At national level there was and has been hardly any significant climate protection in the USA. The US-Americans are and will remain the worst climate damagers on our planet. George W. Bush was so much dependent on the US oil lobby that he wasn’t even able to spell the word climate protection – as he once told the German Federal Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

American environmentalists therefore pinned their hopes on President Obama, whom they also strongly supported during the election campaign. But the young President is letting down his supporters as he doesn’t find political majorities for his environmental policy.

All the more remarkable were the latest election results on 2 November 2010 in California – the largest and economically strongest state of the USA where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has attracted attention with ambitious climate protection goals. Republican Schwarzenegger had often said to Hermann Scheer: “You are my hero”. The “green terminator” called the German Renewable Energies Act “a model for the USA”.

But also Schwarzenegger’s successor, Democrat Jerry Brown, is promoting climate protection. He announced that in four years’ time one third of California’s power consumption will come from renewable energy sources. This would be twice as much as today. In previous years, the state on the Pacific Coast has already been a US master of energy efficiency. Since 1980, power consumption in California has remained roughly the same whereas economic growth has considerably increased. In the same period power consumption throughout the USA has increased by 60 %.

Today, energy efficiency – which means power consumption per produced economic good – on the east coast is by 60 % more favourable than in the other states of the USA. An unbeatable economic advantage by ecologic intelligence. With energy efficiency and energy-saving alone, 1.5 million new jobs have been created in California within the last 30 years. Today, sunny California produces 90 % of the total solar energy of the USA – at prices which can already compete with conventional electricity. For 20 years, half of California’s capital, Sacramento, has already been supplied with solar power – by day and night. Meanwhile, other American states are announcing similarly ambitious targets. California’s example is catching. The story of the American Way of Life can also be newly written. German companies Schott Solar and Solarworld, for example, built new solar factories in the USA. The geothermal field “The Geysers” north of San Francisco is considered to be the world’s largest heat exchanger.

The new Governor Brown, today 72 years old, has been California’s Head of State from 1975 to 1983. He had the huge wind farms on the Pacific built – at a time when wind energy had been a foreign word for many people in Germany. At that time, Californians were world champions of wind energy, later the Germans and now – thanks to Obama – the US Americans again. Meanwhile, the Chinese rank second behind the Americans and before the Germans in the field of building and expanding wind energy.

California is proving that also in the USA the power of the strong oil lobby is limited. During the last election campaign, representatives of the oil industry spent nine million dollar in California alone, to create a public platform for polemics against climate protection. But almost 60 % of the voters were favouring the retention of the Global Warming Solutions Act which had been implemented by Schwarzenegger.

In the past, mainly IT and Computer companies had settled south of San Francisco – nowadays there are companies for energy-efficient construction, solar power plants, electric cars and battery technologies. “Big Oil” is going to lose in the USA, too. They will run out of material which will – thanks to scarcities –be far too expensive in a few years. The question is, of course, when? And what will be destroyed in the face of the dramatic climate change? At least, California has often been a model for other states in the USA. And if the USA is going to renew their energy industry, this will change the whole world.

© Franz Alt 2010

Übersetzung: Andrea Polak 2010