From Inhofe to Boxer...watch the climate change!

After the 2006 mid-term elections, Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, will succeed James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, as chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Mr. Inhofe refused to consider regulations on carbon dioxide, calling global warming "the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time." Ms. Boxer, who believes "global warming could reshape the world as we know it," says she will introduce federal legislation that is similar to California's.

California's Air Resources Board, a semi-independent agency, has been given the job of drawing up the nation's first regulatory program intended to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by all sectors of the economy.

CARB, the nation's largest and most influential state environmental regulatory agency, has about 1,000 employees, including scientists and engineers who, working there in the 1960s, helped design the nation's pioneering antismog program.

CARB has been tasked by the legislature to figure out how to cap greenhouse-gas emissions, by preparing regulations by 2012. California's goal is to cut emissions by about 25% by 2020.

Dr. Robert Sawyer, head of CARB, was appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in December. He says he will push every approach that is cost-effective. He plans to send staff members to the United Kingdom and Japan to see how their pioneering regulatory programs work. He plans to hire 100 experts, including economists who will develop computer models of the state's past and future emissions. He is also looking for specialists who can design an emissions-trading program tailored to California's economy.

Having already removed the low hanging fruit of dirty coal-fired utilities air-pollution, CARB will have to focus on the transportation sector, which has roughly double the traffic of most states and produces 41% of the state's total emissions.

CARB could recommend taxes or other incentives to reduce gasoline consumption. On this subject, Mr. Ertel predicts, the agency will experience "some heavy-duty lobbying" before its program emerges.

The influence of coal-fired utilities, the coal-mining industry and car makers, he explains, is much stronger in Washington than in Sacramento, where the biggest players will include oil companies, the state Chamber of Commerce and agricultural interests.

Environmental groups are also stronger in California and have used successful state programs in the past to sell environmental proposals to Congress. As a result, California's antismog regulations and appliance-efficiency standards made it into national law.

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
California Plots Greenhouse-Gas Strategy
State Board Responsible for Cutting Emissions
Hopes to Once Again Set a National Example
By JOHN J. FIALKA
November 17, 2006; Page A4

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Plastics are a key component in what is now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating mass of trash that is accumulating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The patch is a menace to sea life. Some officials in California believe that if more plastic litter would biodegrade, it would help solve the problem.

Wikipedia has an article that describes the region known as the North Pacific Gyre...and the fluid eye of the ocean's circulation pattern. It reminds me of the eye of a hurricane...just a thicker soup.

The centre of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes) and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste, leading to the informal name The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, and these pieces are trapped by the gyre and remain suspended in its centre. The photodegraded plastic can attract pollutants such as PCBs, and the floating particles also resemble zooplankton, which can lead to them being consumed by jellyfish and thus entering the ocean food chain. In samples taken from the gyre in 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded that of zooplankton (the dominant animalian life in the area) by six times.

This leads to a vital question...what is "green" and what's the baseline that will really stop covering the earth's functioning ecological systems with functional inhibitors?

Humans and Sustainability of Nature's Life Support System

During the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger spatial scales than ever recorded on earth."
1998 Address by the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

"Sustainable development" refers to an ideal of widespread economic prosperity that sustains nature’s life-support systems enabling expansion of the next generation's choices rather than limiting them. Imaging the ideal serves to define a more preferable state. Backcasting from that future vision specifies alternative paths forward. This frame encompasses a wide range of innovative corporate activity at the nexus of business and natural systems that is transforming existing markets, creating new ones, and embedding sustainability principles in firms' strategies. The growing imperative to systemically incorporate environmental impacts, health issues, community effects, and a longer-term fiduciary responsibility to stockholders provides a strong incentive to companies to both understand this changing competitive landscape, and explore its inherent new opportunities.

Humans have become a central force in nature. While having always influenced the physical environment around us, our reach has been extended so dramatically in the last 50 years through technology and globalization that we are now living in a watershed moment in history. Our anthropogenic impact has altered fundamentally the chemistry, ecology, and biology of living and non-living systems. This has occurred because our progress has resulted in an historically unprecedented population explosion with accompanying exponential growth of industrial production and materials throughput. Technological advances now race to keep pace with the resulting demand for land, water, materials, energy, and food. The rates and scales of change combine with staggering volumes of waste that disrupt and potentially impair natural systems worldwide (e.g. habitat, climate, the hydrologic cycle, and biogeochemical cycles). Yet these same natural systems provide the critical services on which we depend - clean water, healthy air, clean energy, productive soil, healthy food.

SOURCE: Darden Business Publishing, University of Virginia
Introduction to GBUS 806: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Business – a second year MBA course offered by Prof. Andrea Larson, 1999-2005

City Utilities End Coal Fired Electricity Contracts in California

Several Southern California cities have decided not to renew long-term contracts for coal-fired electricity, choosing instead to turn to cleaner sources of electricity.

City officials told Utah-based Intermountain Power Agency they wouldn't be renewing their contracts for coal-fired power, which expire in 2027, and would instead be looking for alternative energy sources.

The cities are Pasadena, Glendale, Riverside and Anaheim. They join the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has already choosen not to renew the contract with Intermountain.

The cities' decision came after increased pressure from politicians and environmentalists.

The move could put Southern California in the forefront nationally of the commercial use of alternative energy in coming years.

Electricity utilities are starting to feel the pressure for "clean" coal.

SOURCE: ALTERNATIVE ENERGY BLOG - Solar-Energy-Wind-Power.com