Westly: Green-tech holds promise for Santa Cruz's future
SANTA CRUZ — The Beach Hill area near the Boardwalk will become "Beach Island" and the pesky problems on Pacific Avenue will no longer be an issue once the street is submerged, if the planet continues to warm at its current pace causing the sea to rise.
That's according to UC Santa Cruz climatologist Lisa Sloan, who joined former gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly and acting Chancellor George Blumenthal at UCSC on Friday to discuss climate change and how the county can benefit by taking action now.
Westly, a former California state controller turned green technology entrepreneur, said Santa Cruz is ripe to capitalize on renewable energy technology and other industry related to climate change, which has become one of the world's fastest-growing business sectors.
Take solar power, for example.
"California has more solar energy than all 49 states combined," making it one of three solar superpowers in the world, along with Japan and Germany, Westly said. Research into creating cheaper, more versatile photovoltaic materials — including research already going on at UCSC — will make solar power ubiquitous in everyday life, he said.
"Mark my words, in five years you'll see [small photovoltaics] on everything from clothes to iPods," Westly said.
The county's access to venture capital money in the San Francisco Bay Area and intellectual capital at UCSC could set the stage for a new green economy, Westly told a group of city and business leaders in the first of a series of meetings aimed at enticing green tech businesses to locate in the county.
City leaders, who've spent the past five years searching for ways to boost the local economy and bounce back from the loss of more than 1,000 manufacturing jobs, are listening to Westly's call.
Mayor Emily Reilly said Friday that leaders are looking to build a countywide coalition that would to build a green economy, and "fix" the environmental problems associated with climate change at the same time. The City Council will address the effort at its meeting Tuesday.
"I'm really optimistic about the support that we're going to be getting from the entire county to move forward in a unified effort to reduce our emissions and our carbon footprint," Reilly said. "My hope is to get all the cities in the county to agree to speak with one unified voice with the university and business community to say this is what we intend to do"
Computer models generated at Sloan's Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory show that by 2060, temperatures in Santa Cruz will rise 8-9 degrees in the spring, warming an average April day to 80 degrees if current trends go unchecked, Sloan said. Summers will be hotter too, with quadruple the number of days with temperatures above 95 degrees.
Other climate models that show sea levels rising 20 feet, enough to inundate downtown Santa Cruz, would come as a result of Greenland's ice sheet melting or slipping into the ocean. Scientists are unsure how soon the scenario could play out.
Sloan said a 20-foot rise was likely to happen anytime in the next 100 to 1,000 years if levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise in the earth's atmosphere at the current rate.
