Governor Jerry Brown: Difference between revisions
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* [https://www.gov.ca.gov/2018/09/10/governor-brown-signs-100-percent-clean-electricity-bill-issues-order-setting-new-carbon-neutrality-goal/ '''''California Sets Goal of 100% Clean Electricity: Governor Brown Signs Bill, Prepares for International Climate Summit Hosted in San Francisco'''''] | * [https://www.gov.ca.gov/2018/09/10/governor-brown-signs-100-percent-clean-electricity-bill-issues-order-setting-new-carbon-neutrality-goal/ '''''California Sets Goal of 100% Clean Electricity: Governor Brown Signs Bill, Prepares for International Climate Action Summit Hosted in San Francisco'''''] | ||
Revision as of 15:11, 14 September 2018
September 2018
https://globalclimateactionsummit.org
https://globalclimateactionsummit.org/program
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Global_Climate_Action_Summit
When US President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement, California Governor Jerry Brown announced that he would host a "Global Climate Action Summit."
A coalition 'of the willing', of activists, leaders, organizers, cities, states and national representatives is convening in San Francisco, September 12-14, to confront critical environmental challenges and step up common ground efforts toward climate solutions with development of clean, renewable energy.
While Donald Trump goes backwards, California and visionary citizens of the US, partnering globally, move forward.
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LA Times / July 1, 2018
The projected budget deficit Gov. Brown inherited in 2010 stood at $27 billion.
All of which seemed a distant memory Wednesday (June 27) as Brown signed a budget creating a $13.8-billion cash reserve, the largest in state history. “I think people in California can be proud that we’re making progress,” the 80-year old Democrat said standing beside legislative leaders — the oldest of whom was only 12 when Brown was first elected governor in 1974.
LA Times / April 17, 2018
Brown vows to fight Trump over mileage rules until 'long after we have a new president
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Via California Sunday / LA Times-San Francisco Chronicle
March 18, 2018
Jerry Brown, Last Days in a Long Run
- After more than 40 years in public life, 15 as governor of California, he is as combative and contradictory as ever — and still trying to save the world from itself.
- On the defining issue of our time, climate change, Brown has assumed the mantle of alt-president, traveling to Europe and Asia, insisting the United States will not abandon its commitments
BROWN IS unusual among politicians; he’s a pessimist. He likes to quote physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer: “The world is moving in the direction of hell with a high velocity, and perhaps a positive acceleration and a positive rate of change of acceleration.” Or he’ll just come right out with it: “A lot of politicians like to say how good everything is. I like to say how bad everything is — in the spirit of making it better.”
He’s not a fatalist. Nowhere is this more evident than in Brown’s work on climate change. “This is an overarching, existential threat to everything we’re trying to do, to our entire way of life,” he told an audience last year. “Based on that, I believe we have to rise to the occasion.”
Of all the through lines in Brown’s career, the environment is the clearest one.
The start of his political career, in the late 1960s, coincided with the Santa Barbara oil spill, the first Earth Day, and the birth of the modern environmental movement.
NOT LONG BEFORE his last State of the State address, Brown retreated to a small office on the third floor of the governor’s mansion. It was January now, and the sun shone through a small window, brightening the room. Piles of speeches were stacked on his desk. He’d been reading some of his old State of the States, Reagan’s farewell address, and especially the words of his father.
He proudly points out a photo of Pat Brown and John F. Kennedy on a wall in his office. He keeps a framed poster from one of his father’s campaigns for San Francisco district attorney in the waiting room. Friends and family members say Brown has also come to a greater appreciation of the types of big projects his father undertook. “He sees how they’re a manifestation of one’s contribution,” Kathleen Brown says. “They last. Ideas can be more fleeting.”
As Brown sat down to write his State of the State, two such projects were at the front of his mind: the high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco and the water tunnels in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.
Brown says that he sees his pursuit of high-speed rail and the Delta tunnels as carrying on his father’s work — something he likely would not have acknowledged 40 years ago. He concedes, though, that it is far more challenging for the government to pull off such projects in the current political climate, even in liberal California, than it was in his father’s era. Still, he was determined to press his case for his two signature initiatives before he left office.
