Three years after the mandate for clean electric cars died a senseless death, California took another stab at attacking smog and climate change when a movie star, pro-business Republican governor named Arnold Schwarzenegger ignored his staff’s objections and turned to liberal Democrat and former pool cleaner Terry Tamminen, and gave him an epic assignment: Find a way to fix the mess.
The surprising part of it is, Tamminen may have actually found a way to do it. Through his efforts, the tools and determination to roll back greenhouse gas emissions may now be California’s most important export, spreading to other states and the private sector, with Tamminen in the self-described role as the “Johnny Appleseed of climate change.”
“It really came down to not being able to wait any longer. We could not wait for a new president and a new Congress to wake up and save the planet,” Tamminen says. “And what happened next just blows everyone’s socks off, because even without federal leadership, by the time a new president is in the White House in 2009, a majority of Americans already will live in a state with a world-class climate change program, with measurable goals and a plan to achieve them.”1
Arnold Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy for the governorship of California on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Wednesday, August 7, 2003. The celebrity venue suited the circuslike atmosphere of that election year, which included the recall of the sitting Democratic governor, Gray Davis, and a ballot listing 135 candidates who wanted his job. Most of these candidates were nonpoliticians; they included former child actor Gary Coleman; pornographer Larry Flynt (campaign slogan: “Vote for a Smut-Peddler Who Cares”); porn star Mary Carey; a comedian named Gallagher whose signature bit involved smashing watermelons with a mallet; and Angelyne, who become a minor Hollywood celebrity by putting up billboards of herself throughout Los Angeles that pretended she was already a celebrity.
Schwarzenegger, at the time best known for his role as a robotic assassin in the Terminator films, was immediately declared the sensible choice and the front-runner. The weekend after his announcement, he and his family flew to Massachusetts for a visit with his in-laws—the Kennedy family. Politics is the Kennedys’ lifeblood, and he was peppered with questions about his platform, his policies, his plans, his staff, and his campaign. At that point he could offer few specifics beyond the conviction that someone from outside Sacramento with a businessman’s eye and a nonpolitical perspective—this is how he defined himself at the time—could bring fresh ideas to the task of fixing California’s considerable problems. One of the areas he intended to tackle was the environment, he said, because the dirty ocean, beaches, and air in Southern California troubled him. He needed help to translate his concerns into policies, though. As it happened, there was an expert in such matters standing right next to him. So Schwarzenegger asked his wife’s cousin, the environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was the chief attorney for the antipollution group Hudson Riverkeeper and a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, about whom he might approach. Kennedy told him, “Talk to Terry.”
Terry Tamminen’s varied résumé appealed to the multi-careered Schwarzenegger, an Austrian immigrant who has been an American bodybuilding champion, an action movie star, a real estate investor, a restaurateur, a “Global Torch Bearer” for the Special Olympics, and then, in 2003, a gubernatorial candidate. Tamminen’s background was every bit as diverse. Born in Milwaukee, he had grown up partly in Australia, where his family had a business breeding tropical fish, and partly in Southern California, where he had been inspired to become a scuba diver at age twelve by the old action television series, Sea Hunt. He traveled and worked in Europe, came home for college in California, left to convert apartments to condos in Florida, ran a sheep ranch owned by his boss at the condo company, and finally moved back to California, where in 1976 he bought a half-share of a pool cleaning business based in the swimming pool capital of the world, Malibu. He lived modestly in a trailer near the coast, but this gregarious jack-of-all-trades with the round, cherubic face and an emphasis on eco-friendly water-quality practices, gradually built up the business’s customer base tenfold. He catered to celebrities in Beverly Hills and Malibu—Madonna, Johnny Carson, Dustin Hoffman, Dick Clark, David Letterman, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bruce Willis, Sting, Diana Ross, and Barbra Streisand, along with many agents, producers, and other movers in Hollywood. He wrote several books on pool maintenance, including The Ultimate Pool Maintenance Manual, styling himself the “Malibu Pool Man to the Stars.” Then he wrote a stage play about Shakespeare as the bard entered retirement, which he has performed at community theaters and colleges nationwide.
