2008 Pat Brown Award
We all breathe a little easier and live a little better thanks to Tom Graff and his team at Environmental Defense Fund. Tom’s intelligence and dignity have often prevailed over conflict and stalemate, building better outcomes through consensus. On April 8, 2008, CCEEB was proud to present Tom with the the 15th Annual Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Award. Guest speakers shared their personal stories, including Mary Nichols, Tam Doduc, Kip Lipper, and Linda Adams.
Remarks of Tom Graff accepting the "Pat" Brown Award
Thank you Jerry, Jack, Mary, Tam, Kip, Vic, Linda, and Wally. And thank you all who have come here today to participate in the event.CCEEB stands for balance. Building and maintaining a healthy economy while protecting and restoring the state’s environment. Yet here you all are presenting me with and applauding me for the receipt of the much-celebrated and I might add muc h-coveted Pat Brown award.
Yet by 1971 when I was given the enormous privilege of working as a professional on environmental issues here in California it was evident (or would soon become so anyway) that the challenges of meeting CCEEB’s mandate (which is really EDF’s as well) required that some new alternative approaches be tried that would both protect the environment and strengthen the economy.
To make some of these new approaches operational—approaches like utility profit from conservation investment, water marketing, emissions trading, and congestion pricing—requires leadership from business, from labor, from various kinds of civic and non-governmental organizations, and of course from government, both from the executive and legislative branches.
While CCEEB and EDF have certainly had our share of significant clashes over the years, it was on some of these major opportunities to tackle environmental, economic, and equitable objectives, all at the same time, that we came together in remarkable ways.
Let me just give two examples, one ancient and one just pre-modern. I can get away with that choice I hope, given my age.
Back when Mike Peevey ran CCEEB, he organized a trip (some would say boondoggle) to Europe (Germany, Sweden, and England specifically) to look at co-generation facilities, energy conservation opportunities, and more generally electric utility policies in those countries. Invited on that trip with such notables as Howard Allen of SCE, Bart Shackelford of PG&E, and Mary Nichols (then of CARB and come to think of it now of CARB), I got to know some of these fearsome business execs as human beings rather than just as caricatured adversaries. Others got to know Mary as a fearsome regulator and as a particularly congenial human being as well.
There are no doubt many reasons why it happened, but it was not long after that trip, that Howard Allen took the revolutionary step of “postponing” (and then eventually cancelling) all involvement by SCE in the construction of new large central-station coal and nuclear plants, preferring instead investment in, among other things, co-generation, conservation, and renewables. As an aside, Bart Shackelford after that trip became one of EDF’s strongest supporters of water marketing.
More recently when Vic Weisser headed CCEEB and with Jerry Meral and others created the California Environmental Dialogue, we developed a position paper entitled California Transportation: The Key to a Prosperous Economy and a High Quality of Life. That monograph was touted, among other publications, by The Economist. It remains a succinct but seminal, if not immediately embraced, statement of a modern transportation policy for California.
It won the unanimous support of CED’s membership, including all its environmental organizations and such business luminaries as GM, Toyota, Hewlett Packard, Chevron, and BP Arco.
Now Mayor Bloomberg of New York, not to speak of Mayor Livingstone of London, have beaten us to the punch in promoting congestion pricing, that was one of the report’s most important recommendations, but that has not quite yet caught fire in California. Notably that fire was doused last night in New York by Assembly Speaker Silver, but I do believe congestion pricing and many of the report's other recommendations are on their way here and elsewhere. People might want to dig out that document.
If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years, things don’t always happen according to plan. In the development of public policy and in the adoption of policy reforms, the timing is unpredictable. Crucial global warming legislation passed in California because of the cooperation of Assembly Member Pavley, Governor Schwarzenegger, Speaker Núñez, and Senator Perata (last year's Pat Brown Award winners). Global warming legislation, on the other hand, is languishing in Washington because of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and some regional complications in the Congress. Just like some Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island residents are skeptical of paying fees to park in downtown Manhattan, legislators representing coal and auto-dominant districts fear comprehensive climate change legislation. But I have no doubt good legislation will pass, hopefully in 2009, because of President McCain or President Clinton or President Obama.
Our job, CCEEB’s and EDF’s and all of yours out in the audience, is to emulate Pat Brown, not just because he was a great man, even though he got some big policy matters wrong, but mainly because he committed himself to public service, and kept plugging away at it, carrying out his duties, while in office and after, in a manner that was at once thoughtful and persistent and humane and considerate of others.
There are few in California’s illustrious history in whose name it would be a greater honor to receive an award.
Thank you CCEEB and thank you all.