With jurisdiction over one of the nation's largest ports and with experience at the California Energy Commission and as chief of staff for the California State Senate's Energy Committee, Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster is well versed on the issues of renewable energy and green infrastructure. The article features remarks made by the mayor at the recent GreenXchange Global marketplace Conference.
"When I was at Edison, we had the great fortune of having a guy named Bill Gould as chairman in the early ‘80s, who, before anybody else in the electric industry, wanted to move towards renewables. He happened to be a Long Beach citizen, actually. Bill Gould set a policy for the SCE company to have ten percent of its portfolio in renewable energy. There was no requirement. It was ground-breaking. He did it because he thought it was the right thing to do."
"We all know that every local government is looking for dollars to do things that they find necessary. This is just about policy. We're taking it upon ourselves, the two ports and the two cities, to clean up those ports, to electrify them, and to make sure that the handling equipment is clean. It's either going to be electric or some other clean, alternative fuel. We're going to change the trucking industry to have alternative fuel trucks and clean diesel trucks."
Comments
time for implementation
This is a nice call for the feds to stay out of the way, and perhaps actually help.
The problem with the feds is that they are stuck in a 70's or 80's way of thinking. Each new administration wants to develop its own solution so they call for research and then by the time the research is done, they are out of office and someone new is in there - again - calling for research. People..... we have been researching this to death for forty years now. If we don't have any good answers yet, then more research will not help us. But the truth is, we do have many great answers to our problems. What we need is a government effort to IMPLEMENT SOLUTIONS that are off-the-shelf. We need to do the things that we already know how to do instead of continually searching for new brilliant ideas to stick in a paper that no one will read. My state just gave out twelve million dollars for novel projects to develop new energy technologies which may or may not work, but I can't get them to give my agency one million dollars to install solar panels which would actually make a real difference in a very short time.
When we went to the moon, or built the bomb, we did not study it endlessly. Sure we had to figure things out, but when we did, we immediately implemented our solutions. We progressed rapidly because we used what we had discovered. Last night I heard one of Hillary Clinton's advisers say that the solution to the energy and climate problems should be addressed with more funding for research. Thank goodness I voted for Obama!!!