California: How the Golden State went green
In the state where the car is king and the freeways go on forever, revolution is in the air - and the water, and the landfills. California is bravely blazing a trail in the fight against climate change. Now its Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is being hailed as a global eco-hero
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 10 April 2007
Afew weeks ago, residents of Catalina Island off the coast of southern California were invited to a screening of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The mayor of Avalon, Catalina's one and only town, didn't have high expectations; the island, 20 miles out from the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is known for its conservative politics and its population of affluent weekend yachting types who don't believe in crimping their lifestyles for anything as nebulous as the future of the planet.
The event, though, was a sell-out - attracting about 400 people, or almost 12 per cent of Avalon's population - and the crowd stayed at the end for a lively question and answer session.
Anyone who has seen Gore's film can guess why it had such a powerful impact. If global warming causes the oceans to rise, Catalina will be the first place on the US West Coast to feel the effect; mostly probably, it will split into two islands at the point where its two mountain ranges meet. The Pacific would quickly swallow up Avalon's pretty semi-circular waterfront, with its pedestrian walkways, cafés, ice-cream parlours and surf and diving equipment stores, which attract hordes of weekend and holiday visitors.
Global warming is likely to hit Catalina hard even before matters reach such a dire point. An hour's ferry ride from the mainland, it is just far away enough to feel, in some ways, eerily uninvolved in the problems of civilisation at large, but also close enough to feel, in other ways, crucially bound up in them.
The island already suffers water shortages, which will only get worse if temperatures rise and water supplies on the Californian mainland become scarcer. If fuel costs rise, so too will the price of living on an island almost wholly dependent on diesel barged in from the mainland and burnt in an electricity generation facility.
Catalina is hitting the limits of sustainability in other ways, too. Its landfill for household waste is projected to fill up in about 20 years, raising the prospect of shipping the waste back to the mainland, at huge cost. Its saltwater sewage system is falling apart because the salt is attacking the pipes, causing liquid effluent to bleed into the very Pacific waters that attract the tourists, who are the principal engine of the island's economy.
All this comes as a profound psychological shock to an island that has enjoyed an idyllic existence as a carefree getaway for the past 90 years, ever since the Chicago chewing-gum king William Wrigley bought it for $3m and turned it into a resort, complete with casino, beachfront attractions and tours of the surrounding ocean in glass-bottomed boats.
Present-day Catalina is not shying away from its problems; rather, it is confronting them head-on. Its aim is a complete rethink of the way it manages its lifestyle, so that it becomes as close to self-sustaining as possible. Cutting carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions to zero may be too much to ask, but it hopes, in the next few years, to become an emblematic trailblazer in the fight against global warming, inspiring and influencing communities on the mainland and beyond.
"What can a small town of 3,500 residents do to solve the problems of the world?" asks Avalon's mayor, a diving-shop owner and long-time Catalina resident called Bob Kennedy. "We can educate a million visitors a year. We can plan for a model community. We want to be more responsible custodians of the environment, whether global warming is truly a phenomenon or not."
The dream scenario, as laid out in a local blueprint known as the 2020 Vision Plan, would have Catalina generating most, if not all, of its power from renewable solar, wind and ocean resources. The landfill waste would be recycled as ethanol or used as a fuel source in itself by being burnt using state-of-the-art, clean technologies. The cars and golf carts the residents use to get around the small network of paved roads would be zero-emission electric vehicles. Much of the island's potable water would be produced by an energy-efficient desalination plant.
The solid waste in the sewage system would be processed into hydrogen and other fuels using bacterial fuel cells. The liquid waste would be recycled for use as irrigation water, or pumped back into the island's aquifer, or reused more directly to flush Avalon's household toilets. As Bob Kennedy puts it, with just a hint of mixed metaphor: "We're throwing 60 eggs in the henhouse and hoping that 20 or 30 of them will make sense for Avalon."
The dreams of tiny Catalina are, in many ways, the embodiment of what California as a whole hopes to achieve. While the Bush administration in Washington has preferred to kowtow to the short-term interests of the big energy companies and flirt with those who would deny that global warming poses any threat at all, the Golden State has taken matters into its own hands.
Indeed, California has, almost single-handedly, pushed the debate forward across the United States. Since 2005, when he issued his first executive order establishing emission reduction targets over the next half-century, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has staked much of his reputation and legacy on finding ways to roll back the effects of global warming.