On the morning of January 25, sitting at his thick wooden conference table under the photo of Kennedy and his father, he gave his State of the State speech one last read. When it was time, he tucked the black binder under his arm and walked from his office to the Assembly chambers. Anne Gust Brown and his staff sat in the gallery. As Brown entered, the chamber erupted with applause and whistles. Democrats and Republicans rose to their feet, many pulling out their cellphones to record a small piece of history. Brown briskly made his way to the speaker’s rostrum, a slightly bemused look on his face as a chant of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” broke out.
“As my father used to say,” he began, “I accept the nomination!” He’d ad-libbed that line. The rest was vintage Brown: frank, challenging, a statement of faith in the purpose of government and the power of politics. He celebrated how far California had come since he’d returned as governor. He championed the Delta tunnels and high-speed rail. And he ended with the story of his great-grandfather, an immigrant who had sailed from Germany to America on a ship named Perseverance. “He persisted against all the odds and made it to Sacramento three years later,” Brown said. “And, yes, we too will persist against storms and turmoil, obstacles great and small.”
The lawmakers rose to applaud, the audience in the gallery cheering and shouting. Jerry Brown, the pessimist and the rationalist, sat back in his chair and gazed out, allowing himself a moment to take it all in.
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California's Governor Brown Delivers State of the State Speech
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November 2017
California Gov. Jerry Brown delivers a blunt climate change message
In the middle of a 10-day visit to four countries en route to a major United Nations conference on climate change in Bonn...
Brown has been hailed in German media as the “anti-Trump” for his efforts to keep the United States engaged in the 2015 Paris agreement’s commitments to cut greenhouse emissions...
“It’s hard to get your mind around something so extensive,” said Brown, who was appointed by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the U.N. conference president, to serve as a special advisor for states and regions...
Everyone is creating the problem and unless everyone contributes to the solution, then the job won’t get done...
“Let’s lead the whole world to realize this is not your normal political challenge,” he added. “This is much bigger. This is life itself. It requires courage and imagination.”
October 2017
Gov. Jerry Brown heads to Washington to talk about the threat of nuclear war
Via the LA Times / Sacramento Bee / News Services
Governor Brown speaks as a member of the Board of Directors of the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington DC
In private session, the Governor addresses the rising risk of nuclear confrontation in the Pacific region under the new Trump administration...
September 2017
UNITED NATIONS — Jerry Brown, the governor of California, huddled on Sunday night with European, Brazilian and small-island leaders — gathered here for the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, which formally begins on Tuesday — and pledged to work with them on climate change. On Monday he met with António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, to discuss the future of the Paris agreement.
In another era, meetings like these might have been the exclusive domain of the State Department. But with the Trump administration vowing to leave the Paris agreement on climate change — affirmed on Monday by Gary D. Cohn, the chief White House economic adviser, at a meeting with allied ministers — Democratic state governors are taking an increasingly conspicuous role on the international stage, forming something of an informal negotiating team.
It is the first time that governors have taken such a prominent role on climate change at the annual General Assembly...
The goal, the governors say, is to assure other countries that they, along with and hundreds of cities and businesses, remain committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the goals of the Paris accord.
August 2017
Washington Post: Jerry Brown says Trump is fueling California’s climate push
“If anything, the Trump imperative going in the opposite direction is a stimulus,” Brown said in a recent interview with The Washington Post’s David Bruns. “It’s a goad, it’s a pressure. … In a way, it’s a rising of or raising of awareness that’s actually making my agenda stronger and more resonant with the people of California.”
During Brown’s more recent two terms, California has been a powerhouse in promoting the spread of electric cars and renewable energy, and the state recently extended its ambitious cap-and-trade program.
“The fact that Trump is the null hypothesis, he’s saying there is no climate change, it’s a hoax,” said Brown. “So that sets up an antinomy, a contradiction. And because of that what California is doing is more salient. People are paying attention. People are more concerned because now they see, oh what Trump is saying – that’s not right.”
“There are scientists who predicted that humanity will have a very hard time being around after the 21st century because not just of climate change but nuclear and other kinds of technologies that could get out of hand,” he said. “If we lack the morality, the wisdom and the collective self-restraint to manage what is becoming the aggregation of the most unimaginable power that any species has ever possessed.”
