Western Climate Initiative Moves On, Goes Forward

U.S. states and Canadian provinces take up the slack where their respective Federal governments dither and delay on climate change action. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger met with the British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, where they discussed mutually important issues including energy and the environment. The following photo was taken in the Governor’s Office at the State Capitol in Sacramento, California earlier this month.  Photo credit: Justin Short.

The WCI was launched in February 2007 by the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington to develop regional strategies to address climate change. The initiative expanded to include the states of Montana and Utah, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. The partners set a regional goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.    

“The detailed plan for a regional carbon market released today [July 27] by the Western Climate Initiative reminds us that states—and provinces—are ready, willing and able to lead the way to a clean energy economy in the absence of federal leadership.

“This plan has been in the works for many months, but the timing of its release coincides with frustrating news that the chances of the U.S. Senate passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill this session are slim. - Erin Rogers, manager of the Western States Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

The Western Climate Initiative is the largest climate collaboration in North America, representing 3/4 of Canada's economy and 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

When implemented, the WCI program will be the most comprehensive carbon-reduction strategy adopted anywhere in the world. It is “economy-wide,” meaning that all sectors – energy, industry and transportation – participate in addressing climate change as well as receive the economic benefits. Together, the seven states and four provinces that make up the WCI represent over 20 percent of the U.S. economy and 70 percent of the Canadian economy.

Ian Bruce writes on David Suzuki's website that: This could be the most significant blueprint for climate change emissions reductions in North America, as long as the partners, including B.C., Ontario, Manitoba, and Quebec, close several major loopholes in the regulations...Read MORE

For a copy of the detailed program design or for more information on the WCI visitwww.westernclimateinitiative.org/news-and-updates.

In related news, California is out ahead of the U.S. pack when it comes to clean-tech investment. As reported in L.A. Times Blog by Tiffany Hsu, "Venture capital investment in clean-tech companies for the second quarter hit $1.5 billion -- a 63.8% increase from the same quarter in 2009 and the highest amount since the third quarter of 2008, according to Ernst & Young. And again as reported in L.A. Times Blog: "Solar companies ended the quarter with 182.6% more funding than in the same period in 2009. Of that $438.8 million pot, Brightsource Energy Inc. of Oakland tucked away $180 million."

And with $265.7 million, biofuel firms saw a 517.2% boom compared to last year."  Solar and Electric vehicles seem to be the darlings of the day with Israeli/ Palo Alto-based A Better Place recently scoring $350Million in Funding. 

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X Games Take Over Downtown L.A....and Scream Green!

X Games 16 Skateboard Vert Men’s Final Results

Final standings from the ESPN X Games 16 Skateboard Vert Men’s event held at The Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif. on July 30, 2010.

Name– Hometown– Score
1. Pierre-Luc Gagnon – Carlsbad, Calif. – 93.00
2. Shaun White – Carlsbad, Calif. – 85.00
3. Andy Macdonald – San Diego, Calif. – 79.00
4. Bucky Lasek –Baltimore, Md. –60.00
5. Sandro Dias –Santo Andre, Brazil –60.00

Jamie Bestwick at X Games 16. Credit: Pete Demos/Shazamm/ESPN Images

X Games 16 BMX Freestyle Vert Final Results

Final standings from the ESPN X Games 16 BMX Freestyle Vert Finals event held at Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif. on July 30, 2010.

Name – Hometown – Score
1. Jamie Bestwick – Derbyshire, Great Britain90.00
2. Steve McCann –Melbourne, Australia80.00
3. Simon Tabron – Newquay, Great Britain80.00
4. Chad Kagy – Gilroy, Calif. – 79.00
5. Coco Zurita –Santiago, Chile – 70.00

Global Inheritance, the non-profit that thinks green and out of the box, presented attendees of ESPN's X Games with these activities this past weekend at L.A. Live.

X Games Energy Playground. Will also be at Lollapalooza.

+++ TRASHed Recycling Store (only currency accepted is empty bottles/cans/biodegradable cups)

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House Plant Vacations At The Hammer Museum

Houseplant Vacation - Plant Drop off 

The Hammer invites you to give your houseplant a vacation during our August cultural retreat for plants. Throughout the entire month, participant's plants will be installed in the light flooded Lindbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events, for plants every Saturday from 1-4pm. See below for the full schedule and for information about plant portraiture by Lisa Anne Abash. (Please no sick/infested plants - this is a vacation, not rehab).

Plant drop off is July 31, 11am- 6pm and pick up August 28, 11am- 6pm ONLY!

You can download the attached plant release waiver and fill it out before you come to the museum or you can do this when you drop off your plant.