In his forties, still feeling unfulfilled, and experiencing what he calls his midlife crisis, Tamminen sold his share of the pool business and started an environmental group, Santa Monica BayKeeper, in 1993. It was funded by the late former president of the Disney Company, Frank Wells, and modeled after Kennedy’s Hudson Riverkeeper group. Tamminen earned his certification from the Coast Guard as a ship captain, and he and a cadre of volunteers would patrol the bay as a citizen pollution police force, reporting violators and deterring dumpers—and Tamminen’s education as an environmentalist began. He took a crash course taught by Kennedy and soon realized that he had at last found his great passion in life. His wife would get up each morning and put on her business suit while Tamminen would pull on a wet suit to begin his workday—a dream job for the kid who grew up watching Sea Hunt and the popular 1970s television documentaries by the French explorer and ecologist Jacques Cousteau. Later Tamminen also worked to set up and direct a foundation, Environment Now, to provide grants to similar WaterKeeper programs throughout California, but he always returned to the boat. “Glad to see you finally cleaning up the big pool,” Tamminen recalls a former customer, Dustin Hoffman, quipping the next time they met.
As with other eco barons, Terry Tamminen’s mission in life began with an affinity for nature—his passion for boating and diving and his desire, his need, to be outdoors for significant portions of his life. Kieran Suckling argues that Americans have built a culture so distanced from any real experience of nature—most people, he says, watch it on television more than they actually touch, smell, or feel it—that society can casually lay waste to the natural world and most people never perceive it. Distance makes desecration possible, because for most Americans, the experience of nature comes through a television documentary. They think that the cut and recut forests of America, with undergrowth abnormally thick from years of suppressing the normal cycles of fire and regeneration, are natural. They do not know what a real forest should look like—the kind of forest that greeted the pilgrims and the explorers, that Thoreau and John Muir loved and watched vanish. If Suckling is correct about this distance from and desensitization to nature, then it is no coincidence that the Tompkinses, Sucklings, Galvins, Quimbys, and Tamminens of the world, people who are most happy in the woods, on the water, or clinging to a mountainside, are able to experience and share environmental insights that elude others, and that the world desperately needs. Tamminen found his place and insight on the bay, but it also set the stage for his next career.
And then Arnold Schwarzenegger called.
Schwarzenegger was so eager to put the green part of his campaign in place that he phoned while still at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. Would Tamminen meet with him the following week?
A few days later, they were sitting in Schwarzenegger’s office in Santa Monica, California, drawing up a list of campaign pledges for the environment—ambitious proposals on fuel efficiency, tailpipe emissions, alternative energy, and a “hydrogen highway” for fuel cell cars; new rules on water quality and pollution; and a vow to develop quickly a serious statewide plan to combat global warming. When Tamminen’s friends and colleagues heard of this unlikely alliance—most of Schwarzenegger’s advisers were extremely conservative staffers left over from the last Republican governor, Pete Wilson—they thought he had lost his mind and were quick to say so. Tamminen was a lifelong liberal Democrat. He had been a fund-raiser for Al Gore’s 2000 run for the White House, and Tamminen’s Democratic friends considered any association with “the party of George Bush” as bordering on treason. Tamminen, however, had been pleasantly surprised during his meeting with Schwarzenegger, who, he felt, demonstrated a solid understanding of climate change and acknowledged it as a threat to the world and especially to the coastal state of California. In Tamminen’s view, this attitude put Schwarzenegger far ahead of where most American politicians and most citizens were in 2003, and certainly ahead of the California Republican Party, which was dominated by the far right.
“First of all, this guy might be your next governor,” Tamminen argued, “so let’s make sure we fill his head with the right ideas.”
No one was buying it, though. “I took a lot of crap,” Tamminen would later recall. “But I saw the opportunity, possibly, to shape not just California’s environmental future, but by virtue of California’s tendency to lead the rest of the nation, to have a tremendous impact.”
It was all academic, however, Tamminen thought at first. Mainstream politicians from both parties had entered the race, and Schwarzenegger’s candidacy had come to seem quixotic; Tamminen figured that his own main contribution would be to put forward a plan that other candidates would be forced to match,2 and after the election, he could return to his old life. But as Election Day neared, it suddenly dawned on Tamminen and his comrades that Schwarzenegger might actually win. At this point, Tamminen made it clear that he had no interest in a career in government, or in leaving his boat and the glorious coastal climate of Santa Monica to endure the heat of inland Sacramento. He had laid out what would be the most far-reaching and groundbreaking environmental program in the state’s—and the nation’s—history. His job was done.
