.
Mr Schwarzenegger seems an improbable environmentalist, known for his fondness for Hummers. But many of his nominees to key posts in the environmental area have solid green credentials, and few doubt his personal support for hydrogen as a replacement for petrol to power cars.
But even California's powers are limited. As so often in the US, sweeping measures are whittled away in the courts and elsewhere. Car companies waged a ferocious action against the Zev law, arguing they were technologically unfeasible. The 2002 initiative has also been bitterly contested.
Despite years of efforts, the automobile remains the state's chief pollutant, accounting for 60 per cent of California's total emissions. Unarguably however, Californian initiatives have forced the pace of research into clean technologies.
(Back)
02/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, California sets global example with historic deal to reduce emissions, (Source).
01/09/06, Andrew Grice, Conservatives make pledge to increase 'green' taxes, (Source).
01/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, US direct action: How American cities have bypassed Bush on Kyoto, (Source).
01/09/06, Rupert Cornwell, Setting trends: State that has blazed an environmental trail, (Source).
02/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, California sets global example with historic deal to reduce emissions, (Back).
The state of California is embarking on a ground-breaking effort to curb global warming, following an agreement between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state's movie star Republican Governor, and the Democrat-dominated state legislature, to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020.
The agreement, the result of months of fractious negotiation and considerable bad blood between Mr Schwarzenegger and his fellow Republicans, sets California far apart from the Bush administration, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and questioned the very existence of global warming.
It also opens the way to an outpouring of technological advances in alternative energy in the Golden State - from solar panels on homes and businesses to battery-powered cars and biodiesel trucks.
Like others, Mr Schwarzenegger argues that fighting global warming makes good business as well as environmental sense.
"We can now move forward with developing a market-based system that makes California a world leader in the effort to reduce carbon emissions," the Governor said in a statement. "The success of our system will be an example for other states and nations to follow as the fight against climate change continues. [This deal] strengthens our economy, cleans our environment and once again, establishes California as the leader in environmental protection."
Environmentalists and Democratic leaders with whom Mr Schwarzenegger hashed out the deal on Wednesday were equally ecstatic. California state assembly speaker Fabian Nunez said the deal was "the most important day in my legislative career". Bob Epstein, of the business lobbying group Environmental Entrepreneurs, said: "This is the tipping point in the country's climate-change debate."
The deal settled the final wording of Assembly Bill 32, which is expected to sail across the Governor's desk. Mr Schwarzenegger is also expected to sign a second bill from the state Senate, prohibiting California from importing new energy sources that did not meet strict emissions standards.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the legislation is the creation of a system of emissions credits. If a company exceeds its targets on emissions reduction, it can sell the excess to a company lagging behind, creating a financial incentive for businesses to do their bit for the environment.
This was one of the talking points when Mr Schwarzenegger and Mr Blair signed their UK-California partnership agreement on global warming in Los Angeles at the end of last month.
There are signs that the idea may now be copied in other states, starting with Illinois, which sent a delegation of lawmakers on a fact-finding trip to California a few days ago.
The deal is a political coup for Mr Schwarzenegger as he faces a race for re-election in November and may emerge as the signature achievement of his first term. After his popularity slumped to record lows by steering his administration too far to the right last year, he has now gone in the other direction, in part under the influence of his die-hard Democrat wife Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan.
His environmental advisers are not former energy industry lobbyists, like many of President Bush's appointees, but are long-standing green activists. They have encouraged him to offer incentives for Californians to build solar panels on their roofs. He has also championed research into alternative energies, especially hydrogen fuel cells, and pushed for cleaner car exhausts.
Such initiatives make eminent good sense in an environmentally conscious state like California, which is always at the forefront of regulations to curb pollution - not least because of numerous smog crises suffered first in Los Angeles and, more recently, in the agriculture-intensive Central Valley.
Mr Schwarzenegger has nevertheless broken several rules of modern-day partisan politicking. The Republican minority in the California legislature has opposed the greenhouse gas initiative all the way and has not offered a single vote in favour of either of the bills.
George Plescia, who leads the Republican delegation in the California assembly, condemned the deal almost immediately. "Adopting costly and unattainable regulations will drive businesses and jobs out of California into other states," he said, "and even into other countries with no commitment to improve air quality."
Industry lobbyists and their political allies are unlikely to give up. History suggests they will press to water down Assembly Bill 32, continuing all the way to 2012, when the first emissions mandates kick in.
But there are also reasons to suppose some business interests will continue to support the bill. "Imposing environmental regulations and cleaning up the air clearly hasn't hurt the Californian economy in the past," said Mark Bernstein, a senior policy researcher specialising in energy and environmental issues at the Rand Corporation.
"Now there's money to be made on developing technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. California is where a lot of the research and development is going to take place."
01/09/06, Andrew Grice, Conservatives make pledge to increase 'green' taxes, (Back).
A shift away from taxes on income and wealth to "green" taxation has been promised by the Conservative Party.
George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, declined to spell out any detail but committed a future Tory government to raise the share of revenue raised by environmental taxes.
David Cameron has resisted pressure from Tory right-wingers to fight the next election on a firm pledge to cut income tax but the proposal might allow him to do so while at the same time boosting his green credentials.
