(Co-authored with Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law and the faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA)

We depend on federal funding for this research through our universities and national labs, including DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If Trump acts as many fear, we stand to lose the benefit of this tremendously valuable research by some of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers.
We also need climate impact, adaptation and mitigation research. As a coastal state, California is particularly vulnerable to climate change and resultant sea-level rise. Changes in rainfall and loss of snowpack in the Sierra and Rockies pose huge challenges due to our arid climate, complex water-supply system, large population and major agricultural sector. Our low-income communities will be hit especially hard. We can’t plan the state’s responses without sharper predictions and new technologies and approaches to make California climate resilient.
The federal government contributed $6.6 billion to clean energy technology programs in 2015, with $4.8 billion of that to DOE. With these kinds of cuts, how should California fund the necessary research? The options include bond funding; revenue from the state’s cap-and-trade program; an increase in the gasoline tax or vehicle license fees; or a small surcharge on electricity bills. Several of these options would need to include exemptions for low-income Californians to avoid regressive effects.
Another possibility is a tax on the extraction of oil and natural gas. Such a tax on fuels that contribute to climate change would raise up to $1.5 billion annually to support the necessary research and technology development that philanthropic and private monies typically don’t support.
There’s strong precedent for California taking research leadership when the federal government falters. When the Bush administration cut federal money for stem cell research, California voters responded by establishing the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine through government bonds. CIRM has been lauded for funding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of important, lifesaving research.
With new research funding, California can bolster two of its greatest strengths: its clean energy industry and the greatest public higher education system in the world. California’s green-tech sector leads the country in job creation, venture capital funding and clean energy innovation. State research funding will strengthen this sector, especially when combined with venture-capital investments and funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Initiative, which aims to bring promising technologies to market.
Research in climate science and energy innovation is an investment in our future. It will pay dividends many times over for our economy and for our environment. California, as the world’s fifth-largest economy and environmental leader, should be at the forefront as the federal government bails out.
Prof. Farber, I want to thank everyone at UC and CSU for the latest post on BERKELEY NEWS: “UC, CSU faculty send open letter to Trump on climate change.”
You and I have been discussing uniting professors and scholars to fight to protect the human race from global warming for about a decade.
You told me that this would be like herding cats, but Trump’s threats have brought them together at last.
You encouraged me to “Never Give Up!” on this issue and I haven’t, even to the point where I have been informed that I am considered to be a troll on the Berkeley Blog by one of Berkeley’s most distinguished social scientists.
Now the question is, can we repeat the environmental success of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and adapt in time with solutions that can be implemented with the required sense of urgency to guarantee an acceptable quality of life for our newest and all future generations?
Professors Carlson and Farber, one paramount fact of life you must also consider immediately is that this is the age of fast changing environmental, social, political, economic and scientific changes and we are not adapting in time to meet these increasingly out of control challenges of change in any satisfactory state, national or worldwide manner at all.
Lone rangers (even those who are members of small, dedicated groups) must join together with other leaders and groups to solve a number of increasingly destructive problems threatening the human race today that include climate change, violence and inequalities.
Worldwide political systems, and the United Nations, are continuously failing to meet the increasingly out of control challenges of change we are facing today due to never-ending political power competitions and the power of money.
Lessons of history have proven repeatedly that intellectuals are the best group, to overcome our political failures, that must unite too meet the challenges of change our civilization faces today with the required sense of urgency.
Intellectuals must unite immediately to solve and implement solutions to more than one threat to our civilization in order to guarantee an acceptable quality of life for you newest and all future generations.
P.S. We need leaders like Rachel Carson and Winston Churchill to motivate us to defeat global warming, violence and inequalities.