We caught up with Terry Tamminen for a few minutes this afternoon to talk about the Governors' Global Climate Summit, an event he played a pivotal role in organizing. Tamminen, an influential wonk who has the ear of Republicans and Democrats alike, predicted that President-elect Obama would create a high-level position in his administration to focus on climate issues. (See previous Grist interviews with Tamminen here and here.)
Tamminen stressed that states and local governments have already gotten a substantial head start on climate policy, offering incoming president Obama a foundation on which to craft a federal program. The summit convened this week in Los Angeles is meant to ratify and extend those state efforts -- he said attendees will reconvene, perhaps as early as six months from now, to assess their progress on the agreements reached here.
In the following video, Tamminen chats with Grist's David Roberts about the significance of the governors' summit, the role of the EPA in addressing climate change, and what to expect from the Obama administration.
In 2003, Tamminen was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to serve as the secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency; he later served as the governor's chief policy adviser. In that role, he orchestrated the state's landmark climate plan, and then went on to work with other governors, including Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R).
Tamminen is the author of Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, and he is the director of the climate policy program at the New America Foundation. His name has also been tossed around as a possible climate czar under Barack Obama.
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Comments
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:16 am
19 Nov 2008
"My prediction is that he will pick people who are "team players" ...he is a brilliant guy ..."
What exactly is a team player? Is it someone who does what his boss tells him to do? There's nothing wrong with that, to a point, and no shortage of people happy to do so to keep their jobs. Who can't do that?
Or is it someone who tells his boss what he wants to hear? What good is that? American corporate and political leadership has been wrecked by the cultivation and promotion of yes men by yes men until you finally get a yes man at the top (and a string of them all the way down) who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag. Obama is no yes man, and I hope he knows better than to cultivate them.
"He will be looking for the kind of people where when he challenges their beliefs they can flip around and make the best arguments against what they just said to him eh, ah, ah, as well as the ones that can make arguments for what they want to advocate because he really needs people around him ...who really understand all different sides of an argument and issue and can then come to the best policy.
The above doesn't make a lot of sense, but then he's just blabbering in front of a camera in a hotel room ;-).
If I were Obama, I'd ask my advisers for a public debate on an issue on some respected forum (like the Grist blog). I'd then sit down with a cup of coffee and read the debate, including comments. Fat chance.
Terry does not strike me as being a critical thinker. His dogmatic insistence (in light of all the evidence presented to the contrary) that hydrogen is a viable contender to reduce oil use is a prime example of that. He is not the guy who can understand "all different sides of an argument and issue and can then come to the best policy."
Here he is recently plugging hydrogen for cars again: "We should use hydrogen (generated by solar and wind power) in our cars."
Wrong, Terry. Wind and solar should offset coal. High mileage cars, bike lanes, and mass transit should be used to reduce oil use.
He also didn't see the biofuel backlash coming as late as 2007. Here he is promoting biofuels, natural gas, and hydrogen on Grist: "Replace these vehicles with ones that run on the cleanest fuels available, which today are biofuels, natural gas, and hydrogen.
Terry is interchangeable with any other bureaucrat with and environmental bent. He obviously is not one to think critically or even to understand two sides of a debate well enough to conclude which is right. On the other hand, Obama is unlikely to find such a person so Tamminen should do just fine.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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