A couple months later, he was sworn in as the newly elected Governor Schwarzenegger’s secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, charged with making their campaign proposals a reality. “What can I say?” he shrugs. “I couldn’t say no to Arnold.”
At the outset, the worst fears of Tamminen’s friends seemed to be realized. In his first years in office, Schwarzenegger the moderate candidate appeared to morph into a hard-line conservative governor, who engaged in a running battle with teachers’ and nurses’ unions over budget cuts he had promised not to make, having regular showdowns with legislators (whom he labeled “girlie men,” borrowing a line from an old television skit on Saturday Night Live that had originally mocked Schwarzenegger), and drawing praise from conservative Republicans nationwide. Conservatives began openly discussing the possibility that Schwarzenegger might run for the presidency, though this would require a constitutional amendment to lift the restriction, imposed by the Founders, that the president be a native-born American.
Tamminen hunkered down and continued working on the environmental action plan, confident that Schwarzenegger’s rightward tilt was more media story line than reality, because his own marching orders and dealings with Schwarzenegger hadn’t changed. And he made some substantial progress that first full year in office: creation of a 25-million-acre Sierra Nevada Conservancy to protect undeveloped land in twenty-three counties stretching from central California to the Oregon border; ocean protection regulations that banned dumping by cruise ships; an initiative to subsidize the installation of solar panels on 1 million roofs in California; $150 million in permanent annual funding for the Carl Moyer Program, which pays for the scrapping of dirty diesel buses and trucks and replaces them with vehicles that run on natural gas or other clean fuels; and the creation of the promised “hydrogen highway” program, with an ambitious goal of building 200 fueling stations by 2010 for clean hydrogen cars that, at the time, existed only in theory. (The overly optimistic embrace of the expensive and still unsuccessful hydrogen technology was the most glaring flaw in the Schwarzenegger and Tamminen approach to global warming, but environmental activists were so thrilled by the rest of the plan that criticism was muted.)
Despite a successful start at fulfilling a substantial number of environmental campaign promises, Tamminen’s work that year was marginalized by some of Schwarzenegger’s other staffers, who considered him too liberal. There was little effort to publicize or generate excitement about Cal-EPA’s accomplishments.
But the dynamics changed the following year. Schwarzenegger’s conservative policies, confrontational tactics, and bashing of teachers and nurses proved deeply unpopular, his rating in the polls plummeted, and his attempt to go around the Democratic-controlled legislature with a series of ballot provisions to enact his conservative agenda ended in disaster, as voters rejected all his key proposals. After the vote, he did something few politicians do, and it saved his administration: He publicly apologized, and his policies took a markedly more pragmatic and moderate turn as he distanced himself from both President Bush and his own party’s state leaders. The talk about Arnold in the White House and a constitutional amendment evaporated, to be replaced by serious talk of global warming that posed a direct challenge to his party and the president.
“I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat, and we know the time for action is now,” Schwarzenegger announced in June 2005, unveiling his new state plan to tackle climate change. Tamminen and his staff had crafted an aggressive, measurable program to reduce greenhouse gases, increase conservation efforts, and increase the use of alternative energy. This program would make California a world leader in the race to blunt the worst of global warming, with an ultimate goal of lowering greenhouse gas emissions so much that by the year 2050, they would be 80 percent lower than in 1990.
It had taken more than a year to study the problem, inventory the state’s greenhouse gas emitters, and develop a plan. The task was slowed because when Tamminen arrived there was not a single climate scientist at Cal-EPA. Within two years, he had 200 people in state government working on the problem.
This was in sharp contrast to national climate policy under the Bush administration, which lagged behind all other developed nations in responding to climate change and sought to deal with rising energy costs by endlessly proposing drilling in the protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other ecologically sensitive regions on and offshore. Even the most optimistic estimates about such drilling predicted a level of oil production that would be only drops in the bucket compared with the potential savings a genuine pursuit of conservation and alternative energy sources could yield.