 

• Saturday, July 31, 11am to 6pm: Drop off at the Hammer Museum and plant portrait photography

• Saturday, August 7, 1-4pm: Musical performances, dramatic readings, and psychic plant healing

• Saturday, August 14, 1-4pm: Musical performances, poetry, and psychic plant healing

•  Saturday, August 21, 1-4pm: Musical performances, historical accounts of botanical exploration and psychic plant healing

• Sunday, August 29, 11am to 6pm: Plant pick up at the Hammer Museum

About A.I.R.

In June 2009, the Hammer Museum was awarded a $1 million Arts Innovation Fund grant from the James Irvine Foundation to create a new model for visitor engagement, conceived and driven by artists. To that end, in November, the museum welcomed its first Public Engagement Artist in Residence (A.I.R.), Machine Project. The Echo Park-based collective, led by Mark Allen, has produced nearly 40 programs onsite including an overnight Dream-In; microconcerts in a coatroom-turned-theater; and needle pointing group-therapy sessions.

 

For additional information on these and other A.I.R. projects, please check the museum’s blog http://hammer.ucla.edu/newsblogs/ or Machine Project’s website.

 

About Machine Project

Machine Project is a non-profit performance and installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food. Machine presents events, workshops, and site-specific installations using hands-on engagement to make rarefied knowledge accessible. Beyond their storefront space, Machine Project operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from the Santa Monica beach to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Currently, Machine Project is serving as artist in residence at the Hammer Museum producing a year of programming addressing the visitor experience and public engagement.

 

 

 HAMMER MUSEUM  10899 Wilshire Blvd.  Los Angeles, CA 90024

 

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Greetings From Planet Ocean

By Graham Hill

A note from the editor:

After sailing 8,000 nautical miles, The Plastiki – carrying a 10-member crew  – arrived triumphantly in Sydney harbor on July 26^th, completing a 130-days voyage across the Pacific Ocean.

 

After engaging in a role-playing game with actress Glenn Close during the TED Mission Blue Voyage, entrepreneur Graham Hill joined fellow Selection Committee member and adventure ecologist David DeRothschild and his Plastiki crew on a groundbreaking voyage across the Pacific Ocean.

“I’m not a werewolf,” said Glenn Close, her eyes not leaving mine for a second. My mind reeled. Could I trust her? She seemed calm and confident. Or was that a slight smirk in her smile?

Close, myself, several environmentally engaged celebs such as Edward Norton and Leonardo DiCaprio, along with AOL founder Steve Case, tech savant Bill Joy, and a number of philanthropists, were among the 100 or so aboard a Lindblad Expeditions ship in the Galapagos this past April for the TED Mission Blue Voyage. The five-day conference had been organized by TED and Dr. Sylvia Earle, the deep-sea-diving pioneer and 2009 TED Prize winner. Close and DiCaprio had taken a break from plotting ways to save the world’s oceans for a mean game of Werewolves and Villagers, a highly addictive role-playing game. The game won, Close, talented actress that she is, smiled mischievously. Total werewolf.

This scene, frankly, wasn’t one I had ever imagined myself in. But being the founder of one of the more popular green websites, TreeHugger.com, had, strangely — and wonderfully — brought me together with a lot of people I never dreamed I’d play role-playing games with below decks on the equator. And thankfully! The increasingly vivid environmental nightmare we were heading toward has prompted many of our society’s influencers to see how they can help, and the TED Mission Blue Voyage was the first of two such inspired gatherings I’ve been privileged to drop in on lately, the second being the Plastiki, my pal David de Rothschild’s recycled-plastic-bottle “cataraft,” on which I was just crossing the Pacific.

Unlike many maps, globes are not distorted. Take a look at one. Spin it around. Notice that there’s way more blue than brown. Center it over Hawaii, and the Pacific covers your whole view. The oceans cover fully 71 percent of the globe. It ain’t Planet Earth; it’s very clearly Planet Ocean. Without the oceans, we’d quite simply go extinct, and this is the fundamental issue that both the TED Mission Blue Voyage and Plastiki are addressing.

In the Galapagos, Sylvia Earle wanted to galvanize support for saving our oceans by creating a global network of marine protected areas dubbed “Hope Spots” — think national parks for regions of the ocean — and over the five-day event, she got a major head start. The event featured your standard intense battery of TED talks (ocean-focused), lightened with interludes by Chevy Chase, Damien Rice, and Jackson Browne and peppered with guided snorkeling excursions, diving trips, and nature walks (per Cousteau: we protect what we love).

Between premiering Jake Eberts’s latest masterpiece, Oceans; showing videos of Mike Rutzen playing with a variety of monstrous sharks; displaying fantastic ocean photos by Brian Skerry; and raising a cool 17 million (yes, million), the TED-curated talks delivered. Among much else we learned that our fisheries have been decimated, that two-thirds of our oceans are out of any nation’s control and therefore are frustratingly difficult to regulate. We learned that we insanely subsidize our two-and-a-half-times-too-large fishing industry to the tune of $35 billion a year, while a mere $16 billion could protect more than 20 percent of the seas.