He depicted the decarbonization of the world economy as one of the greatest economic and technological challenges of our time.
“We’re going to radically transform the very basis of who and what we are,” he said. “That’s big. That’s what you say we’re facing a wall of inertia and to overcome that step by step takes clarity takes science takes technology and takes enlightened leadership and the ability and willingness of people to follow and to do what they have to do.”
July 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Governor's Press Office
Wednesday, July 12, 2017 -- (916) 445-4571
Jerry Brown / https://twitter.com/JerryBrownGov
I'm partnering with Michael Bloomberg on an important climate initiative to help keep America on track ...
California out in front in a Green future
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California-China, Strategic Talks, Strategic Cooperation
June, Time for a China Trade Visit, Time to Focus on the Future
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-jerry-brown-california-climate.html
- http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-green-cities-20170604-story.html
As Trump Steps Back, Jerry Brown Talks Climate Change in China
- By Javier Hernandez and Adam Nagourney / JUNE 6, 2017 / NY TIMES
Mr. Brown was in China on Tuesday, emerging as a de facto envoy from the United States on climate change at a time when President Trump has renounced efforts to battle global emissions. In a meeting packed with symbolism — and one that seemed at once to elevate the California governor and rebuke Mr. Trump — President Xi Jinping of China met with Mr. Brown, at the governor’s request, at the very moment China prepares to take a more commanding role in fighting climate change.
“California’s leading, China’s leading,” Mr. Brown said...
At such a volatile moment in Washington, the meeting allowed Mr. Xi to focus on the common ground China shares with some American politicians.
Gary Locke, a former American ambassador to China and governor of Washington, said Chinese leaders were “well aware” that Mr. Brown was considered a “strong leader” on climate change and a critic of Mr. Trump. Analysts said that Mr. Xi might have also wanted to show Mr. Trump that China was willing to work around him by strengthening ties with allies like Europe, India and California.
Mr. Brown... arrived just days before David H. Rank, the chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy in Beijing, resigned in protest of the president’s decision on the Paris agreement. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, was here as well for the energy conference, though he apparently did not meet with Mr. Xi...
Mr. Brown and other Democratic leaders of California have made clear that they would push ahead on the state’s leading-edge efforts to reduce all emissions no matter what happens in Washington.
Mr. Brown... said the lesson California had learned as it imposed limits on emissions was that it did not interfere with economic growth or cause hardship.
“Sacrifice is not a term that is that popular these days,” he said. “I think happy-time news is what people like from their politicians, even if the news can be a little more dire than that.”
“I don’t think we’re going to have to put on a hair shirt and eat bean sprouts,” Mr. Brown said. “I think we can have quite a rich life, but we’re going to have to get going and make the transition.”
California looks forward to the future, investment, environmental security
California / China / Development of Trade / Green Technology / Renewable Energy
2017
Governor Brown meets with President Xi of the People's Republic of China, signs agreement with national government to boost green technology
- Energy Innovation CEO Hal Harvey: "The reference point for China is not Washington, its California. They would rather learn from California than any other jurisdiction."
Both governments see big economic and environmental upsides to increased cooperation. California views China as a rising dynamic force, a valuable export market, a source of new investment, and an innovation collaborator. While in China last week, Governor Brown said, “China is leading. California is leading... California-China cooperation has taken a real leap forward.” Likewise, China considers California a trailblazer for the sustainable development path it aspires to follow.
California offers lessons as China works to build a cleaner, more innovative economy. The air pollution Chinese citizens endure today from increased industrial activity and sprawling personal automobile use is reminiscent of mid-20th century smog in southern California, which spurred the creation of the California Air Resources Board and dozens of subsequent policy innovations.
2016
2015
2014
2013
Governor Brown: "This year we will take another step to strengthen the ties between the world’s second and ninth largest economies."
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- California Gov. Jerry Brown warned that President Trump has just made a “colossal mistake” in gutting the federal government’s effort to combat climate change, which will ignite a response Trump is unprepared to handle.
