July 8, 2013, San Francisco
Intersolar North America 2013 kicked off with an impassioned keynote address by California Governor Jerry Brown, pledging strong support for further development of solar power in California. His speech was marked by repeated references to the urgency of climate change, calling current efforts ‘feeble’ and not on a scale proportionate to the severity of the problem.
Jerry Brown was followed by San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee, who also voiced support for solar and mentioned the goal of basing San Francisco’s electricity supply on 100% renewable energy sources.
 |
| “We’re going to need an indomitable will to overcome all the inertia, the blindness, and the silliness that stands in the way from our obvious destiny and future, which is a renewable, sustainable solar America and solar world.” ~ Jerry Brown |
Partial Excerpt:
“Thank you and welcome to California. This is a great place to come and talk about solar energy because we’re in the forefront of certainly the rest of the states, probably, in fact certainly in the Western Hemisphere, California’s in the lead, and that’s important,. But being in the lead doesn’t mean we’ve arrived at the goal. We’ve got a long way to go and I hope that the work you do here, the conversations, the relationships that are formed can help advance of the cause of solar energy and renewable energy more generally.”
….
0:40 “Today of course we know a lot more we know about climate change. We now have a population several billion more, we know if the demographers are right, the world will add another 2 billion people. Two billion people… we now have a billion cars when I was governor last time there were a couple hundred million cars. In fact cars are reproducing faster than people, and as long they’re using oil we got a problem. That’s why in California we have a goal to get a million electric vehicles by 2025.”
1:21 “Just within the last two months we actually recorded over 2000 megawatts of solar energy being put into the grid, which is more than San Onofre [closed nuclear reactor] provided. Of course the sun only works for six hours or so, and nuclear works for four times as long, however it leaves a little bit of a tale afterwards that has to be dealt with. But it’s an important milestone. California does have the goal of 33% renewable energy. We have the goal of a million solar rooftops. We already have over 130,000 installations on homes and small businesses. So, we’re looking at utility scale installation of solar looking at individual homes and businesses.So wherever we can, we are encouraging it. We’re number one in the country. We’re keep on going, it’s very critical.”
2:27 “Now I know, from the idea to the execution, to the secure realization, takes a long time, and we have to have patience, we have to have staying power. So that that’s the dilemma.”
“When we look at most of the countries, Germany’s certainly an exception, but most are not stepping up to the plate. There is a complete disproportion between the knowledge and the magnitude… the knowledge about, and the magnitude of climate change, and what it’s gonna do to our way of life, and our response. The response is feeble compared to the challenge, and we’ve got to wake up to that fact.”
 |
| “There is a complete disproportion between … the knowledge about, and the magnitude of climate change, and what it’s gonna do to our way of life, and our response. The response is feeble compared to the challenge, and we’ve got to wake up to that fact.” ~ Jerry Brown |
“One of the challenges is – climate change is not news, cause it’s too slow. News is fast, it’s what didn’t happen yesterday. And climate change has been happening gradually over time, and a lot of other stuff that’s going on that day gets people excited, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t get excited about a lot of trivial things, why not? It can distract you from other trivial things that may be more irritating. But still we have to think of what’s important, and what our responsibility as human beings are. It’s not just fun, and toys, and entertainment ,and shopping. There’s some serious stuff that men and women in this world have to deal with, and those things, there’s a lot of em – producing enough food, creating a safe environment, good schools, medicine. But energy is certainly one of the pillars of modern civilization, and there’s a lot of oil in the ground, more than, you know, if we wait for peak oil to save us, were done, cause we got plenty oil.”
“And I remembered somebody telling me once, a Stanford Professor, our problem is not too little too late, when it comes to oil, but it’s too much too soon. In other words, there’s plenty there. So that’s the problem – you got some easy coal, we only have 40% now that’s quite a lot. Coal burning, pretty simple stuff. And if you can’t burn it in American you put on a train, ship it over to China or India.”
