Energy symposium weighs perils and opportunities on climate change

BERKELEY — While the average Californian now uses about 40 percent less electricity than the average American, we cannot rest on our laurels, Mary Nichols, the chair of the California Air Resources Board, told a gathering at Berkeley on Monday that explored "bold ideas for a new energy landscape." To meet the challenges of global warming — and the state's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 — each Californian needs to cut his or her carbon footprint from the current average, 14 tons per year, to 10, she said. Nichols addressed the third annual UC Berkeley Energy Symposium, where the dangers and opportunities — political, economic, and environmental — of the current moment were a recurring theme. In her keynote address she told more than 500 conferees in Pauley Ballroom that "the time is now to respond to both the economic and environmental imperative to take action." Clean and efficient technologies, she said, can "serve as an engine for a reinvigorated and sustainable economy that will deliver jobs and sustain our quality of life." While warning that societies often fail "to come to grips with crises," Nichols highlighted opportunities for progress on climate change under the Obama Administration, leveraging California's record of environmental leadership at the national level. The state's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (often referred to as AB32), is one example of its past successes, along with the long-term economic effect of California's energy-efficiency standards, as calculated recently by Berkeley faculty member David Roland-Holst: between 1972 and 2008, $56 billion in electricity-cost savings and the creation of 1.5 million jobs in the state.