Using photo-ops in the Big Apple as a backdrop, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his New York counterpart, Gov. George Pataki announced Monday their states will work to link California’s future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions credit market to a similar upcoming market in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic states. Earlier in the day, Schwarzenegger rolled out an executive order in his state to implement new global warming laws. He’ll sign the order Tuesday upon his return.

On a daylong, three-stop promotion tour in New York City, the California governor stopped on Wall Street and meetings with both New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki. Schwarzenegger made the trip’s focus his discussions on implementation of California’s new market-based GHG emission reduction laws.

Schwarzenegger’s press office said he and Pataki “agreed to explore ways to link” with Eastern states, specifically to “form a GHG trading partnership with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)” made up of the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic partnering states. Pataki helped spearhead the development of the Eastern regional cooperation. California state environmental officials accompanying Schwarzenegger met with their counterparts on RGGI.

“No one state can do it alone,” Schwarzenegger said in a prepared statement. “It truly is a global problem where states, regions and nations must work together to find a solution.”

Schwarzenegger’s whirlwind trip East seemed designed for national consumption rather than coverage in his home state where the Republican governor now enjoys a comfortable lead in the political opinion polls for a November reelection vote. The cooperative regional activities among states are not expected to require consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to California EPA Secretary Linda Adams.

In a separate announcement from his Sacramento press office Monday morning, the barnstorming California governor issued another executive order on global warming — this one featuring a three-step process to implement the state’s new laws (AB 32 and SB 1368), which critic’s in the California business community have predicted will place the state at an economic disadvantage unless national global-warming measures are adopted. The order, which is designed to plug holes left in the new state laws, calls for the following:

The California governor started the day early Monday, helping sound the opening bell of the NASDAQ stock exchange where he noted that 600 California companies are listed as “leaders in entertainment, high-tech, bio-tech and now clean-tech.” An hour later he met with Mayor Bloomberg at the Credit Suisse greenhouse carbon emissions desk on its commodities trading floor in lower Manhattan.

“I wanted to learn about this marketplace and how it will work in California,” Schwarzenegger said. “But it also struck me that these jobs were all new jobs being created in the clean-tech industry, and I have said many times that you do not have to choose between a healthy economy and healthy environment.”

He completed the public part of the trip at a 27-story building dedicated three years ago by Gov. Pataki as a model of energy efficiency and environmental sensitivity. Pataki previously qualified the Solaire building as meeting the state’s green building tax credit, a program aimed at encouraging more environmentally sustainable design and development in commercial and residential buildings.

The two governors held private meetings following a news media availability session in which Pataki lauded California’s approach for taking a “global view,” including the Eastern states and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Both governors emphasized that a national approach to GHG emissions ultimately must be hammered out in the United States, but they offered no specific plans now for coordinating their efforts with the Bush administration.

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