- “It defies science itself,” Brown said in a call to The Times shortly after Trump signed an executive order that aims to bring an abrupt halt to the United States' leadership on global warming. “Erasing climate change may take place in Donald Trump‘s mind, but nowhere else.”
- “Yes, there is going to be a counter-movement,” Brown vowed, predicting Trump’s actions will mobilize environmentalists in a way President Obama never could. “I have met with many heads of state, ambassadors. This is a growing movement. President Trump’s outrageous move will galvanize the contrary force..."
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NBC "Meet the Press" / Gov. Jerry Brown to Trump: ‘You Don’t Want to Mess with California’
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State of the State Speech (transcript) -- January 24, 2017
Governor Brown: "California is Not Turning Back, Not Now, Not Ever"
- http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/jerry-brown-california-trump-alternative-facts-climate-immigration
- http://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2017/01/jerry-brown-warring-with-donald-trump-back-on-national-stage-108988
- http://ktla.com/2017/01/24/gov-brown-delivers-state-of-the-state-address/
- http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article128432759.html
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Jerry Brown speaks of Earth Science and "truth telling" - Dec. 2016
- The California Governor calls on scientists to accelerate their work
- as a newly elected president prepares to take office
- Watch the speech at YouTube:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MLHWFO6DwE (GreenPolicy)
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California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won’t Back Down to Trump'
- By Adam Nagourney LA Times/NY Times (who's been reporting on Jerry Brown for over two decades) and Henry Fountain (environmental writer/reporter at the NYT)
Jerry Brown: “California can make a significant contribution to advancing the cause of dealing with climate change, irrespective of what goes on in Washington,” Mr. Brown said in an interview. “I wouldn’t underestimate California’s resolve if everything moves in this extreme climate denial direction. Yes, we will take action.”
Democrats relish the prospect of challenging Mr. Trump on climate change, noting that other states have followed California in trying to curb emissions. And California has the weight to get into the ring: It is one of the 10 largest economies in the world, with a gross domestic product of approximately $2.5 trillion.
“California more than ever is strongly committed to moving forward on our climate leadership,” said Kevin de Leon, the leader of the State Senate. “We will not deviate from our leadership because of one election.”
Nagourney/Fountain:
Mr. Brown will be a critical player in this fight. He has presented himself as an environmental advocate since he first served as governor in the 1970s. As he enters what will probably be his last two years in public life, he has seized on the prospect of leading an anti-Trump environmental movement.
“We’ve got the lawyers and we’ve got the scientists and are ready to fight,” Mr. Brown declared in a speech in San Francisco earlier this month to the American Geophysical Union. “We’re ready to win.”
Mr. Brown, in our interview, called Mr. Trump’s election a setback for the climate movement, but predicted that it would be fleeting.
“In a paradoxical way, it could speed up the efforts of leaders in the world to take climate change seriously,” he said. “The shock of official congressional and presidential denial will reverberate through the world.”
Success of Jerry Brown, and California, Offers Lessons
Via the NY Times / By Adam Nagourney
(GreenPolicy Siterunner / SJS Note: In 1992, Adam Nagourney covered the Brown v Clinton presidential campaign. As an advisor to Brown, I had many opportunities to interact w/ Adam and react to his campaign news coverage for USA Today. Adam was an exceptional reporter in the early 90s, as he covered our "We the People" presidential campaign, and still is today in 2016 as he covers California politics as a NYT senior political reporter and Los Angeles Bureau Chief...)
SACRAMENTO — When Bernie Sanders held a rally at an outdoor stadium here the other night, more than 15,000 people turned out in a display of cheering, chanting, singing and cartwheels.
Gov. Jerry Brown, the state’s most prominent Democrat, was not there, but he might as well have been. Mr. Sanders’s speech was replete with the kind of to-the-barricades flourishes that have long been part of Mr. Brown’s campaign language. “The political establishment is getting nervous,” Mr. Sanders said. “The corporate establishment is getting nervous. And they should be nervous. Because real change is coming.”
As the Democratic presidential primary nears in California, it is easy to find in Mr. Sanders the kind of populist appeal that has long animated Mr. Brown, who ran for president in 1992 on a “We the People” pledge to accept no contribution over $100...