For any state, even one as large as California, to attempt to lead the nation forward on global warming was a radical departure. In the past, it had always been the federal government, after much delay and prodding from activists, that dragged reluctant states into a more enlightened future: Teddy Roosevelt’s forests and parks conservation programs; the equal employment, fair housing, voting rights, and desegregation laws and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s; and, more recently, the landmark clean air, clean water, and endangered-species initiatives of the 1970s. Energy efficiency and fossil fuel emissions were also supposed to be a federal prerogative, but federal leadership had mostly languished since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981. Carter has not been revered as a president (he is admired more for his charitable and human rights work since leaving office), but history may actually be kinder to Carter than to his successor, particularly on the subject of energy and the environment. Had Carter remained in office for a second term rather than being ousted by Ronald Reagan, the nation (and the world) very likely would be facing a less severe, less imminent climate catastrophe and a milder oil addiction problem in the twenty-first century. Carter had a plan in place to begin fixing the mess, and many years later it provided a starting point for Tamminen. Reagan’s actions, on the other hand, made matters worse, and provided an example of what not to do about environmental and energy problems.
Carter had made renewable solar energy a central part of his program, putting the founder of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, in charge of a federal Solar Energy Research Institute. Hayes brought an activist’s passion and single-mindedness to the bureaucratic Department of Energy, just as Tamminen would do in Sacramento a quarter century later. Hayes commissioned a one-year study by leading scientists, who concluded in 1979 that existing technology could be used to convert 28 percent of the nation’s energy use to nonpolluting renewable sources, primarily solar, but also wind and geothermal. All that would be required was a system of incentives and disincentives—the government had to make it more profitable for utilities to produce renewable energy and more expensive to produce dirty power dependent on fossil fuels, and then provide similar incentives to consumers. Likewise, efficient low-polluting or nonpolluting cars would be rewarded with tax breaks and other incentives, whereas gas-guzzling smog machines would be penalized.
It was only fair to set up such a structure, environmentalists argued, as it would be no worse a violation of free-market principles than had previously existed: oil, nuclear power, and coal had been subsidized for decades. The tens of billions of dollars of annual tax breaks were not the only subsidies to Big Oil and Big Auto—these industries had also been held harmless for the enormous health costs from toxic fossil fuel emissions. Normally, it is a fundamental legal principle that if a product causes harm by design, the producer ought to be responsible. Rates of cancer and lung diseases are higher in smoggy cities and higher still in neighborhoods with heavily trafficked highways cutting through them, but neither the automobile makers nor the oil companies have ever had to pay a cent to cover the medical costs (or funeral expenses) their products caused. Instead, consumers and, ultimately, taxpayers have always footed that bill—a subsidy worth trillions of dollars to those industries. Industry had, in effect, been given incentives to make the earth toxic. Now the time had come to turn that situation on its head and make it profitable for the oil and automotive industries to clean up their act, and unprofitable to fail to do so. As Terry Tamminen would say many years later, “They have much to atone for.”
The solar program Carter launched was not primarily a matter of reducing pollution, and global warming was then merely an obscure concern of a few climate scientists who had no impact on public policy. Carter’s interest in solar energy was primarily a matter of national and economic security—a rationale that remains valid in the twenty-first century. It stemmed from two oil crises, in 1973 and 1979. The first crisis came in the form of an Arab oil embargo aimed against Israel’s allies during the Yom Kippur War. It led to rationing, long lines at gas stations, and spiraling fuel prices during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Congress responded by adopting fuel efficiency laws requiring automakers to gradually improve fuel economy so that new cars would consume less gas—the now famous Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.3 The second oil crisis came in the form of severe shortages resulting from a war between Iran and Iraq, and from the Iranian revolution—during which fifty-five members of the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran were held hostage for 444 days, destroying President Carter’s chances for reelection. Oil prices shot up during the crisis of 1979 to thirty-nine dollars a barrel (ninety-eight in 2008 dollars, a price record that stood until March 2008). This second oil crisis persuaded President Carter that national security depended on immediately launching an urgent program of conservation, solar energy research, and incentives to stimulate the adoption of alternative energy sources. He told the nation that America needed to free itself from dependence on foreign oil suppliers and, appearing in a sweater on national television, urged Americans to lower their thermostats and dress more warmly in winter instead of cranking up the heat. The solar panels he put up on the White House were intended to be a symbol of his and the country’s commitment to breaking the oil addiction, and thanks to tax credits and other incentives, the solar power industry took off as never before.
