California Climate Change Conferences in Flux

This will not be news to people registered for the California Climate Adaptation Forum, but bystanders might be interested to know:

The California Climate Change Symposium "Science to Safeguard California" that was to be held Tues. Sept. 6 at the Renaissance Long Beach Hotel, the same hotel where the California Adaptation Forum (CAF) will be held Sept. 7-8, has been rescheduled and relocated. It will be held in Sacramento on January 25-26, 2017.

The reason for the above change is that it was being organized by state entities (California Natural Resources Agency, the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research) and there is a labor dispute at the host hotel that has led to all state employees, who are union members, being told to stay away from this hotel. This is a paraphrasing of something passed on to me a few weeks ago by an employee of the California Coastal Conservancy (who was trying to figure out a work-around, such as attending as a private individual, with no luck).

The organizer of the CAF, the Local Government Commission (LGC), is a non-profit and not a union shop, so the CAF is going forward despite state employee withdrawal from participation.

A friend who is not a union member but who has qualms about potentially crossing a picket line contacted the LGC about the labor dispute, and was sent this reply on Aug. 12 indicating some ways she might engage with the negotiation process (the text links are as sent in the e-mail):

The hotel staff is not on strike, there is an organized campaign by UNITE HERE [Local 11] to raise awareness of labor issues and to pressure the hotel to allow them to unionize using a card check neutrality process. The campaign includes a protest outside the hotel on some days. We have more information here on a web page  we setup on the situation so that everyone could know what was happening. 

In terms of updates, we are still in active discussions with representatives from UNITE HERE about ways to further engage during our event and to use our presence as a means to engage with hotel management on their concerns. We are currently developing a letter to the hotel management and owners describing how their actions have affected our event specifically, and at the request of some partners have created a template for anyone who wants to provide their own feedback to the hotel. We are talking with UNITE HERE about following-up with this letter by bringing a delegation to management during the event to ask them to allow the card-check neutrality process to go forward and are potentially going to try to get a news piece to cover the situation during the event.

If you are interested in any of these activities please let me know. Don't hesitate to contact me should you have any further questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Kif Scheuer
Climate Change Program Director
Local Government Commission

So far it looks like the UNITE HERE Local 11 campaign will not be resolved in time for state employees to participate at the California Adaptation Forum. That, plus what I've heard about the approved workshops, makes this a gathering with a strong emphasis on private, local community groups. It will be interesting to see what unfolds!

California Climate Change Symposium Parking Lot

I was unable to attend the California Climate Change Symposium (#CCCS15) in Sacramento on Aug. 24-25, 2015, so I'm creating a parking lot here for links that can help a non-attendee get acquainted with what happened there.

It was put together by the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR), the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA), the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal-EPA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main topic of the event was the state of climate science in California (the URL for the event is "californiascience.org"). The Daily Breeze (LA County) does a nice, quick, accessible summary of the take-aways of the science presented at the CCCS15, if you can get past the demotivating headline: California climate researchers sound the alarm at symposium: ‘There’s no way out’ (Aug. 25, 2015).

That "no way out" quote is attributed to the wise and esteemed Susanne Moser, who I greatly admire, but who definitely tends towards the "stick" more than "carrot" approach to delivering climate change information, at least when she is talking to her peers-- scientists and climate change planners. Another stick-upside-the-head pronouncement I wrote down once while listening to her speak is "we can't save everything we love." She's good at "stick" delivery. Another So-Cal journalist who appears to be repacking the Daily Breeze take-aways but with maps, seized on the "no way out" quote, putting it in bold under another "stick"-y headline: The Many Terrifying Ways Global Warming Will Soon Be Ravaging California (Aug. 26, 2015).

FYI -- if you, like me, missed the event because you didn't find out it was happening in time to attend, the event was first announced May 21, 2015, by the CNRA via its climate change list-serve (which you can join here). The call for posters only went out on July 8. Since the short lead-time on the event probably excluded a lot of people who have to plan ahead more than a few weeks at a time, it's nice that the event was live-webcast. However, I don't think the videos are available online (or, aren't yet online).

Despite the short notice, it was a sold-out 600+ crowd, from one friend's account. I'm skimming through the Twitter feed of top tweets on the event for other insights.

If that's too much heavy lifting, LA-based Climate Resolve has just published a curated selection of CCCS15 tweets.

If you are looking for MORE heavy lifting here's the "live" feed for #CCCS15, the whole slough of tweets with that tag, uncurated.