fter his election, Schwarzenegger named Terry Tamminen the head of the California Environmental Protection Agency. Out of the gate, the Schwarzenegger administration got to work on its environmental agenda. The governor, for instance, has vigorously defended the state's authority to regulate CO2 emissions, which has been challenged by an auto industry suit. Schwarzenegger signed legislation that would help various state agencies better coordinate ocean protection as well as regulate fisheries, cruise ship pollution, and water quality. He also collaborated with the state legislature in passing a number of air quality bills, including one that provides funding to replace older, polluting diesel engines. He sponsored a Million Solar Homes bill to increase California's total solar energy output from 101 megawatts to 3,000 megawatts by 2018, and ordered the state government, the largest power user, to increase its own energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2015. A 25-million-acre Sierra Nevada Conservancy was established, and the governor signed bills favored by environmental groups on pesticide drift, water quality standards for the San Francisco Bay, and allowing high-mileage hybrid vehicles in freeway carpool lanes. By executive order, Schwarzenegger inaugurated a California Hydrogen Highway Network initiative to build 200 hydrogen filling stations along California's major freeways, linking the south to the north.

The hydrogen plan was typical of Schwarzenegger: bold, visionary, and long range, not requiring much pain in the short term. The program itself reflects his and Tamminen's conviction (there often seems no clear way to tell the two apart) that environmental policy ought to be a kind of industrial policy, aimed at stimulating technological innovation and, through it, economic growth. Still, the governor acknowledged to me that the Hydrogen Highways plan is as much political theater as it is policy: "selling the idea," as he put it. "It's a motivational thing: Build hydrogen fueling stations, because that will motivate Detroit and other manufacturers around the world. They'll say, '[California is] taking this seriously.' "
In Japan last year on a promotional tour for California products and tourism, Schwarzenegger sat down with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who agreed that Japan and California should work together to realize a hydrogen economy. Although the two men made no formal agreement, the governor took this as an endorsement by Koizumi of Schwarzenegger's Japanese-style shaping of advanced industrial development through a combination of incentives and regulation. And the governor was duly impressed when Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber of the German state of Bavaria arrived in California last year with a 50-person delegation, including "all the top industrialists in the car business. This stuff is going on," he said, "because they all look at us as serious players, even though it's more noise right now than actual substance. The substance will come from each station we build."

But in that same first year, Schwarzenegger vetoed a slew of bills favored by environmentalists, including 10 that had been labeled as "job-killer" bills by the state Chamber of Commerce, and signed many bills favored by business lobbies. He let the federal Bureau of Reclamation renew 25-year farm water contracts for the gargantuan Central Valley Project at existing grossly subsidized rates without input from environmentalists.

Advocates such as Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), credit Terry Tamminen with maintaining open lines of communication, even in the face of strong pressures put on the governor by business lobbies and more conservative members of his administration. "He hasn't been an apologist for Schwarzenegger," Reynolds said of Tamminen. "He's been fighting the good fight. And that hasn't dimmed his stature in the governor's eyes; he just promoted him" -- from head of the state Environmental Protection Agency to cabinet secretary, overseeing the entire executive branch. Whether this move will strengthen Tamminen's voice or distract him remains to be seen. When I spoke with Tamminen he acknowledged that it was a challenge to go from worrying about air pollution to worrying, in addition, about the prison system, health care, and law enforcement.

In any case, Tamminen's is clearly not the only voice the governor listens to. In its 2004 environmental scorecard, the California League of Conservation Voters gave the governor only a 58 percent proenvironment score for his first year in office. (By comparison, Governor Davis received 100 percent in 2003.) Ann Notthoff, NRDC's director of California advocacy, notes that the league's rating looked at only one piece of the governor's record -- the bills that reached his desk. A governor is also accountable for appointments to his admininstration, executive orders, and legal actions. "He made solid progress during his first year by making several good appointments," says Notthoff. "But this year has been a different story."

Indeed, several recent developments have especially alarmed environmentalists. In July, the governor cut $40 million from programs for coastal protection, salmon and trout restoration, and parks, among others. More troubling has been the feeling that the governor has lately caved in to business lobbies in making key appointments to state and regional regulatory boards, quasi-independent bodies that wield enormous authority in California. This summer, two appointments in particular raised flags. Ron Nehring, the San Diego GOP chairman and protégé of antitax activist Grover Norquist, was named to the state board of forestry and fire protection, in spite of his lack of expertise in either matter. Of even greater concern to environmentalists was the appointment of Cindy Tuck to the chairmanship of the state air resources board, an 11-person commission that Notthoff calls "arguably the most influential environmental board in the country." Tuck is a former lobbyist for the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, a business group that has opposed many of the major air quality measures passed in the state.