KEY POINTS:
When residents of Catalina Island off the coast of southern California were invited to a screening of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the mayor of Avalon, Catalina's one and only town, didn't have high expectations.
The island, 32km from the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is known for its conservative politics and its affluent weekend yachting types who don't believe in crimping their lifestyles for anything as nebulous as the future of the planet.
The event, though, was a sellout - attracting 400 people, almost 12 per cent of Avalon's population - and the crowd stayed for a lively question-and-answer session.
Anyone who has seen Gore's film can guess why it had such a powerful impact. If global warming causes the oceans to rise, Catalina will be the first place on the United States West Coast to feel the effect, most probably splitting into two islands at the point where its two mountain ranges meet. The Pacific would soon swallow Avalon's pretty semi-circular waterfront, with its pedestrian walkways, cafes, icecream parlours and surf and diving stores, which attract hordes of visitors.
The island already has a water shortage, which would worsen if temperatures rise and water supplies on the Californian mainland become scarcer.
And if fuel costs rise, so will the price of living on an island almost wholly dependent on diesel barged in from the mainland and used to generate electricity.
Catalina is reaching the limits of sustainability in other ways, too. Its landfill for household waste will be full in about 20 years, raising the costly prospect of shipping the waste to the mainland.
Its saltwater sewage system is falling apart because the salt is attacking the pipes, causing liquid effluent to bleed into the very Pacific waters that attract the tourists, who are the mainstay of the island's economy.
All this comes as a profound psychological shock to an island that has enjoyed an idyllic existence as a carefree getaway for the past 90 years, ever since the Chicago chewing-gum king William Wrigley bought it for US$3 million ($4.1 million) and turned it into a resort, complete with casino, beachfront attractions and trips in glass-bottom boats.
Catalina is not shying away from its problems but confronting them head on. The aim is a complete rethink of the way it manages its lifestyle so that it becomes as close to self-sustaining as possible.
Cutting carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions to zero may be too much to ask, but it hopes that in the next few years it will become an emblematic trailblazer in the fight against global warming, inspiring and influencing communities on the mainland and beyond.
"What can a small town of 3500 residents do to solve the problems of the world?" asks Avalon's mayor, a dive shop owner and long-time Catalina resident Bob Kennedy.
"We can educate a million visitors a year. We can plan for a model community. We want to be more responsible custodians of the environment, whether global warming is truly a phenomenon or not."
The dream scenario, as laid out in a blueprint known as the 2020 Vision Plan, would have Catalina generating all its power from renewable solar, wind and ocean resources.
Gas from landfill waste would be recycled as ethanol or used as fuel in state-of-the-art clean technologies.
The cars and golf carts the residents use to get around the small network of paved roads would be zero-emission electric vehicles. Much of the island's potable water would be produced by an energy-efficient desalination plant.
The solid waste in the sewage system would be processed into hydrogen and other fuels using bacterial fuel cells. The liquid waste would be recycled for irrigation water, or pumped back into the island's aquifer, or reused more directly to flush household lavatories.
As Kennedy puts it, with just a hint of mixed metaphor: "We're throwing 60 eggs in the henhouse and hoping that 20 or 30 of them will make sense for Avalon."
The dreams of tiny Catalina are, in many ways, the embodiment of what California as a whole hopes to achieve.
The Golden State has almost single-handedly pushed the debate forward across the United States.
Since 2005, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave an executive order establishing emission reduction targets over the next half-century, he has staked much of his reputation and legacy on finding ways to roll back the effects of global warming.
Last summer he signed a landmark bill requiring California to bring its emissions down to 1990 levels by the year 2020. He has accelerated a programme to convert 20 per cent of California's energy to renewables by 2010.
He has taken advantage of California's long history of air-pollution controls and car-exhaust regulations to offer incentives to drivers of hybrid petrol-electric vehicles.
And he has thrown his support behind the long-term construction of a "hydrogen highway" - a possible future in which gasoline has been entirely replaced by compressed gas in private cars and trucks.
As Schwarzenegger put it, with characteristic bluntness, back in 2005: "The debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now."
In a political system extremely susceptible to the lobbying power of special industry interests, it's easy to be a little cynical.
The car and oil giants, in concert with state authorities, killed an early experiment with electric vehicles in the late 1990s and they have successfully resisted attempts to impose higher fuel-efficiency standards.
But the symbolic value of California's involvement is huge. It is the world's sixth largest economy - and the twelfth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Schwarzenegger has done something else the Bush Administration has resisted - he's joined forces with partners, nationally and internationally.
He and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have signed a highly unusual joint memorandum of understanding on global warming; and he has accepted an invitation from British Tory leader David Cameron to speak at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool.