Last summer, he signed a landmark bill requiring California to bring its emissions down to 1990 levels by the year 2020. He has accelerated a programme to convert 20 per cent of California's energy to renewables by 2010. He has taken advantage of California's long history of air pollution controls and car-exhaust regulations to offer incentives to drivers of hybrid petrol-electric vehicles, and he has thrown his support behind the long-term construction of a "hydrogen highway" - a possible future in which gasoline has been entirely replaced by compressed gas in private cars and trucks.
As Schwarzenegger put it, with characteristic bluntness, back in 2005: "The debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now."
In a political system notoriously susceptible to the lobbying power of special industry interests, it's easy to be a little cynical about how wide-ranging any reforms might be. The car and oil giants, in concert with state authorities, killed an early experiment with electric vehicles in the late 1990s, and they have successfully resisted any attempts to impose significantly higher fuel-efficiency standards.
But the symbolic value of California's involvement is huge. It is the world's sixth-largest economy, and also the 12th-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And Schwarzenegger has done something else the Bush administration has resisted - he's joined forces with partners, nationally and internationally. David Cameron has announced that Schwarzenegger had accepted his invitation to speak at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool this autumn. Last summer, the Governor signed a highly unusual joint memorandum of understanding on global warming with Tony Blair.
California's regulators are now drawing up plans for an emissions trading system along the lines of the one operating in the European Union; in fact, a delegation from the California Environmental Protection Agency was in Europe on a fact-finding mission a week ago. Its members visited London to speak to officials at the Foreign Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry to find out what works and what doesn't. (In return, British officials are interested in California's pioneering air quality and vehicle exhaust regulation system, which has significantly reduced the smog hovering above Los Angeles.) California has also signed cross-border emissions regulation agreements with its near-neighbours Oregon, Washington, Arizona and New Mexico, so that companies won't have the option of dodging new standards by moving to a nearby state.
One person excited by these developments is Sir Nicholas Stern, the British Government's top adviser on global warming policy. Sir Nicholas was in the Golden State last week. "California joining up [to the global emissions trading market] would be a big signal, not just for the size of the market but of the direction the United States and the world is going," he told a San Francisco newspaper. "It would really move the debate in Europe, in China and elsewhere."
Schwarzenegger makes very similar arguments to Tony Blair's when he says that combating global warming and finding ways to curb emissions are actually a potential boon to the economy, not a drawback - because of the energy savings involved and, in California, with its vast scientific research infrastructure, because of the huge revenues that could accrue from developing new green technologies.
A report by Schwarzenegger's Climate Action Team last year suggested that reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 would, in itself, create an estimated 83,000 jobs in California and an extra $4bn (about £2bn) in income. That sort of talk has, in turn, seduced some of the state's big electricity providers and other companies. Others are being chivvied on by the nature of the emissions cap-and-trade system - there are tangible financial incentives to meet the mandated targets.
There is, naturally, some resistance - on the right, from companies who instinctively distrust government regulation in and of itself, and on the left, from environmental lobbyists who fear that the emissions trading system will give companies greater rewards than their progress on cutting greenhouse gases really deserves. That has been a criticism in Britain, where carbon dioxide emissions actually rose last year in spite of the flurry of regulatory efforts to cut back.
If anywhere, though, is destined to be the grand stage on which the global warming policies of the future are to be forged, it is California. In part, that is a matter of political culture; no other place on the planet is more imaginative in putting green ideas into practice, whether it is putting solar panels on the roofs of private houses, or whether it is Hollywood stars ditching the traditional limo and having themselves driven to the Oscars in a hybrid Toyota Prius. It does no harm that Schwarzenegger, Republican though he is, is a part of the Hollywood mindset that likes to lavish its patronage on groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But California's interest in the subject goes well beyond trendy political fads. It is, literally, a matter of survival. The state is, in many ways, on the front line of global climate change. Its heavily populated coast, especially around Los Angeles and San Francisco, is under direct threat from rising ocean levels. Its suburbs are at greater risk from forest fires. If the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains is allowed to melt (estimates suggest a loss of 70 to 90 per cent over the next century), a key water source for an already thirsty state will dwindle away.
Rising temperatures would pose many direct threats to the farming region in the Central Valley, the world's largest single food-producing area, including lack of irrigation water, lower soil fertility, disruption of the region's dam and flood control systems, and the possibility of salt-water contamination. The Napa and Sonoma valleys may get too hot for premier wine production. Smog would return with a vengeance, both in Los Angeles and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley south of Sacramento.