Once Mission Blue concluded, I hightailed it to Christmas Island, Kiribati. Five hours south of Hawaii, this is where I joined up with the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran made out of 12,500 reclaimed bottles and a fully recyclable plastic called Seretex.

The cat looked like a pleasure yacht. But one with Magiveresque additions of solar panels, wind turbines, a gigantic terrarium apparatus, and even a power-creating stationary bike. It was crowned with a Buckminster Fuller–inspired geodesic igloo for the crew. In short order, I came to understand that Adventure Ecology’s vessel, while very high-tech in some ways, was more raft than boat. An experimental craft built in San Francisco over the past few years, the Plastiki’s mission was to sail from there to Sydney using only alternative energy (wind, solar, hydro, human) while drawing attention to the plight of our oceans and encouraging us to start thinking “resource instead of “waste” management by emulating our animal brethren and designing for zero waste. The adventure part? The Pacific is absolutely massive, the boat sails a measly three or so knots per hour, and due to the design challenge of hulls full of water bottles, she easily drifts sideways and has serious turning restrictions.

By my fourth day, I’d acclimated to the round-the-clock three-hour watches, the constant salty damp and the incessant creaking, clanging, whistling of our lady Plastiki as she lumbered across the oh-so-ginormous Pacific in a suspiciously Truman Show fashion. The vibe was great onboard, and with partners such as HP and Inmarsat, there was plenty of media streaming outward to CNN, Oprah, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, TreeHugger, and many others. It was also revealing to see how six people can live relatively comfortably in a tiny, tiny space (a roughly 300-square-foot cabin) while only using wind and solar energy.

About 10 days in, coming out of said 95-degree sweatbox of a cabin, I noticed our normally trailing buoy far to port. The infamous doldrums were upon us. And so, with equal parts excitement and fear, we jumped into the water for a swim, excited to get into the massive ocean for a cool-off and for a change of scenery, but fearful that our snail’s pace would be further slowed. We swam around like excited children, leaping off the cabin into the sea, diving deep and hanging onto the buoy, as far as one could safely get from the boat. The water was as blue and has as much visibility as a swimming pool, yet I dove and dove again looking for signs of life. Eerily, we saw nothing at all near the surface, and I understood how parts of the ocean truly can be desert-like.

 

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Greetings From Planet Ocean

California Says, We Are Going To Pump You Up!

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today issued the following statement after the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced an award of up to $122 million over five years to the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), an Energy Innovation Hub with a team of leading researchers tasked with developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight:

 

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger delivers comments to NARUC July 21st in Sacramento. Photo courtesy Justin Short.

 

The Hub will be funded at up to $22 million this fiscal year and is one of only three that will receive funding this year. For more information visit: http://www.energy.gov/news/9243.htm.

“California has always been the birthplace for the nation and the world’s newest wave of research and innovation, so it couldn’t be more fitting the Department of Energy chose our state for this groundbreaking work. This energy hub will bring together some of the best minds to work on solutions that will reduce our dependence on oil and increase our energy security, all while creating jobs in our state. We have always led the way in California, and this impressive team will help further advance our global leadership in clean energy technologies.”

As a matter of fact, there are 270 companies that want to build now in California for renewable energy,...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered remarks at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Annual Summer Committee Meetings on July 21, 2010.

Excerpts from the Partial Transcripts follow:

(Sacramento, Calif. July 21, 2010)  …And this is something that we have had in California. We have had consistency.

And this is why we have to go and do everything that we can to continue with that consistency. Why? Because we have to be and all of you have to be an inspiration to the federal government to create that consistency, because the federal government is a disaster when it comes to energy policy. They haven't had an energy policy for decades.

We all remember when Jimmy Carter came in with some brilliant ideas about solar and about doing research and exploration of shale oil and wind and all of those kind of things. The next administration came in and said well, wait a minute. A barrel of oil is down to $10. Why are we futzing around with all this stuff over here when we can just buy the oil? And the policy was out the window. So this is not consistency, so people don't know, should we invest in this or not invest in it? They don't know. They're confused.

And right now, several decades later -- and I've watched all this since I've been in this country, I can tell you -- it is really amazing that today the federal government still doesn't have a policy. They have no idea how much they're going to rely on more nuclear plants, what is their portfolio, their goal when it comes to renewable. No idea. No one can answer that question, how much should we reduce in greenhouse gases, what should our standards be, what kind of cars do we want 10 years, 20 years down the road? None of those things anyone can answer.

And this is a disaster because the rest of the world, European countries, have a goal. Even in 1976 when they started changing, when they saw the oil crisis. The Europeans stayed on course even though the oil price went down. And now, 30 years later, you see the great work that is being done in Germany, in Spain, in Portugal, Denmark and all of those European countries...  Read Entire Transcript at:  http://gov.ca.gov/

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California Says, We Are Going To Pump You Up!