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Adam Nagourney's NY Times Magazine story on Jerry Brown (2011)
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A Stark Nuclear Warning
By California Governor Jerry Brown
July 14, 2016 / New York Review of Books
Review of My Journey at the Nuclear Brink
by William J. Perry, with a foreword by George P. Shultz
Stanford Security Studies, 234 pp.
I know of no person who understands the science and politics of modern weaponry better than William J. Perry, the US Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997. When a man of such unquestioned experience and intelligence issues the stark nuclear warning that is central to his recent memoir, we should take heed. Perry is forthright when he says: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”1 He also tells us that the nuclear danger is “growing greater every year” and that even a single nuclear detonation “could destroy our way of life.”
In clear, detailed but powerful prose, Perry’s new book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, tells the story of his seventy-year experience of the nuclear age. Beginning with his firsthand encounter with survivors living amid “vast wastes of fused rubble” in the aftermath of World War II, his account takes us up to today when Perry is on an urgent mission to alert us to the dangerous nuclear road we are traveling.
Reflecting upon the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Perry says it was then that he first understood that the end of all of civilization was now possible, not merely the ruin of cities. He took to heart Einstein’s words that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking.” He asserts that it is only “old thinking” that persuades our leaders that nuclear weapons provide security, instead of understanding the hard truth that “they now endanger it.”
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From the 1970s Onward, Taking on the Gravity of Challenge, Jerry Brown's Journey...
GreenPolicy siterunner:
During the last week of 2014, GreenPolicy360 highlighted the work of Pope Francis.
This week, the first week of 2015, we have highlighted the work of Edmund G. 'Jerry' Brown.
'Perhaps it is fitting to move from a Jesuit pope on to a former Jesuit seminarian -- now 76 yrs old and Governor of California.
Via Politico: Jerry Brown slams climate skeptics as 'troglodytes' at Vatican conference
Speakers at the event highlighted the role mayors can play fighting climate change, given that half the world’s population now lives in cities, which are in turn responsible for nearly three quarters of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Brown spoke of California's environmental accomplishments as a template for mayors around the world to follow.
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California Out in Front in a Green Future
Newsweek: Brown has a Cassandric quality, a mixture of prescience and alarmism that was disconcerting when he was young but is soothing now that he is old and can say “I told you so” with an unthreatening demeanor. The best thing to say about Brown is also the worst thing to say about him, and it is the thing that has always been said about him: He is way ahead of his time.
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January 2016
Steve J. Schmidt / GreenPolicy360 Siterunner / excerpts from two January 2016 social media posts:
Speaking to the challenges to be faced by the Sander's campaign when negotiating w the Clinton campaign re: the "First 100 Days" of the next administration...
The Jerry Brown presidential campaign of 1992 -- A Focus on Opposition to Undue Influence of Money-in-Politics
SJS: >We're witnessing a presidential campaign of Senator Sanders with many core themes of the 1992 Jerry Brown campaign for president. In '92, I can look back to being an adv to Jerry and a collaborator w him on our platform. We spoke of money in politics and its 'undue influence' over most every critical element of policy -- from war and peace to health care. I worked my first campaign with Jerry in 1976 and have pushed green issues now as Jerry has for over 40 yrs... Time flies as the saying goes and it feels appropriate that California is still out in front in green politics and policy -- no more 'moonbeam' rap for Jerry. Mike Royko, who coined that term, long ago apologized as Calif w Jerry's vision and leadership continue to very much stay out in front of the modern envir movement. Too bad Jerry's not younger. He'd be a great president.
>Not to sound maudlin but Bernie Sanders does sound like our campaign in 1992 and our message and challenge to the Clinton campaign... what Sanders is saying about quid pro quo, w add-ons about Citizens United and Super PACs, is old, old news to me -- and there's not going to be much substantive change in DC as long as the pay-to-play, campaign finance/lobbying system as it is remains in place -- re pushing back money in politics reform proposals in '92, the reps of the Ds national org and Clinton campaign told me, and told me to tell the Brown campaign, that they weren't going to "unilaterally disarm" and they were moving to out raise and out do the Rs in the money game, and in many ways they have... it's about money in politics.... that's where policy comes from.