What are the prospects of forestalling these trends? Certainly, government regulation is a big part of the answer. But it is also about creating a sufficient sense of urgency to muster the political will for change - perhaps even radical change.
Catalina Island is as good a place as any to test the political and popular mood. Sure, it's on the coast, so it is very different from the state's farming or desert regions (where population increase has been fastest in recent years). Sure, it is a community that, unusually, coexists with a vast natural wilderness.
But it is also distinctly detached from the progressive politics of LA or San Francisco. Many of its residents have moved in from Orange County, the suburban area south of LA that was once synonymous with conservative Republican white males. Their ethos is the ethos of the American West - let me have my property and leave me alone. When Bob Kennedy first ran for office a couple of years ago, he did not so much as mention the environment in his campaign; he knew it was not a vote-winner. Too many people, he said, were "not as concerned with the environment as they are with their pocket-book". As one Avalon resident who did not want to be named put it: "People here are very independent and don't like to be told what to do. It's as far west as you can go."
Because of the layout of the island - most of the human transport is restricted to the couple of square miles of the town of Avalon - the most common vehicle is the golf cart, which is certainly a good start where emissions are concerned. But most of the golf carts run on fuel, not electricity. When a batch of Ford Think electric carts was introduced as an experiment a couple of years ago, residents complained that the charging stations were too few and far between, and developed an aversion to all electric vehicles. The authorities haven't pushed the issue - not least because the electricity for any low-emissions vehicles would have to be generated by the same dirty diesel fuel the island depends on (for the moment) for everything else.
Avalon's population has also given the thumbs-down to proposed car-sharing schemes. Americans think of their cars as extensions of their houses, taking personal pride in them and filling them with all sorts of personal junk. Residents of Catalina are no exception. "People can't visualise it yet," says a wistful Sue Rikalo, who introduced a flex-car proposal as a member of the island's planning commission. "If it was in place, everyone would love it. But getting them to change is a real challenge."
That said, Catalina has several built-in advantages. It doesn't have a major industry to mount significant opposition to the anti-global warming measures. The power brokers on the island, relatively few in number, include: the elected leadership of Avalon; the power company, which handles electricity, water and gas; a foundation called the Catalina Conservancy, which keeps the wilderness covering some 90 per cent of the island thriving; the Santa Catalina Island Company, which owns most of the rest of the land; the Chamber of Commerce; and the University of Southern California, which maintains an environmental and marine research facility funded by the Wrigley family. Together, these players all agree on the need to fight global warming and are reasonably confident they can steer popular opinion their way over time.
Making the 2020 Vision a reality has, so far, largely involved entertaining offers from cutting-edge scientific research companies who say they have come up with one dream technological breakthrough or another and want to use Catalina as their shop window. Bob Kennedy, who readily admits that he's dealt with a lot of "snake-oil salesmen", isn't willing to spend serious money until he's quite sure of what he's getting. Ann Moscot, the director of the Catalina Conservancy, says she wants to rely only on proven technologies. She expects the initial transition to take anything from five to 10 years.
Some of the enthusiasm for the anti-global warming project has taken forms that even a dyed-in-the-wool conservative can relate to. The chairman of the Island Company, Paxson Offield, known as Poppy, is enthralled with the idea of building a golf course at an idyllic spot called Descanso Beach that would rely entirely on recycled liquid waste - essentially, golf without guilt.
Sometimes, it's enough to lead by example. Just one house on Catalina has solar panels on its roof, a large pink residence on a hill overlooking the Avalon pier, belonging to a retired dentist called Frank Blair. The tenant who lives in Blair's guest-house just happens to be Avalon's city manager, Tom Sullivan. Sullivan can't help but notice that, while the rest of the island had to endure a recent 50 per cent spike in its electricity bills, he and his landlord pay nothing; the panels supply everything they need.
Sue Rikalo, the planning commissioner, runs the restaurant next to Catalina's small airport. She is introducing compostable bamboo plates and napkins, business cards made of recycled paper, non-toxic toilet cleaner and "green" office-supplies. She is trying to get every other business owner on the island to follow her example - with some success. "We're just dropping seeds, getting things started," she says.
Mayor Kennedy and others argue that these are more than token gestures - they are the inevitable wave of the future. He's staking his reputation, and his re-election bid next year, on the proposition that people will have to change, whether they like it or not. "Sure, people here are anti-growth, anti-change," he says. "But they forget that if things carry on as they are, one day they are going to flush their toilet and nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to work."
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