
Another post from California, this one from rainy Los Angeles. We flew into Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport yesterday, and it was quite a mob scene. Not for us, as it happened, but for Bill Clinton, who was in town to announce a partnership between his Clinton Climate Initiative and the city of Los Angeles, to refit 140,000 Los Angeles street lights with energy-saing LEDs. The program is projected to save taxpayers an estimated $48 million over seven years in energy costs while removing the CO2 equivalent of 6,700 cars a year from the road (a blip on the screen here in a city of so many cars, but…).
So, there we were, not quite rubbing shoulders with Clinton and his entourage at the airport, where the former president was leading an environmental roundtable discussion at a solar-powered hangar. The 60,000 square-foot facility generates enough clean power to run the building’s lights, recharge ground equipment and operate an aircraft’s electrical system while it’s being worked on inside the hangar.
The stop in LA was part of Clinton’s broader campaign of proselytizing about the upside of a ‘green economy.’ As Clinton explained yesterday, “if the world decides tomorrow to change the way it uses energy, it would create more jobs in more places than anywhere in human history. . . . But we have to change the mind-set . . . that we can’t do it without hurting the economy.” Sounds like he’s been reading our blog!