"Arnold is green," said John White, a veteran Sacramento Sierra Club lobbyist. "He's a throwback to the old days when Republicans were good on these issues." This week, the governor appointed Meg Caldwell, the director of Stanford's environmental law program, to the Coastal Commission. Schwarzenegger's top eco-advisers are Terry Tamminen, a former Santa Monica environmentalist he appointed to run the California EPA - - - an agency that Tamminen used to sue - - - and Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman, a Visalia farmer and former Southern California Edison executive active with Ducks Unlimited. "These issues have become entirely too partisan, and too polarized," said Chrisman. "They are not Republican or Democratic. We have to help the governor steer the debate toward that." Other key informal Eco-advisers are Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver; her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council; and Bonnie Reiss, an entertainment lawyer who in the 1980's founded the Earth Communications Office, a nonprofit that worked to place environmental messages in TV shows. "He has a Rolodex that none of us can match. On the oceans, he has spent a lot of time talking to Julie Packard and Leon Panetta," Tamminen said, referring to the Monterey Bay Aquarium executive director and Clinton's former Chief of Staff. "He's got a very curious mind about other people's experiences." During the recall Election, Schwarzenegger called for putting solar power on 50% of new homes, creating a "hydrogen highway" of 200 hydrogen vehicles fueling stations by 2010, and expanding parks in inner cities. He took several stances opposed by the Bush Administration" supporting a Clinton plan for reduced logging in the Sierra Nevada, opposing ethanol mandates for gasoline, and wanting no new offshore oil drilling. Suffice to say that environmentalists are still wary and are obviously in the "honeymoon" stage with Arnold, but now people are really beginning to feel that there may well be a record of real accomplishment with this Administration. --- Contra Costa Times, Paul Rogers, 5/29/04