“So we got Market forces, and against that, we have to marshal intelligence, and collaboration, and political response, cause this stuff is serious, and the fact that people aren’t worried it, and don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. And that’s the insidious character of this challenge. Some people know about it, 90, 97 percent of the scientists who deal in climate science are all agreed, but then when it comes to doing something, it takes leadership – and not just political leadership – but business leadership, church leadership, academic leadership, and that’s the context, I believe, in which you come together.”
“You’re focusing on solar energy, that’s a big piece. There’s plenty of sun out there to take care of our energy. It’s good to take time, it’s going to take technology, that takes scientific breakthroughs, research and development, and it’s going to take storage, and it’s gonna take various incentives.”
“I’m going to move aside all the obstacles, whoever and whatever they are, get out of the way, the sun is shining brightly in the state of California.” ~ Jerry Brown
“Just in California have some cities that charge 1800 bucks for a permit, for somebody to put solar on the roof, well that’s absurd, so we’ll fight against that, cause there’s soft costs, and we can bring those down. So from the small incremental step, to the long march in getting it done, those are all the elements that you have to deal with, and there’s some pauses, sometimes things plateau. I know some of the utilities feel they have enough for 33 and a third percent, which is our state goal, well then, you have to find other states, we’ve got to get out of people putting out a 33% renewable standard. We’ve got to get, and we do,
7:00 “we have a law in California encouraging storage, because we can’t just rely on sunlight, we gotta bottle the sunlight – you probably heard about that before – bottling sunlight, well that’s a metaphor for storage – but we can get it done.”
“And you know, in a time of war when the invading army comes, people rise to the occasion. But when the invasion is more subtle, and more gradual, then what? Then it takes clarity, it takes courage, and it takes will. A lot of political will, a lot of personal will, and that’s what I would urge upon all of you. You’ve got your businesses or your academic work, all of it has to flow in to this transformation.”
“Because climate change is happening, it’s affecting the food supply. We have the number of people going up, the number of oil fed cars going up, but we have food production now lagging behind. And so we’re going to have to slow climate change while we take care of all these other economic challenges. And is very easy to say, well we can’t turn off coal, we can go to solar, it’s too expensive. Well you wait 10 years, you wait 15 years, it’s going to be a lot more expensive, it’s a lot more. ”
“So, how do we take the future and bring it forward, so that we can act on the basis of what we certainly expect. And when I say we, it’s not we all the people, it’s we, a relatively small subset – people in this room, people throughout the country, but in rather limited numbers. And so you not only have to do what you doing, but you got to find a way to market the very idea of solar energy, the very idea that we have all the energy we need. We have to develop the technology to utilize it, without at the same time, filling up our atmosphere with methane, and CO2, and nitrogen oxide, and all the other emissions and pollutants that are going to reshape what life on earth is.”
“When you hit 400 parts per million, as we did, as reported by the monitoring stations over in Hawaii. It hasn’t been like that for three or four million years, and when it was like that, three or four million years, the sea was a lot higher, the ice at the polls was a lot less, so we got a lot of evidence. We’ve gotta find now the step-by-step sequential movement toward the goal, and the goal is an energy system totally compatible with the rules of nature. Humanity’s gotta get on the side of nature.”
“Now a lot of people like to fight nature, but we are nature, so when we fight nature we’re fighting ourselves, we’re fighting our own life support system. That’s really the challenge here, so it’s business, is a livelihood, but it’s also a calling, to wake people up, to make the kind of progressive steps that are crucial to make sure that we keep going. So we have a hundred and thirty thousand solar installations, we’re going to get several hundred thousand more, and as governor of California, I guarantee we’re going to get there, cause I’m going to move aside all the obstacles, whoever and whatever they are, get out of the way, the sun is shining brightly in the state of California.”
…….
“We’re going to need an indomitable will to overcome all the inertia, the blindness, and the silliness that stands in the way from our obvious destiny and future, which is a renewable, sustainable solar America and solar world.”
…….
San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee
Report by James George