But it ground to a halt under Reagan. Solar research funding was cut; most of the staff was let go. The White House solar panels were trashed. Hayes’s study and its ambitious target of 28 percent alternative energy for the nation were shelved and forgotten, as Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He spoke then of recapturing America’s past glories, which to him meant pursuing not conservation or solar energy, but more privatization of the oil, gas, and coal deposits on public lands, so that Americans need not alter their driving habits, their thermostats, or their addiction to oil. Reagan and Congress even halted regulations that would have required continuing improvements in automobile fuel efficiency. For the next quarter century, the requirements for miles per gallon remained locked in where Carter had left them.
The solar energy incentives were withdrawn without any tapering off—a devastating blow to the nation’s fledgling solar industry. The same happened with wind energy. Carter’s tax credits allowed the U.S. wind-power industry to grow and take world leadership: American companies controlled 90 percent of the world market by the early 1980s. Then the tax subsidies were cut and the industry withered; the United States now has only 16 percent of the market, and countries with government tax breaks have taken the lead. Promising research on geothermal power has also languished compared with research by other nations. Instead, Reagan launched a very different research program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile shield project begun in 1983. It is the most expensive weapons system in history; more than $100 billion was spent over twenty-five years, and the second President Bush appropriated more for it than ever before—$11 billion a year in his last years in office. After twenty-six years, it still has never been shown to work. One year of funding for “Star Wars,” as this program has been called, represents more than the government has spent on solar energy research in twenty-five years—even though solar energy is a technology that could immediately improve national security and help address concerns about climate change. Had the nation continued as Carter intended—gradually converting to clean, emission-free solar power and giving industry the incentives it needed to pursue alternative energy seriously—America could have become a world leader in solar power within a decade. Instead, the nation is playing catch-up and generating less than 1 percent of its power from the sun—while importing technology from the world leaders in solar energy in Europe and Israel.
By 1997, when an international agreement to battle climate change, the Kyoto Protocol,4 was negotiated in Japan, America was ill-equipped to participate in this new framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Kyoto covered 170 countries, and the industrial nations were expected to adopt binding reductions in greenhouse gases phased in during the coming decades. Developing nations had voluntary goals under the treaty; these nations included China, which has become a major emitter of greenhouse gases as its economy rapidly expanded. Alone among the developed nations, America has refused to ratify the treaty (Australia, the only other holdout, ratified it in 2007). President Clinton signed the treaty but, faced with nearly unanimous opposition in the U.S. Senate, he never sought the required ratification. President Bush said he would not agree to Kyoto because it put America at an economic disadvantage and because China was not part of the mandatory caps. The result is that the United States has had no meaningful, sustained mechanism in place for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And because America has long led the world in emitting greenhouse gases, the entire world was imperiled by its failure to act. (In 2007 China finally surpassed the United States in overall greenhouse emissions, thanks in large part to the construction of numerous dirty coal-fired electrical generating plants in China. But America remains by far the per capita leader in this dubious competition to warm the earth.)
So it fell to California to take the step that neither Clinton nor Bush had undertaken.5 Tamminen started with what he considered a commonsense approach, seemingly obvious—though few others in positions of power in government were yet endorsing it. He started with the science of climate change, not the politics: The question was what could be done scientifically to reduce greenhouses gases, not what would satisfy a political constituency. Next there had to be a complete inventory of where the emissions were coming from—utilities, transportation, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, mining—and in what proportions: No workable plan could be made without a thorough inventory of California’s greenhouse gas sources—it would be like trying to build a skyscraper without knowing how much iron, glass, and concrete were on hand. Those steps provided the amount of reduction that could be sought, and the targets. Then it was possible for Tamminen to sit down with the governor to consider the menu of options available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on science and the experience of other countries, devising a plan that fit California’s needs.
