Air Date: Week of June 3, 2005

Stephen Schneider, climatologist and professor of biological sciences at Stanford University (Photo: Stanford University)

Host Steve Curwood talks to Stanford’s Stephen Schneider, who advised Governor Schwartzenegger on his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Transcript

CURWOOD: Joining me to talk about the governor’s plan is Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, who is also an advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger about global warming. Professor Schneider – what’s the significance of this announcement by Governor Schwarzenegger?

SCHNEIDER: What we’ve done is we’ve set a bipartisan example that in my view is dramatically important. It’s a lesson I wish they’d learn inside the beltway because the environment and conservation is a conservative issue. It should not be ideologically polarized into blue and red states. So this may be more important from the fact that a significant Republican did it than actually what he had asked.

CURWOOD: What’s the mechanism of enforcement. I mean it’s fine for a governor to say, “California should do this.” What powers does he have to make it happen?

SCHNEIDER: Steve, you’ve got your finger right on the problem. Uh, you’ve got to have some rules and the rules have got to have teeth and that’s going to take political buy-in and this announcement from the governor today is part of the process of getting the public to buy into the need for real rules with enforcement, but we’re not there yet. So this is important to get us going, but the next thing to do Steve, we’ve got to do it or this really is just talk, is we have to have the California legislature pass rules for efficiency, of appliances efficiency, of cars which is already done. We have to defend them in court and not lose to the auto industry, it’s not clear about that.

We have to then set-up a cap and trade program where we have limits on emissions and we allow the polluters that can’t make it to buy from those people who are more efficient than their requirements and they actually get a reward for having invented clean mechanisms and all those kinds of rules will now have to be implemented. I actually think there’s a decent chance they’ll get implemented in California.

Then other states, New York, Massachusetts, and other states in the Northeast and Oregon and Washington have all said, “well if California does it, we’re going to do it.” So pretty soon we start surrounding the federal recalcitrants. The ones that are hanging back and refusing to do anything and we’ll have to get those guys to finally do the right thing which is to set it up the level we have to set it up which is nationally.

CURWOOD: Um, how does Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan compare to the Kyoto process?

SCHNEIDER: It’s stronger in the long run and weaker in the short run. Kyoto said that we needed to cut in the United States to seven percent approximately below our 1990 levels of emissions, but we’ve been going way up, we’re like 15, 18 percent higher now than we were in 1990. And the California cut that he talked about was to the year 2000. So it’s still different. The California target that the governor’s talking about is still about an eight percent increase to 2010. But without it we would have been a 20 or a 22 percent increase so it’s a big change.

CURWOOD: Now one of the mechanisms that California is looking to is to use the cap and trade system to meet this very ambitious goal of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That would mean California as a state would be trading with other countries.