Arnold

A day after California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration and state lawmakers stirred the global warming pot, the governor on Tuesday called for a “Climate Action Summit” next week in San Francisco and directed the state Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) to hold a series of six public discussion sessions in the major regions of the state to consider the implications of the 1,300-page climate report released Monday.

Ignoring the prospect of a pitched political battle, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Thursday renominated the chairman of the California Energy Commission (CEC), Joseph Desmond, for a full six-year term. Leaders in the Democratic-controlled state legislature already have indicated publicly they will block the confirmation of Desmond, a former Silicon Valley business leader who has served as Schwarzenegger’s chief energy adviser.

Rachelle Chong, a former Federal Communications Commissioner in the Clinton Administration, was named by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Wednesday to the California Public Utilities Commission, replacing Susan Kennedy, who left last month to become the governor’s chief of staff. Chong joins the five-member regulatory commission immediately, although her appointment is subject to state Senate confirmation. She can begin serving for up to a year without confirmation.

As California’s state legislature starts its final week Tuesday with several renewable energy and resource adequacy issues on its plate, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s revitalized proposal to reorganize the state’s energy bureaucracy into a cabinet-level energy department has been put off until next year’s second part of the current two-year session. The governor’s eleventh-hour attempt to push a proposal that was earlier in the year rejected as part of a new bill (AB 1165) was set aside by a legislative committee last week.

Hoping last week’s transmission emergency that resulted in isolated rolling blackouts will make a difference, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Wednesday reintroduced his plan to reorganize the state’s scattered energy functions into one cabinet-level Energy Department.

After a round of negotiations and proposed amendments during the state legislature’s first week back from its summer recess last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “million solar roofs” proposal (SB 1) and several other major energy proposals face a critical test this Wednesday in the state lower house Assembly Appropriations Committee. What form the proposals will take, and who is supporting them, was still unknown last Friday.

Some top personal and political advisers to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are turning up as part of the public relations/lobbying team for one of the major proponents of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal along the state’s coast, Australian resources giant, BHP Billiton, according to a political analysis report in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Thursday said he thinks eventually his state needs its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal, but only after local citizens decide where it should be sited.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger kept pushing energy-saving messages for this summer in his weekly statewide radio address last weekend, but other news media picked up belatedly on the governor’s comments about liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal siting in the state that he made in response to media questions last Thursday (see Daily GPI, June 24). The governor’s press office stressed that Schwarzenegger is waiting for the regulatory processes to be completed regarding both proposed onshore and offshore LNG terminals.