GreenPolicy's Siterunner w/ Gov Brown, 1992, @ Dem platform hearings
>Our 'We the People' platform spoke of political reform across a breadth of issues.... many green ideas we brought forward carry on in the founding US Green Party Platform, which your GreenPolicy siterunner was the key drafter, and Jerry and his ideas and agenda carried on in California. To this day, Governor Brown continues out in front with model green and progressive initiatives for change.
>Decades now, day-to-day, Jerry has been hard at work to make a difference and create, with vision, a better world.
>Here's a nod of our green hat to Jerry Brown -- a principled visionary
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The Brown Campaign Platform, a Foundation of Forward-Looking Ideas and Policies
- At the 1992 Platform hearings of the Democratic party, a turning point for the Democratic Party
- Presidential campaign announcement speech, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 1991
Campaigning in Michigan on workers issues, NAFTA-GATT, trade and jobs, industrial policy and electoral reform
"California feeds on change and great undertakings, Jerry Brown said in Monday's (January 5, 2014) swearing-in speech, "but the path of wisdom counsels us to ground ourselves and nurture carefully all we have started..."
January 5, 2015 Inauguration Speech (video)
Today the press reports -- California leads the nation in environmental policy and Jerry Brown's point of view? “What happens here doesn’t stay here. It goes all around the country and all around the world.”
California continues as a world leader in Clean Air/Emissions Control and Policies Addressing Climate Change - Governor Brown Establishes Most Ambitious Greenhouse Gas Reduction Target in North America: New California Goal Aims to Reduce Emissions 40 Percent Below 1990 Levels by 2030
The 'greening' results are showing... Transportation High Speed" -- Energy -- Climate Change -- working with Arnold who added real environmental Muscle
- Out in Front on Climate Change, California Out in Front with Eco-nomic Policy
Governor Brown signs aggressive climate change bill
LOS ANGELES (AP) / October 7, 2015 — Gov. Jerry Brown dramatically increased California's climate-change goals on Wednesday, committing the state to use renewable energy for half its electricity and make existing buildings twice as energy-efficient in just 15 years.
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California is about to do something no state has done / Sept 2015
Back in January, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) made a promise. His state, he said, would pursue a new package of climate goals that are the most ambitious in the nation (and among the most ambitious in the world). California was already a leader in efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions and promote clean energy. Brown pledged to go further. By 2030, he declared, California would double the energy efficiency of state buildings; get half its electricity from renewables; and halve consumption of gasoline by cars and trucks.
At the time, all those nice-sounding goals were just words in a speech. But they could very soon become the law of the land. The state legislature is currently considering several bills (SB 350 is the most important) that would codify Brown's climate agenda. The legislation is widely expected to pass before the end of the legislative session next Friday, but not without a fight from the state's powerful oil lobby...
Today Los Angeles has ten times as many cars as it did in the 50s, and the air is 95 percent cleaner. That’s a pretty dramatic move, one that countries like China and India are taking notice of.
So we’ve had that history. As far as people’s attitudes I would say that there is a strong preference for favoring policies that nurture the environment as oppose to those that disrupt them.
But if you dig deeper into the use of things or creature comforts, I don’t think we’ve attained the level of enlightenment that Pope Francis is calling for.
Catholicism, Zen, and Jerry Brown
The notion of subsidiarity, that decisions are best made closest to the people, is Catholic. So too is his disregard for the omnipotence of government, and the belief that change must emanate from within...
Jerry Brown’s time with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta
America Magazine | July 2015
California Governor Jerry Brown has spent his entire life in public service. After college Brown spent a few years as a Jesuit seminarian. He has spent the 45 years since serving the state of California at every level, from Los Angeles community college district trustee to mayor of Oakland, state Attorney General, governor, candidate for Senate twice, and candidate for the presidency three times. In his 1992 run he carried six states, and came in second in voting at the Democratic convention to Bill Clinton...
I think it definitely advances the church’s position on the environment. The pope made a very clear articulation of the responsibility and the respect that human beings owe the rest of creation. And he’s taking on a real existential threat to the underlying conditions on which our civilization is dependent, the stability of the climate, which has been very favorable for the last 10 to 12 thousand years. So it’s important for reorienting Catholics to the rules and the laws of nature that can’t be ignored or abused in the name of individual freedom or desire or initiative. As people work out their various ways of living they have to take into account not just what they want to do, but what nature dictates and what science tells us about the way human beings are enmeshed in and dependent on a greater and complex web of life.