Writing that plan was not the breakthrough, however. For years, scientific organizations, government committees, and activist groups have been coming up with national and regional plans to grapple with global warming, some little more than political posturing, some deeply flawed, some visionary, others practical. What was different here was the will to act on Tamminen’s ideas at the highest level. The action plan Tamminen and Schwarzenegger settled on exceeded the goals set by Kyoto, in part by applying a cap and trade system through which businesses received credits for reducing greenhouse gases below the maximum emissions cap. They could then trade or sell some of those credits, in the form of carbon offsets, to other companies that had not sufficiently reduced their carbon footprints on their own.
Development in cities and counties would have to take greenhouse gas emissions into account—in construction methods, in choice of locations, and in provisions for mass transit and solar energy, just as the Center for Biological Diversity has advocated. The same conditions would apply to new industry and businesses—the plan provided incentives for being clean, and consequences for continuing with business as usual. Californians would have to be told—over and over, according to Tamminen—that the state faces a unique threat of global warming and that this threat requires big changes. The alternative to change would be to experience mass extinctions of up to 50 percent of the state’s unique plants, including the majestic Redwoods, in the coming decades, along with coastal flooding as the sea ice continues to melt, and along with drought everywhere else. “People think it will be too disruptive to change what we drive or how we build,” Tamminen says. “And we’re here to tell them that’s nothing compared to what will happen to us if we don’t clean up our act. Now, that will be disruption, on an epic scale.”
Tamminen’s plan would also mark a return to California’s aggressive mandate for low-emission cars—automakers worldwide would be required to reduce their vehicle greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016, or stop selling cars in the nation’s biggest car market. This time Tamminen felt that all technologies should be brought to the table—electric, hybrids, hydrogen. Anything was fine, so long as the greenhouse gases went down the requisite amount. This approach, it was thought, could avoid the earlier, disastrous ZEV mandate and its thirteen wasted years. He envisioned more of partnership with the car, utility, and other industries, rather than the confrontations of the past, although he knew automaker lawsuits over emissions regulations would be inevitable.
Alternatives to fossil fuel energy generation would have to play an important role in the plan; these included both small-scale solar power systems on individual homes and businesses (through the state’s Million Solar Roofs Plan) and large-scale solar power plants. The plan envisioned massive solar generating complexes in the Mojave Desert, one of the sunniest places on earth, where several such plants, using solar-heated steam turbines to drive generators, were already on the drawing boards.
Tamminen did not structure the whole plan around any particular technology. Instead, he chose a “renewable portfolio standard”—a smorgasbord approach that used both mandates and market-based methods, an embodiment of his often repeated refrain: “There are no silver bullets for climate change, only silver buckshot. We have to cast a wide net.” Whatever silver buckshot the state ended up using, there was nothing ambiguous about the portfolio’s goal: it required 20 percent of the energy used in California to come from renewables by 2010, and 30 percent by 2020. At the time the plan was designed, renewables accounted for about 4 percent of the energy generated, so this was an ambitious goal. It was meant to have an immediate impact, and if it was adopted nationally it would spur the kind of research on solar and renewable energy that Carter had attempted to start and Reagan had quashed.
Once completed, the Tamminen-Schwarzenegger plan became the basis of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which passed the state legislature on a party-line vote, with all but one member of the governor’s party voting against it. The legislation made the aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions legally binding—something no other state had done.
California could do this because of its unique legal position among states when it came to environmental regulation. Because California had been beset by smog since the 1940s, it had undertaken pollution controls and regulation of auto emissions before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970. So Congress—over fervent opposition from industry—decided to give California free rein to choose between federal regulation and its own, and California’s could be more stringent. No other state had that power—although other states had the option of following California’s more stringent standards rather than Washington’s.
This is why California was able to lead the whole nation in environmental regulations. And California really had led the nation since the 1960s: It was first to regulate smog-causing nitrogen-oxide emissions, first to set standards for diesel truck emissions, first to require catalytic converters to absorb tailpipe emissions in cars, first to introduce unleaded gasoline, and first to require automakers to produce a certain percentage of low-emission and zero-emission vehicles. Oil and automotive companies fought all these initiatives and lost; most of the measures were later adopted by other states or the federal government. California had also made its household electrical consumption twice as efficient by imposing a rate structure that rewarded conservation and made it profitable for utilities to sell less energy rather than always trying to sell more. Normally, pushing conservation hurts the bottom line for a utility, but in California, it increased profitability. Because California would be the sixteenth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world if it were a separate nation, any large-scale conservation measures it takes have a global impact.
