Berkeley and Saratoga

On Tuesday, I received a flurry of E-Mails from David Crockett Williams in Berkeley regarding an Emergency Climate Stabilization meeting to be held at the Berkeley City Council Chambers on Wednesday. Since these concerns are not that far from my daily concerns as an air quality meteorologist, I decided to attend. The meeting was actually pretty quiet, but it was a genuine pleasure talking to Alden Bryant and Chris Conrad. I was able to emphasize the distinct difference between air quality management (which is what I do at my day job, where regulation of trace gas emissions can be tackled comparatively easily), and climate stabilization management (which deals more with bulk CO2 emissions, and is much, much harder to implement (because of the necessary worldwide scope of the effort, combined with the ill-defined, hard-to-enumerate nature of some of the carbon sinks, like rock weathering).

We found a useful point of unanimous agreement - the world doesn't need new, badly-done regulatory schemes. Good schemes - OK: bad ones, no. My view is that we actually know enough to start climate stabilization management anyway, no matter what political obstacles exist, and that's actually been the case since the 1880's, when a German scientist (I believe by the name of Heinz) first noticed that fossil fuel consumption could lead to global warming. The longer we wait to get effective management in place, of course, the worse the consequences of global climate change are likely to be.

It's also important to note that the industrial world is seriously addicted to petroleum, and regulation by itself, like prohibition laws for an alcoholic, is a feeble antidote. Something stronger, like intervention, is required to break an addiction, but we need tools first for an effective intervention: savvier cars (like hybrids) might be a start. I'm also convinced that the petroleum industry is more than aware of the problem, and that they aren't automatic opponents of our efforts - the engineers among them love new gadgets anyway, and would prefer to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

After the Berkeley meeting, I travelled to San Jose to visit my old friend from graduate student days, Jerry Steffens, who teaches meteorology at San Jose State University. I stumbled across a student journalist with a camera interviewing two frat brothers about a recent student death, and I horned in, thereby getting an unexpected interview with San Jose State Student News, which is apparently televised on Cable TV over a 10-county or so area on Sundays at 6 a.m.

After surprising Jerry, I left for a 12-candidate debate sponsored by a student branch of "Democracy Matters" at Saratoga High School (even as the 'big' debate between the top five candidates was going on simultaneously back in Sacramento). What a great time, although I wish there had been more than 80 or so people there. There were 12 campaigns there (a representative of John Burton's campaign, plus candidates Roscoe, Scheidle, Laughing Horse Robinson, Vaughn, Fontanes, Zellhoefer, Sproul, Foss, Miller, Richtmyer, and Valdez). There were many verbal tussles in the colorful group. I remember expressing disdain for the concept of a "Zero Emission Vehicle" even as Darrin Scheidle (who owns one) defended the concept, and David Laughing Horse Robinson expressed disdain for my idea that the closer the margin of victory, the harder the victor will have to work to get a mandate to govern while in office, and the better for the people of California. One student asked a very penetrating question regarding my anti-Proposition 13 stance, homing in on the weakness that unemployed people sitting on expensive properties (not than unusual a problem these days in Silicon Valley) could lose their homes due to property taxes, and thus I had to elaborate on my fail-safe mechanisms to prevent that from ever happening. We had a great time!

After the debate, I visited my friend Jerry at his apartment, before travelling very late back to Sacramento, in my non-ZEV 2002 Saturn SC coupe.