Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
November 20, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
California leads fight against climate change on global level
Los Angeles Times
$4.3-billion water retrofit is ready to get underway
Milpitas Post
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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.
Los Angeles Times – 11/20/2008
By Margot Roosevelt , Staff Writer
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.
China, India, Brazil and other fast-developing nations have resisted caps on their emissions.
"The industrial countries that have been spewing out the most greenhouse gases have a higher responsibility to act," said Gov. Ana Julia de Vasconcelos Carpa of the Brazilian state of Para.
About 20% of the world's annual carbon emissions come from burning forests in Brazil, Indonesia and other tropical nations. In an international carbon market, as envisioned in California's global warming law, U.S. industries could pay to preserve tropical forest as a cheaper way to meet their own global warming targets. It is a source of income that foreign leaders are eager to tap.
Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, one of the signers of the agreement, said that his heavily forested state also would share research with the tropical nations. "We have a joint interest in how the carbon market moves forward," he said. "We want to ensure that forest lands and their facility in capturing carbon receive appropriate credit. This will be a big political fight in this country and around the world."
Tropical deforestation, which was excluded from the emissions rules in the Kyoto Protocol, is expected to be incorporated in the new treaty. But how the developing nations are compensated by wealthy nations for not burning down their forests is far from resolved.
With California and other U.S. states facing severe fiscal restraints as the economy worsens, nonprofit organizations including the Climate Group, Conservation International and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have pledged funds to support working groups and draft position papers for states and provinces that signed Wednesday's pact.
"Everyone wishes they could just say, 'I'm going to protect my forest, so give me money,' " said Peter Seligmann, chief executive of Conservation International. "But we have to verify that any commodity is real. Now these regions are linking with California, the eighth largest economy in the world, in an effort to create a verifiable source of carbon credits. That is huge."#
$4.3-billion water retrofit is ready to get underway
Milpitas Post – 11/19/2008
Milpitas Post Staff
MILPITAS residents might not have noticed but a week ago two San Francisco boards gave their final decisions in two areas which now permit the huge seismic rebuilding of virtually the entire San Francisco water system. Targeted completion date is 2014 construction will take that long. And the costs of paying for the $4.3 billion will have to be shared by Milpitas and its fellow water users in 27 other cities and special districts throughout the Bay Area.
Final decision on how and when to begin collecting for the huge project have been deferred by the city council here after major protests deluged city hall. But it is likely that the newly elected council (which will only have one new member) will have to come to grips with that deferral in the coming year.
Two Oct. 30 actions in San Francisco saw that city's planning commission approve the final environmental impact report for the set of 37 construction projects along the 170 miles of pipelines, dams, power plants and the like. The same day, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that runs the water system from Yosemite National Park down to the users, wrestled with a knotty dilemma of keeping adequate flow for the rapidly diminishing Tuolumne River salmon. That decision limits the needed growth in the supply for the next 10 years.
The system sends 2.4 million Bay Area residents 265 million gallons a day now. And it won't attempt to take more than that over the next decade unless the drought gets a lot worse. In that case, they might take some extra water from the Tuolumne but also cities like Milpitas, San Jose and Santa Clara, which have a second major source in the Santa Clara Valley Water District, might just get cut off.
Speakers at the meetings stressed the need for more recycling, more conservation, and pricing which discourages wasteful water use. Prices act as a strong motivator to conserve, especially in these difficult economic times.
Milpitas has wisely kept the state water plan water and has installed connections and shut-off valves should there be a need to switch from one system to the other. Right now households receive the higher quality Yosemite water with mostly industry getting the water district supplies from the delta and the recycled water for landscaping.
The source of both water supplies is in the Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack. Its east to west route crosses five separate earthquake faults. Most experts don't say "if we get a big earthquake" but "when." So the decision to retrofit the 50- to 75-year-old system is a no-brainer. It will take nearly six years to complete and we have to hope there won't be a cataclysmic break in the interim.#
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