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Articles by Terry Tamminen

Terry Tamminen is the former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and is now a policy adviser and author. His latest book is Watercolors: How JJ the Whale Saved Us.

All Articles

  • Want Dinner with Leonardo DiCaprio and George Soros?

    In New York last week for the Clinton Global Initiative and United Nations Week, I attended a small dinner party late one night that featured film star Leonardo DiCaprio, billionaire philanthropist/investor George Soros, the President of the central African nation of Gabon and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), among others. What brought […]

  • America’s secret economic weapon: the EPA

    In the race to compete in a global economic recovery, the U.S. may have a secret weapon against economic rivals. China may be graduating more engineers and scientists; Canada may have a better health care system; but the U.S. has an unlikely secret weapon that has put American companies and workers in a position to race ahead of the pack for years to come -- the Environmental Protection Agency.

  • Water for a Wife

    In parts of the West African nation of Ghana, water has become so scarce that young women ask suitors about the distance to sources of clean water in their communities before accepting marriage proposals. Where water is hard to find, food is also often scarce, so girls are interrogating potential husbands about their ability to […]

  • Down under and upside down

    Last week, I visited the Australian state of Victoria, where the Parliament approved a bold plan by Premier John Brumby (of the Labor Party) to cut carbon emissions twenty percent below 2000 levels by 2020. His conservative opponent in the November election, Ted Baillieu of the Liberal Party, goes much farther than his national party […]