What Captain Kirk would do with the Texas oil companies and Proposition 23

Proposition 23 would use its weasel language to kill California's premier law to fight climate change, AB 32 (requiring rosy economic conditions that rarely happen before AB 32 could come into effect). It's a tool of Texas oil companies to delay inevitable action to address climate change.

The oil companies could have vigorously expanded into alternative energy, but they chose this approach instead - trying to slow down their demise by taking California and the rest of the planet with them.

I agree with Captain Kirk:

You can start after minute 1, or at minute 2:30. I need to learn how to edit these things.

Attention literalists: I don't advocate doing this to real humans (or real Klingons), but for the fossil fuel corporations that are trying to take us down with them, I've had enough.

The No on Prop 23 Campaign is here.

Remembering Stephen Schneider, and voting No on Proposition 23

(This is a repost from the Brian for Water District campaign blog.)

Driving to a meeting of the Water District's Environmental Advisory Committee earlier [last] week, I heard the sad news about the unexpected death of the prominent Stanford climatologist, Stephen Schneider.

While a student at Stanford Law School, I participated in one seminar where he guest-lectured and heard him on other occasions during school and afterwards. I thought he gave the most convincing demonstration of who to trust in the climate debate by showing a survey of the mainstream climatologists and the small number of scientists that doubted climate change. Schneider showed that the mainstream scientists were reasonably confident of their predictions but also admitted a wide margin for error. The few skeptic climatologists admitted nothing, and were absolutely confident that they were right. He had given the best demonstration I could imagine of scientific honesty on one side and over-confident hubris on the other.

Schneider's death comes as California wrestles with Proposition 23's demand to suspend its premier climate change law, AB32, a theoretical suspension that would actually kill it if Proposition 23 passes. I know that Schneider actually had some criticisms of his own of AB32, but I can't imagine he would favor the misguided effort to kill the law and do nothing in return.

I'll be voting No on Proposition 23, an initiative that will harm efforts to fight climate change and efforts to protect our water and watersheds. We will have to learn from Schneider's legacy as the state and country move forward.

-Brian

For a eulogy about Steve Schneider, read RealClimate here.

I'm all in, and running for the Santa Clara Valley Water District election this November

As I hinted at a while back, I've thrown my hat in the ring to run for the Santa Clara Valley Water District in the November 2010 election, representing the north county cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, and neighboring unincorporated county land extending up the Santa Cruz Mountains to the county line.  My official campaign website is http://brianforwater.org/, and campaign blog at http://brianforwater.blogspot.com/.

The Water District is pretty unique, combining responsibility for water supply, flood control, and watershed protection.  Many water districts have been extremely destructive water-grabbers or dam builders - this one is different, but a lot more can be done to make it even better.  It may not sound immediately important, but it does a lot of work, and I've been involved with it as chair and vice-chair of its Environmental Advisory Committee over the years.  The elected position occupies a somewhat-vague middle ground between the all-volunteer, supposedly-limited time commitment of most city councils, and the full-time, paid positions at the county and state level.

So will I win?  I'll exceed the accuracy level of many campaigners by skipping the false certainty and admit that I don't really know.  It would be hard to lose just right now - it's an open seat and I'm the only one who's filed an official Intent to Run.  On the other hand, other people are interested and have their own very good qualifications, so we'll see.  I do plan to run a serious campaign - I'm very certain of the support of the local environmental community and that I have more experience than any other name I've heard with the District.

Coming back to the relevance to this blog - the Water District is very clued in to climate change, but again it's always possible to do more.  I also want to highlight the foolishness of Proposition 23 on the November ballot that would suspend California's premier climate change law, AB 32, on the false pretense that the law has anything to do with high unemployment.  I'll be able to make some useful trouble there.

With the campaign effort taking time, I probably will be posting a bit less here, and some of the posting here will be cross-posted from the campaign blog and may be of less interest to readers who aren't from here.  I even thought of making Backseat Driving my campaign blog, but many of personal rants are unrelated to the job of the Water District, so I'd rather let people concentrate on the central issues while not hiding the rants that are here.