Governor Brown Ends Greenbuild Conference with Praise and Warning — and few Jabs

The annual Greenbuild conference in San Francisco ended its four day run with a speech by the greenest governor in the land.  According to reports he praised the several thousand attendees for recognizing the opportunity hiding in plain sight along with the necessity of dealing with climate change.

“I want to reinforce everything you’re doing and tell you that in California, we take it seriously — we’ve been doing it for a long time,”

He went on to give not only a lesson in philology but in structural dependency.

Brown on Friday noted the common Greek root of the words “ecology” and “economy,” but said ecology is about “deep principles, deep patterns, the structure of reality itself” — the economy exists within ecology, not vice versa.

He warned that those who did not understand we “could not repeal the laws of nature” were inviting “catastrophe.”

“Time is not on our side” as greenhouse gasses keep amassing in the atmosphere, he said, adding that if the world doesn’t clean up its act, it could reach a point where humans have to be “living on some other planet that’s more hospitable.”

Peppering the gloom and hope were a few nice jabs — at those who decades ago dubbed him “Governor Moonbeam,” [coined by columnist Mike Royko (and gleefully repeated by media lesser-lights) in 1978, for the ‘silly’ idea that California should launch its own communications satellite, and retracted by Royko in 1992,] and at the “declinists” who are “losing power, from one end of the country to the other.”

Sorry, I can’t find a link to the transcript or video on the internet.  Here are a few reporters on the speech:

David Baker, SF Chronicle

Josh Richman, Oakland Tribune

Andre Torrez, CBS Bay Area

Unattributed, SFAppeal

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For more of a look at the goods on display here’s a link.