Mr Osborne said yesterday: "Conservatives should take a lead in making the changes that are needed to promote green growth. I believe we in Britain should move some of the burden of taxation away from income and capital, and towards environmentally damaging behaviour."
Ed Balls, the Treasury minister, challenged Mr Osborne to spell out whether taxes on motorists should rise when petrol prices were so high.
He said: "If you are going to be a serious opposition you need to come along and say what are your proposals, how would you pay for them, and until then people won't take you seriously."
01/09/06, Andrew Gumbel, US direct action: How American cities have bypassed Bush on Kyoto, (Back).
It is not just the state of California that is bypassing the authority of the US government to take action on global warming.
The mayors of more than 300 cities across the country have signed a Climate Protection Agreement in which they have pledged to meet the emissions-cutting timetable laid down by the Kyoto Protocol - regardless of what the Bush administration decides.
Some of those cities, such as Seattle, which took the lead on drafting and lobbying for the agreement, are bastions of liberal politics and environmentalism, acting out their ideological convictions. Others, though, such as the exclusive Colorado ski resorts Vail and Aspen, are also motivated by a powerful self-interest. If global warming continues unabated, the Rocky Mountain snowpack will melt and there will be no skiing in Vail, Aspen or anywhere else by the end of this century.
Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels, proposed the mayors' agreement whenKyoto came into effect at the start of last year. By June 2005, he had 140 signatories, and the number has more than doubled since.
The goal is to "meet or exceed" the Kyoto target of cutting global warming pollution to 7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The agreement also contains a 12-point action plan, urging signatory cities to discourage sprawl, promote public transport, car-pooling and bicycle lanes, turn to alternative energy sources including alternative fuels for the municipal vehicle and bus fleet, plant lots of trees and introduce environmental education programmes in schools and community colleges.
Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest, is the perfect poster-child for many of these initiatives, since it sits between two heavily forested mountain ranges and is surrounded by water. Despite a long history of environmentalism and commitment to public transport, it has been struggling with smog problems in recent years because of heavy car commuter traffic from the ever-expanding suburbs.
The Colorado ski resorts, meanwhile, have taken robust action to convert to renewable energy to power their ski lifts, shops, hotels and administrative buildings.
Vail just signed a deal to buy more than 150,000 megawatt-hours of wind power per year - the greenhouse gas-saving equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the roads. Aspen, meanwhile, commissioned a study in April that revealed the severe damage done to the environment by private jets landing at its airport. It is now working to curtail air traffic.
Aspen's top city lawyer, John Worcester, described the city earlier this year as the global-warming equivalent of "the canary in the miner's cage". "It is incumbent on all of us," he said, "to face the potential threat upon our economy and way of life as we would any other potential threat".
01/09/06, Rupert Cornwell, Setting trends: State that has blazed an environmental trail, (Back).
Today California, tomorrow America, and the day after tomorrow, the world. So it has been in matters ranging from fashion and music to high tech and healthcare. But nowhere has the state's role as trendsetter par excellence been as great as in the field of the environment.
The deal announced between Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature, ordering a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in the state by the year 2020, is but the latest in more than half a century of trailblazing measures that have frequently become the national, and on occasion the international, norm.
Back in 1947, Los Angeles set up its own Air Pollution Control District, the first in the country, to tackle the smog created by wartime industry. Not until 1955 did the US government follow suit at a national level.
By then, Los Angeles in particular and the state in general had become the land of the freeway. After smog forced the shutdown of LA's schools and industry in the autumn of 1954, California became the first state to establish a board to set standards for car emissions.
Other moves followed. In 1967, the state had already inaugurated Carb, a state air resources board, three years beforesetting up a national equivalent, the Environmental Protection Agency. In the mid-1970s, it led the way in requiring cars to be fitted with catalytic converters. Next, it made unleaded petrol compulsory.
New decades brought new initiatives. In 1990, Carb took its most ambitious step yet, the Zev, or Zero Emission Vehicles, programme, stipulating that 2 per cent of vehicles for sale in 1998 should be totally clean, and 10 per cent in 2003.
In July 2002, Democratic Governor Gray Davis (who the following year would be replaced by Mr Schwarzenegger) signed a landmark state bill requiring carmakers to limit emissions, starting in the 2009 model year. Before long, the cream of Hollywood - the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Natalie Portman and Cameron Diaz - were going nowhere without aToyota Prius.
Quirky it may be, but California cannot be ignored - the state accounts for 14 per cent of the entire US gross domestic product. The Bush administration may have scorned the Kyoto agreement. California, however, is another matter - as Tony Blair demonstrated when he skipped Washington and went straight to the Golden State in July to announce a deal with the Governor for Britain and California to co-operate in fighting global warming.
Mr Schwarzenegger seems an improbable environmentalist, known for his fondness for Hummers. But many of his nominees to key posts in the environmental area have solid green credentials, and few doubt his personal support for hydrogen as a replacement for petrol to power cars.
But even California's powers are limited. As so often in the US, sweeping measures are whittled away in the courts and elsewhere. Car companies waged a ferocious action against the Zev law, arguing they were technologically unfeasible. The 2002 initiative has also been bitterly contested.
Despite years of efforts, the automobile remains the state's chief pollutant, accounting for 60 per cent of California's total emissions. Unarguably however, Californian initiatives have forced the pace of research into clean technologies.
(Back)
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