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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CHANGING THE CAMPUS CLIMATE: CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY TAKES ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE SANTA BARBARA, California, February 4, 2005 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- California's first university-wide summit on global climate change will bring together more than 100 California university students, professors, local leaders, citizens, researchers, and activists to mobilize universities and campus towns across California to lead the state in becoming a national and international model for battling climate change. These leaders will converge at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California at Santa Barbara on February 4th & 5th 2005 to share expertise, initiate partnerships, and create an agenda for action. "My generation knows that the time for climate action is now", said Dan Worth, Executive Director of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS), the lead group organizing the event. "We want to be able to tell our children that we pulled our heads out of the sand and took action in time to save their future." The Summit features student leaders, key university faculty and administrators, civic leaders, and climate experts from across California and the nation, including Bren School Dean Dennis Aigner and the Mayors of Santa Barbara and Goleta, Marty Blum and Jean Blois. The morning session will lay out the causes and impacts of climate change and discuss the failings of international and national governance to address the problem. Speakers include a participant in the recent Arctic Climate Impact Assessment as well as representatives from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the California Student Sustainability Coalition, the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Afternoon speakers will highlight effective initiatives at the state, local, and university levels to aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then join Summit attendees to develop immediate steps and ambitious long-term strategies to catalyze these efforts. "California is a natural leader and needs to take the lead on climate change, by transforming campuses and surrounding cities into models of sustainability", said CCN California Campaign Coordinator, Danielle Grabiel. "California campuses have been leaders in earlier social movements, such as Free Speech, Civil Rights, and the anti-Apartheid campaign against South Africa. Now they must act again to take the technological and moral lead in battling the greatest threat of our generation." The Summit will launch the California campaign of Campus Climate Neutral (CCN), an ambitious, long-term effort to eliminate or offset all US campus emissions. Other CCN campaigns are already underway in New York, DC, and Indiana. Grabiel added: "As past Nobel Prize winning efforts have demonstrated, California universities have the intellectual power and technical know-how to lead the climate change battle, but we need to act now before it is too late." She continued, "The Climate Summit is a chance to find solutions to aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, generate profits, and create new technologies and the jobs that go with them, while training the next generation of sustainability leaders." The Bush Administration continues to deny the climate problem, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, and to boycott the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement addressing greenhouse gas emissions, which goes into effect next month. However, even the Kyoto Protocol only requires 2.5% reductions of greenhouse gases by 2012 for developed countries. "The greenhouse gas reductions of 1.5 to 2.5% by developed countries stands in sharp contrast to the 70-95% immediate reductions most credible scientists believe is necessary to prevent further irreparable harm, " stated Professor Oran Young, co-founder of the Program on Governance for Sustainable Development at the Bren School, which is co-organizing the summit. Young was recently involved in the planning and review stage of the Arctic Climate study showing the dangerous warming of that region and the cascading impacts that have already begun. As recently as last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed the same sense of urgency at the World Economic Summit in Davos, calling for a global focus on climate change at the upcoming G-8 Summit in Scotland in July. "Through the G8 process," he said, "I want to develop a package of practical measures, largely focused on technology, to cut emissions. And here I don't just mean research into new technologies, important though that is. I also think we need to work much harder to find ways to implement the vast range of low-carbon technologies that have already been developed. Energy efficiency. Renewable energy sources. Cleaner fossil fuels. Avoiding waste. All of this can be done, and often at a much lower cost than we realize." -The National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) is a coalition of over 60 law student groups in over 30 states that aims to connect, educate, and inspire the next generation of environmental leaders and mobilize the university community in support of public interest environmental solutions. -The Program on Governance for Sustainable Development (GSD) at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management focuses on the design and implementation of better governance mechanisms, including laws and regulations, to achieve sustainable development. The GSD Program engages in basic and applied research, graduate education, short courses and training, conferences, colloquia, and workshops, as well as advisory services and publications. CONTACT: Dan Worth, Executive Director National Association of Environmental Law Societies Cell: 734-709-8794 dworth_99@yahoo.com http://www.naels.org/projects/ccn/index.htm |
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