Now an advisor to the California Energy Commission, Bartholomy cautioned against pinning hopes solely on hybrid cars, bio-fuels and super-efficient solar panels. He said 40% of California’s greenhouse gases come from the transportation system. Despite the state’s far-reaching policies to curb auto emissions and enshrine low-carbon fuel standards, vehicle-miles traveled in the state are projected to climb two percent annually into the indefinite future.
“That increase and the way we’re building our communities; our behavior and the way we treat our cars—these are going to swamp any of the technological progress we’re going to make,” he asserted. “You won’t see greenhouse gases from the transportation sector going down. They’ll flat-line for a couple of years and then start to creep back up again.”
Revamped land-use can help bridge the gap, Bartholomy said. Green building is essential, housing will have to be built closer to places of employ and commute times will have to be curtailed. Beyond that, he proposed, the state should entrench a public transportation culture that deploys trains and buses on a scale unprecedented in the state’s history.
Bartholomy underscored that even though all levels of government must cooperate to fight manmade climate change, communities, neighborhoods and individuals will be challenged to make fundamental changes in behavior and ways of life, to catalyze government action. “This is the true heroic challenge that today’s youth are going to be focusing on,” he predicted.
HSU was among 1,700 institutions and communities linked in the national climate forum. Jennifer Berman, coordinator of the Redwood Alliance’s Climate Action Project and co-sponsor of the local Focus the Nation initiative, estimated that nearly 1,000 students, faculty and community members participated in the climate solutions conclave. Attendees voted on their top five national climate priorities and local student teams will deliver the results to federal authorities. Online votes can still be cast at www.focusthenation.org.
“By bringing the discussion into a community forum on the HSU campus and in the Town Hall Meeting in Arcata on Thursday night, we realized that this is a much larger movement that will become more and more relevant and embedded in our lives for the foreseeable future,” Berman said.