The states of Washington and Arizona followed California’s lead and adopted similar initiatives to deal with global warming, and Tamminen served as an informal consultant. Then, during a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association, Schwarzenegger, Tamminen, Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and Governor Christine Gregoire of Washington discussed their fear that three states going it alone would see businesses leave for places with no such regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. And that outcome could doom their efforts. Without a national policy, they needed more states on board, so that business would simply accept the change rather than move, and perhaps eventually recognize the program as a potential opportunity to save money, and even profit by selling carbon credits.
Tamminen saw this as his opportunity to get out of government, yet still continue his work. He offered to become the “Johnny Appleseed” of climate change—he would export California’s global warming program to other states, acting as Schwarzenegger’s emissary and consultant.
Within a year, thirteen states had climate action plans in place, most based at least in part on California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. Another fourteen states had plans in development, and seven more had greenhouse gas assessments under way in order to write plans of their own. Agreements were also signed with British Columbia and the United Kingdom for participating in an international cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—California was bypassing the Bush administration on the international climate policy stage just as it was doing at home. Tamminen had made a particularly hard push in the southeastern United States, a region that lagged behind the rest of the nation in responding to global warming. He made a detailed presentation on climate science to the newly elected Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist. Crist, a former state attorney general, had not run on an environmental platform, but Tamminen helped convince him that Florida’s long coastlines, its extensive development at or near sea level, and its vulnerability to hurricanes left it uniquely imperiled by the onset of global warming. There was evidence that a pattern of heavier hurricanes and tropical storms—like the pattern of drought and heat afflicting California and the West—had been strengthened if not actually caused by global warming. Crist decided to make an aggressive climate action plan a top priority for his new administration, with Tamminen as a consultant. In July 2007, just seven months after taking office, Crist announced a climate change program that matched California’s in its reach and ambition, including the same overall goal: By the year 2050, both states vowed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent relative to the level of emissions that existed in 1990.
With two large and politically pivotal states—California and Florida, east and west coasts, both with Republican governors—Tamminen declared that the country had reached a tipping point in the battle against global warming, despite inaction and obstruction at the federal level. A majority of Americans were residing in states with plans to address global warming either in place or fast approaching, and those states would be tied to one another’s carbon-trading plans, as well as to Europe’s and Canada’s—a truly global solution.
Tamminen had pushed George Bush and the federal government to the sidelines in the battle against global warming—except in their accustomed role as obstacles to action. Although the Bush administration had always championed state and local solutions to problems, the White House now attempted to block important portions of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. In a move reminiscent of its flouting of the Endangered Species Act, the administration simply refused to follow the law granting California special authority to create its own auto emissions regulations. To invoke this special authority, California had to request a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This was strictly a legal formality, as federal law does not give discretion to the EPA to withhold a waiver—the law says the EPA “shall” give the waiver so long as the state’s regulations are at least as protective as the federal version. And there was no question that California’s emissions standards were the stricter by far. Yet Stephen Johnson, Bush’s appointee to head the EPA, denied the waiver in 2008 after months of delay. He argued that global warming had to be addressed only on the federal level because greenhouse gas emissions harmed the whole nation, not just Californians. His explanation studiously ignored the fact that there was no similar comprehensive effort to address global warming on the federal level—California, the Center for Biological Diversity, and other states and groups had just successfully sued the EPA because Johnson had claimed the federal government had no power to regulate greenhouse gases at all, a position soundly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. In thirty-seven years, no waiver request from California had ever been denied. Under the first President Bush alone, the EPA granted nine waivers in four years, and Johnson’s scientific and legal staff told him there were no legitimate grounds to deny this one. But he was adamant: The waiver request was rejected.
As California took the Bush administration to court over this denial, Tamminen remained sanguine. The delay was unfortunate—reducing auto emissions was essential to his plan—but he knew that the law and the science were on California’s side, and, more important, so was the calendar.
When the Bush administration denied California the right to enforce its own global warming battle plan, there were only three candidates left in the race to be the next president—and all three had said they would approve the waiver. So either way, through the courts or through ballots, come 2009, the obstruction would be gone, and Tamminen’s plan for California to lead the nation in a war against climate change could begin in earnest.