Aug 30 2010

It's probably not a winning sales pitch for high-tech gadgetry, but the new tablet computer is proving a good fit for local government.

The county Board of Supervisors is using Hewlett-Packard's Elitebook tablet PCs. The Watsonville City Council this week received Apple iPads. And city leaders in Santa Cruz have begun mulling the sleek touchscreen devices as their peers in government offer positive reviews.

"I think I'll be able to do everything I did with paper," said Supervisor Ellen Pirie, who stopped lugging her notoriously bulky meeting agenda around with her when she received her Elitebook earlier this month and could download all the necessary materials to it...

The main goal in getting tablet computers, say government administrators, is to save time and money, particularly when it comes to duplicating paper documents.

As the final days of the 2010 legislative session wind down in Sacramento, a Silicon Valley lawmaker is pushing to give California the most far-reaching mandate for renewable energy in the United States.

But there's more to it than putting up some wind turbines and solar farms. The lofty goal is struggling through a complex tangle of utilities, labor unions, environmental groups and green energy companies -- each concerned about everything from the price of your monthly PG&E bill to the number of jobs the measure might, or might not, create.

"It is an extraordinarily complex task," said State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, "both in respect to the issue itself and the politics surrounding it."

The showdown over Simitian's bill, SB 722, could come to a vote early next week. The bill would require California's utilities to produce 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Government leaders from across the Monterey Bay region committed this week to reducing per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of passenger vehicles by 5 percent over the next 25 years.

The commitment by the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, expected to be fulfilled through responsible transportation and growth policies, comes as state regulators seek to implement California's ambitious greenhouse gas regulations.

The California Air Resources Board is expected to decide next month whether the region's new targets are acceptable. The state board had initially suggested that the three-county Monterey Bay Area could increase its output of greenhouse gases, but local leaders wanted to show greater environmental responsibility.

PG&E is handing over tens of thousands of dollars to the nonprofit Sempervirens Fund to protect a 425-acre stand of redwoods once slated for logging deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The deal, expected to be completed next month, is part of the utility's efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions, in this case safeguarding trees for carbon absorption, and is helping to drive a new marketplace where people and business are offered an incentive to offset pollution.

"We're finding a new financial model here for doing things to capture greenhouse gases that wouldn't have been done otherwise," said Robert Parkhurst, climate protection and analysis manager for PG&E.

"It's a new paradigm for protecting the environment."