California leads fight against climate change on global level
Gov. Schwarzenegger signs a pact with heads of other states and provinces to cut greenhouse emissions. 'We have got to do something worldwide here,' he says.
California formally moved to spread its can-do global warming gospel around the world, signing a declaration Wednesday with 11 other U.S. states and provinces or states in five other countries to help them slash their greenhouse gas emissions.
Fighting climate change shouldn't just go "nation by nation," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a climate summit in Beverly Hills attended by more than 700 delegates from 19 countries. It must go "province by province. . . . We have got to do something worldwide here," he said.
California's unusual state-level diplomacy comes as President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to invigorate U.S. participation in negotiations for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in 2005 -- and which the Bush administration declined to join.
Talks on a new climate treaty resume in Poland next month, and final agreement is expected to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009. But success is far from assured as industrial nations, which have caused much of the world's global warming, battle with fast-growing developing nations such as China to determine who should cut emissions.
Regional leaders signing Wednesday's declaration said they would develop strategies for high-polluting industries in an effort to influence the talks. The signers included 12 U.S. governors and state or provincial representatives from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and India.
California has developed more technical expertise in controlling planet-heating emissions than any U.S. state in the two years since it passed a law requiring its emissions to fall by about 15% in the next 12 years. And although the federal government has stalled in adopting any economy-wide climate legislation, the Golden State has forged ahead with renewable energy standards, automobile tailpipe regulations, efficiency incentives and forest carbon protocols.
"California is a little spot on the globe, but the influence we have on the rest of the world is enormous," Schwarzenegger told the conference, touting the "green jobs" that the state would produce from solar and other clean-technology energy.
The declaration sets in motion a process for the state's Air Resources Board, one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated pollution control agencies, to share engineering and policy expertise with regions such as Brazil's Amazon states and Indonesia's forested provinces on how to measure and control greenhouse gases.