The pope is also raising the point, which gets serious opposition from many quarters, of how much material stuff is really appropriate, that there are certain limits and certain ways of living and industrializing and carrying on that are more compatible with a sustainable and healthy environment. The encyclical raises a real challenge to a modern world that is so dependent on the market for authority and for the allocation of life’s goods and services. The pope is raising the ante, saying No, you have to look at the impact. When you’re disturbing the environment you’re going to create negative feedbacks that are going to be felt disproportionately by poorer people, more vulnerable people who don’t have the assets and the capital to protect themselves against the extreme weather and the disruptions that follow in the wake of an impaired climate regime, which is where we’re going.
So all in all I’d say it’s a welcome voice, a clear voice that definitely lays out ideas consistent with the Catholic tradition but also very related to the times that we’re in...
[www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-brown-vatican-mayors-climate-20150721-story.html Gov. Jerry Brown, at Vatican, tells mayors to 'light a fire' on climate change]
Gov. Jerry Brown, speaking Tuesday at a conference hosted by Pope Francis, accused climate change skeptics of trying to “bamboozle” local leaders trying to cut emissions and said he had no faith that Congress would act on global warming.
“It’s up to you guys,” the governor told more than 60 mayors from around the world who were invited to the climate conference at the Vatican.
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SJS: California has this history that really derives from the experience of smog in the Los Angeles Basin, and the response to that over many administrations has led to where we are today. As a matter of fact the standards that were established under what is called the Pavley Law, the first legislation in the world to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in passenger vehicles, were ultimately adopted by the United States as the national standard. [1] [2]
2016 Update:
Following on Social Media - https://twitter.com/GovPressOffice
One State Acts Again on Climate Change Policy - http://markets.cbsnews.com/California-lawmakers-advance-aggressive-climate-change-plans/4c1a1cdb43da904b/
Pacific Coast Regional Leadership - http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Pacific_Coast_Climate_Action_Plan.pdf
- Confronting Historic Drought-Climate Change
April 2015 -- Brown orders California's first mandatory water restrictions: 'It's a different world'
Standing in a brown field that would normally be smothered in several feet of snow, Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered cities and towns across California to cut water use by 25% as part of a sweeping set of mandatory drought restrictions, the first in state history.
http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18910
PBS Interview - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/gov-jerry-brown-california-change-whats-comfortable-address-drought/
January 2015
Who would want to be Governor of California? (CBS Video)
Challenge and Best Practice Solutions...
In his re-election victory speech Tuesday night, Brown mentioned Props 1 and 2 as being vital to his goals as governor.
"Save money, save water, those are two pillars," Brown said.
November 2014 - the State of California under the leadership of its green governor, Jerry Brown, passed a set of laws, with Proposition One at the center of a wide-ranging plan to encourage a range of water conservation usage and saving measures, California again out in front of national/global efforts to deal with climate change/drought.
Having led the effort to shape and urge passage of a top state priority in the 2014 election, the Governor succeeded as voters passed Proposition 1 – the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Act of 2014 – by a margin of 67%-33%.
Proposition 1 provides $7.5 billion in new and redirected bond funds for a wide range of water related projects that will:
• Protect rivers, lakes, streams, coastal waters and watersheds • Provide regional water security, climate and drought preparedness • Provide public benefits through a wide range of water storage options that demonstrate improvement to the state water system, cost-effectiveness and net improvement in ecosystem and water quality conditions • Promote water recycling • Improve drinking water quality • Provide increased flood protection
California Launches Program to Protect Farmland & Climate
The California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN)is a coalition that advances sustainable policies to support California agriculture in the face of climate change. http://calclimateag.org/about/
The goal is to "integrate funding for permanent agricultural easements with urban land use projects to maximize the gains in reducing greenhouse gases linked to vehicle miles traveled and urban development. This is the first program in the country that invests in farmland conservation for its climate benefits."
Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Guidelines
