The Climate Action Blog

My husband and I decided to vacation in Paris for ten days this past March. What a fantastic city!  The food, the wine, the art, the people, the shopping, the fashion, and the mass transportation.  That's right-one doesn't always rave about how great the mass transportation is in the City of Love, but I will.

First off, we did not need to use a cab the entire time we were there.  We flew into Charles de Gaulle airport and were able to easily find the train that took us into the city.  The train dropped us off about a block and a half from our apartment, and we had a short walk to our temporary home.  All ten days we were there, we used the (surprisingly clean) Metro, taking us from our home base in the Latin Quarter (where we enjoyed the fashions of the university students) to the outskirts of the city to visit the Marmottan Museum (where we were mesmerized by Monet's masterpieces) and up to the top of Montmarte (where we climbed the breathtaking Sacre Couer and soaked in the best views of the city).  It took us everywhere cheaply and easily. 

Listening to battery enthusiasts wax poetic about the Tesla recently - - and seeing a few of them appearing on the streets of west Los Angeles - - I began thinking about the old Tony Curtis film "The Great Race" (remember every time he smiled, there was a shiny sparkle of superiority that gleamed from his teeth?). The roads and Holiday Inns have improved dramatically since the period depicted in the movie, but the idea of testing the claims of exciting new technology at the dawn of a new transportation age is very much the same. So let's have a 21^st Century "Great Race" and pit the Tesla against the other electric car on the market today, the Honda Clarity.

The Tesla is an electric sports car powered by batteries, while the Clarity is an electric sedan powered by hydrogen (a fuel cell converts the hydrogen to electricity). The range of each is rated by USEPA-approved testing at about 230 miles. The similarities end there however - - the Tesla is the fastest production car ever built at zero to 60 mph, giving the little hot rod a distinct advantage that would seem to make a race with a Clarity anything but "great". Or would it?

The ambassador to the UN from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) told me recently that every government agency in his country has a sustainability plan out to the year 2030. The most significant part of that policy exercise is the fact they need to develop an economy beyond oil - - because they expect to run out of it by then.

Two weeks ago I visited Bahrain, an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf that is widely regarded as the Switzerland of the Middle East. This amazing little country gets only about 15% of its revenues from oil/gas development, so it too is planning for what comes after the Oil Age. With that in mind, Bahrain has encouraged the expansion of financial institutions (probably a good thing given how many are melting down in the US and Europe these days!), but more remarkable is the manufacturing industries that are blooming in the desert by the aquamarine waters of the Gulf.

Will Bahrain be the next China in terms of being both an economic and manufacturing powerhouse? Because everyone there speaks English (thanks to a British colonial history until 1971), will Bahrain be the next tech center to compete with India? Based on the rapid development going on in the country and a lot of "cool" factor - - I witnessed the Formula One Grand Prix race there and a major yacht race is being staged next - - the answer is yes.

I admit that my last blog may not have convinced many people that it is urgent to act on global warming unless you are a cat lover like I am.  So this time around I'm going to make my point by discussing a topic we can all relate to: cars.

In 1984, Al Gore held a hearing in Congress about global warming and urged his colleagues to do something about it. As we now know, he was ridiculed and largely ignored for the best part of two decades before being vindicated with a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (oh yeah, and another Congressional hearing, at which he was taken far more seriously).

I've been an environmental advocate for the same couple of decades, always suspecting that my friends raised an eyebrow or two over my predictions and admonitions about sustainability (my family, however, was not subtle about raising their eyebrows). I worked for the day when thinking "green" would be a normal part of everyday life. Well, just as Al Gore's day(s) arrived in 2007, my days arrived this week.

First, I turned on a Los Angeles Laker game and found the entire team wearing "NBA Green Week" tee shirts. The NBA.com website lists dozens of things anyone can do to live more sustainably (and save money in the process!). When a major sports league feels that all they need to say is "green" and that it's a good color for their brand, our time has come.

With governments around the world shoveling money out of pubic treasuries in the hopes of stimulating their economies, how about summoning a modicum of creativity to build better mousetraps that consumers might actually want to buy? I mean even at 10% unemployment, that means 90% of the population still has a job and is buying stuff. If we can come up with a few good ideas, we can put people to work making things and, hopefully, sell a few more widgets at home and abroad.

By Renee Bell, Consultant: By now, everyone has heard of the major impacts of global warming. Ice caps are melting, polar bears are drowning, and forest fires are ablaze across the globe. What people don't consider as frequently, however, is the more subtle impacts of global warming that are only beginning to emerge.

I have a friend who is living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whom I keep in frequent touch with via email. She recently wrote to me about a curious phenomenon happening there. Argentineans are traveling in unheard of numbers to visit the famous glaciers of Patagonia. The reason for this surge in tourism? You guessed it - global warming. The glaciers are melting at such a fast rate that nobody is sure how much longer they will last; people from across the country are making the trip to see them before it is too late. This phenomenon, cleverly coined as "Doomsday Tourism" in an article by Forbes (see here), is occuring across the globe from the Galapagos Islands to Antarctica. All of this raises the question - is it appropriate, or even ethical, to travel to these endangered places? Will the rise in tourism only compound the problem and make it worse or does this tourism help raise awareness for global warming in a positive way?

My three cats are in a good mood.  Although just two weeks have passed since President Obama has taken office, he is already in the process of allowing California and 13 other states to set strict limits on greenhouse gases emitted from cars and trucks and he has proposed an economic stimulus plan that includes creating thousands of new jobs that can reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil (not to mention he is attempting to make some peace in the middle east).  My cats are thrilled that America is on the path to create some useful climate change legislation.

In fact, it is more important to them than ever.  This last week a team of environmental researchers in the US concluded global temperatures could remain elevated for 1,000 years, even if we stop emitting carbon dioxide today (news.bbc.co.uk).