Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
British Columbia and the Climate Race
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Up and down the west coast, state and local governments are trying to out-green one another. It’s well known that Schwarzenegger has been hard at work cutting and capping California’s emissions like the mighty Governator that he is. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Governor Kulongoski has announced intentions to tackle the emissions problem by bolstering the state’s renewable energy policy and industry. A little farther north, Washington’s Gov. Christine Gregoire just signed an executive order committing Washington to reducing emissions levels to those of 1990 by the year 2020. This, of course, is on par with Schwarzenegger’s goals, and many are calling it good but not good enough.
One of those would be British Columbia’s Premier, Gordon Campbell, who (alongside Lieutenant-Governor Iona Campagnolo) outdid all of his west coast counterparts south of the border in the recent Speech from the Throne, in which the Liberal government introduced a 23-point plan for fighting global warming. They intend to bring emissions down to 10% below 1990 levels by 2020, to institute auto emissions regulations and carbon sequestration mandates for coal-fired power plants. As our friends at the keen-sighted Sightline Institute put it, BC appears to have taken each step of California’s plan and pushed it up a notch.
…But the internal quibbling doesn’t eclipse the fact that the whole coast is raising the bar on building local capacity to combat a challenge toward which larger governing bodies have been slow to step up. In the climate change game, a little competition can get more done than good intentions.
What’s more, the competitive landscape that’s truly important is not that of the West Coast today, but that which is emerging globally in the near future. The future will be carbon-restricted, and those companies and countries which move quickly now towards climate-friendliness are going to find themselves with a distinct competitive advantage in the near future. State and provincial climate change policies are not just ethically correct — they’re good economic policy.
(23 Feb 2007)
California Senate Democrats Unveil “California First” Global Warming Bill Package
Frank D. Russo, California Progress Report
Saying that “Senate Democrats believe there is a simple, direct, cost-effective path we can take now to reduce greenhouse gases,” Senate President pro Tem Don Perata announced yesterday the introduction of a sweeping eight-bill package that aims to improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California in the most practical ways.
Perata complained that: “The implementation of Assembly Bill 32 is getting bogged down in arcane discussions over intercontinental trading schemes, ‘carbon markets’ and free ‘credits’. That may work for Wall Street traders and Enron economists, but it doesn’t work for Californians.”
Democrats are clearly not content with the pace of the Schwarzenegger Administration’s actions and alarmed at the news since last August of a massive and rapidly worsening global warming problem.
(23 Feb 2007)
Race between California’ Democrats and Governor Schwarzenegger to see who can do better on climate change policy. -BA
British Columbia: Analysts respond to green throne speech
Matthew Burrows, Georgia Straight
Premier Gordon Campbell’s green throne speech and greened-up image has left prominent environmental analysts optimistic but cautious.
“A throne speech is nice, but it doesn’t reduce emissions,” Dale Marshall, David Suzuki Foundation climate-change policy analyst, told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
As recently as October 2005, Marshall was telling the media in a DSF analysis that despite the “urgency of reducing the real threat of climate change…many provincial governments have no plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions”. In the same report, Marshall said that B.C., Newfoundland, and the Northwest Territories had “weak and vague climate change plans”.
“Right now we have a speech,” he told the Straight . “If I see a plan [from Campbell’s government] before October 2007, maybe B.C. will get a much more favourable grade.”
Marshall admitted that Campbell has taken some “important first steps”, such as setting a target to reduce B.C.’s greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 33 percent below current levels by 2020.
(22 Feb 2007)
