New Haven Independent

It was day one Thursday of a national gathering at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, a convocation of governors. California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Connecticut’s M. Jodi Rell are expected on campus Friday, marking the 100th anniversary of President Theodore Roosevelt’s convening of the nation’s governors to press for protection of the country’s natural resources.

Just a handful of governors are attending in person Friday, but in this age of electronic communication, many more have been involved in the creation of the Governors’ Declaration on Climate Change, explained Dan Esty. He’s director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the point person for the conference. So far 20 governors have signed on.

On Thursday, on the lawn outside Sage Hall, students had concocted a display called “Two Roads Diverged…” to show two possible energy futures.

The three presidential candidates start off in a Volkswagen and must decide which road to take. One includes a gas-guzzling “Bummer” (pictured here) while the other shows a green future of environmental justice (photo at top of story).

Meanwhile, inside at Thursday’s kick-off symposium, top environmental officials for Connecticut, Massachusetts and California discussed projects they’ve initiated to reduce global warming. Gina McCarthy, Connecticut Commissioner of Environmental Protection (pictured with Ian Bowles, the Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs), listed some of her state’s accomplishments in energy efficiency, a Clean Energy Fund, and participation in RGGI (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) a 10-state effort to develop a cap and trade program for power plant emissions.

Confronting Bush’s position that actions to address climate change will hurt the economy, McCarthy said, “The bottom line is that the actions we’ve taken on climate, rather than be a burden to this state, they have been a boon to this state. If we can figure out how to address climate, we can figure out the challenges of fuel costs and prices. We can figure out the challenge of energy security. We don’t need to think of climate [change] as a problem. We need to think of it as an opportunity that must be invested in immediately.”

Mary Nichols, the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, has been in the thick of that state’s monumental fights with the federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and automakers around emissions reductions. She noted that California has two operating nuclear power plants and gets some power from nukes out of state, but still for a relatively small total of about ten percent of the state’s total energy needs. (About a quarter of Connecticut’s energy needs are powered by nuke plants.) In the late 1970s, the citizens of California passed a binding referendum that no new nuclear power plants could be built in the state until such time as a solution was found for long-term handling of the waste created. Still no solution, ergo no new nukes.

In President Bush’s major speech on global warming earlier in the week, he again emphasized the need to build a new generation of such plants. But Nichols said, up to now, the state has managed its energy needs through conservation, efficiency and renewable power. She added, however, that with the population still growing, and with the continued development of “things that plug in” that more and more people feel they must have, the situation might have to be revisited.

The Yale governors’ conference declaration calls for a partnership between the federal government and the states as the only effective way to reduce global warming, and further calls for continued support for existing state-based climate action plans that were undertaken in the absence of action by the Bush administration. (And the Clinton/Gore administration, it must be noted, although the previous president could legitimately claim that the Republican-controlled Congress was perhaps the biggest obstacle.)

“This is a significant commitment to action,” Esty said (pictured with Julie Newman, director of Yale’s Office of Sustainability). “These governors represent more than half the nation’s population, and their states cumulatively represent emissions equal to the total emissions of Britain, France, Germany and Italy.”