They say change starts small, and while the push for environmental change is finally foremost among the world’s leaders, one man is fighting the war against global warming one state and one country at a time. Terry Tamminen, formerly California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s environmental advisor and head of the state’s Environmental Protection Agency, is an all-round renaissance environmentalist.
In 2007 Tamminen was named Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy Program of The New America Foundation, and he was also appointed as an operating advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors. Tamminen is the author of several books, the latest called “Lives for Gallons: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction (Island Press). And Tamminen serves as executive director of Seventh Generation Advisors, a firm offering environmental and energy policy advice to leaders and emerging clean technology firms worldwide.
What does all this mean? Tamminen is currently traipsing the globe, determined to make a positive impact on climate change. And so far, through his affiliation with the New America Foundation, a non-profit, post-partisan, public policy institute, as well as the Seventh Generation Advisors, Tamminen has managed to convince some 30 U.S. states to implement hundreds of carbon- and energy-saving measures. His efforts resulted in the State Climate Policy Tracker, a single spreadsheet with one tab devoted to each state, developed as a collaborative effort to be an online tool that shows climate actions taking place across six economic sectors.
The Policy Tracker was compiled from publicly available information and reports on the progress of every measure, the cost or cost-savings potential, and the estimated reduction in carbon emissions anticipated annually. Much of the individual state planning was enabled by the Center for Climate Change Strategies, another non-profit group that helps states and the country deal with climate change through consensus-driven policies and programs to work toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as adapting to the changing climate. The measures in the Tracker are structured according to the economic sectors used by each state as following:
- Energy Efficiency and Conservation (Residential, Commercial, Industrial)
- Clean and Renewable Energy, Energy Supply
- Transportation and Land Use
- Agriculture, Forestry and Waste Management
- Water
- Education
- Cross-Cutting issues (i.e. Inventories, Cap and Trade)
And Tamminen hasn’t stopped with the United States. According to SolveClimate.com, over the spring and summer he’s traveled to Bahrain, Norway, Holland, India, England, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing, meeting with government officials, business leaders, and policy leaders on behalf of the environment. Despite the likely passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill and the upcoming climate change meeting in Copenhagen, Tamminen seems determined to take on global issues such as renewable energy on his own.
SolveClimate.com reports that he’s been in discussions with Zhou Dadi, one of the most influential energy policy leaders in China, to translate the strides the country has made in reducing emissions while growing its economy on existing energy supplies into climate qualifications that can be used elsewhere. China is currently outpacing the U.S. in efforts to build cleaner-coal-fired power plants.
And, for the record, Tamminen’s home in suburban Los Angeles is powered entirely by solar panels, and he plans to have both his house and car running off solar energy in the very near future.
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