Word on the street has it that The Governator is bringing together a Captain Planet-team of state governors to begin taking solid steps to fight climate change. That’s a great opportunity for Yalies and other locals to get together to stage their own climate change demonstrations and talks. (GET PHOTOS, GET VIDEOS, and POST AWAY!) I’ll highlight more as the details unfold. Check out Yale Daily News highlights from Thomas Kaplan:
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to visit Yale next month to deliver an address on climate change, University officials confirmed last week.
All 50 state governors, as well as their counterparts in the U.S. territories and Canada, have been invited to the conference, although administrators expect only a fraction of them to attend. State environmental-protection commissioners from around the country and at least two former administrators of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, among them former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, are also expected to make the journey to New Haven.
R.K. Pachauri, a one-time FES visiting professor who received the Nobel Peace Prize last year on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which he serves as chairman, is also slated to attend, as is Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president and an environmental activist himself.
Aside from the A-list crowd, the conference will be centered on the unveiling of a policy statement — agreed upon by governors and state environmental-protection officials from across the country — that “effectively calls for a partnership approach between the federal and state government on addressing climate change,” Goodall said.
Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Gina McCarthy will coordinate the statement. She was not immediately available for comment last week.
Schwarzenegger’s speech, as well as a roundtable discussion among the governors on the topic of climate change, is expected to be open to the public, although the time of the speech has not yet been disclosed. Reached by telephone last week, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger would not confirm the governor’s planned visit but said more details would be available as the date of the conference neared.
Schwarzenegger, a Republican, made headlines in 2006 when he signed into law the first enforceable, statewide cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. The program is among the cornerstones of his tenure as governor and drew worldwide praise at the time of its unveiling.
It also addresses an issue that has been a major focus for University President Richard Levin and FES in recent years. During a speech at the University of Copenhagen in January, he called on the world’s economic powers to take action on global warming.
“All of us would like to see the federal government step up — but short of that, the kinds of things that Gov. Schwarzenegger has been pursuing have been very positive,” Levin said Saturday. “He certainly has been a major leader in this field.”
Yale, meanwhile, is making its own effort to fend off global warming: The University is already several years ahead of schedule in its initiative to realize, by 2020, a 10-percent cut in its greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels.
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There is a new world wide web emerging right before our eyes.
It is a global energy network and, like the internet, it will change our culture, society and how we do business. More importantly, it will alter how we use, transform and exchange energy.
When that day comes, to paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin, “for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
For more information, see http://www.terrawatts.com
Cool that Ah-nold is doing this. I hope he talks a bit about energy recycling, which is a topic that tends to get short shrift in most of these talks. I’m associated with a company called Recycled Energy Development, which basically takes the heat from manufacturers’ smokestacks and turns it into electricity and steam. That means lower energy costs AND lower greenhouse pollution. The environmental community at Yale and elsewhere should look into it; it could make a huge dent in global warming — more than taking every car off the road.