California's regulators are now drawing up plans for an emissions trading system along the lines of the one operating in the European Union.
California has also signed cross-border emissions regulation agreements with its near-neighbours Oregon, Washington, Arizona and New Mexico, so that companies won't have the option of dodging new standards by moving to a nearby state.
Schwarzenegger says that combating global warming and finding ways to curb emissions are actually a potential boon to the economy, not a drawback, because of the energy savings involved.
And California, with its huge scientific research infrastructure, stands to pull in a huge revenue from developing green technologies.
A report by Schwarzenegger's Climate Action Team last year suggested that reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 would, in itself, create an estimated 83,000 jobs in California and an extra US$4 billion in income.
That sort of talk has seduced some of the state's big electricity providers and other companies.
Others are being chivvied on by the nature of the emissions cap-and-trade system - there are tangible financial incentives to meet the mandated targets.
There is some resistance - on the right, from companies who instinctively mistrust government regulations, and on the left from environmental lobbyists who fear that the emissions trading system will give companies greater rewards than their progress on cutting greenhouse gases deserves.
In Britain, carbon dioxide emissions rose last year in spite of the flurry of regulations to try to cut them back.
California seems indisputably destined to be the grand stage on which the global warming policies of the future are to be forged.
In part it's a matter of political culture. The Hollywood mindset likes to lavish its patronage on groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defence Council.
But California's interest in the subject goes well beyond trendy political fads. It is, in fact, a matter of survival.
The state is, in many ways, on the front line of global climate change. Its heavily populated coast, especially around Los Angeles and San Francisco, is under direct threat from rising ocean levels.
Its suburbs are at greater risk from forest fires. If the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains is allowed to melt - and estimates suggest a loss of 70 to 90 per cent over the next century - a key water source for an already thirsty state will dwindle.
Rising temperatures would pose many direct threats to the farming region in the Central Valley, the world's largest single food-producing area: lack of irrigation water, lower fertility, disruption of the flood-control systems, and the possibility of salt-water contamination.
Smog would return with a vengeance, both in Los Angeles and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley south of Sacramento.
Catalina Island is as good a place as any to test the political and popular mood, distinctly detached from the progressive politics of LA or San Francisco.
Many residents have moved in from Orange County, the suburban area south of LA that was once synonymous with conservative Republican white males.
Their ethos is the ethos of the American West - let me have my property and leave me alone.
Because of the layout of the island - most of the human transport is restricted to the couple of square kilometres of the town of Avalon - the most common vehicle is the golf cart, which is certainly a good start where emissions are concerned.
But few of the carts run on electricity. When a batch of Ford Think electric carts was introduced as an experiment a couple of years ago, residents complained that the charging stations were too few and far between, and they became averse to all electric vehicles.
The authorities haven't pushed the issue - not least because the electricity for low-emissions vehicles would have to be generated by the same diesel fuel on which the island depends.
Avalon's population has also given the thumbs-down to proposed car-sharing schemes. Americans think of their cars as extensions of their houses, taking personal pride in them and filling them with all sorts of personal junk.
Residents of Catalina are no exception.
"People can't visualise it yet," says a wistful Sue Rikalo, who introduced a flex-car proposal as a member of the island's planning commission. "If it was in place, everyone would love it. But getting them to change is a real challenge."
Making the 2020 Vision a reality has, so far, largely involved entertaining offers from cutting-edge scientific research companies who say they have come up with one dream technological breakthrough or another and want to use Catalina as their shop window.
Kennedy, who admits that he has to deal with a lot of "snake-oil salesmen", isn't willing to spend serious money until he's quite sure of what he's getting. Ann Moscot, the director of the Catalina Conservancy, says she wants to rely only on technologies that have been proved. She expects the transition to take anything from five to 10 years.
Sometimes it's enough to lead by example.
Just one house on Catalina has solar panels on its roof, a large pink residence on a hill overlooking the Avalon pier, belonging to a retired dentist called Frank Blair.
The tenant who lives in Blair's guesthouse just happens to be Avalon's city manager, Tom Sullivan. While the rest of the island had to endure a 50 per cent jump in power bills, Sullivan and Blair pay nothing - the panels are all they need.
Rikalo, who runs the restaurant next to Catalina's small airport, is introducing compostable bamboo plates and napkins, business cards made of recycled paper, non-toxic cleaner and "green" office-supplies.
She is trying to get every other business owner on the island to follow her example - with some success.
"We're just dropping seeds, getting things started," she says.
Kennedy and others argue that these are more than token gestures - they are the inevitable wave of the future.
He is staking his reputation - and his re-election bid next year - on the proposition that people will have to change whether they like it or not.
"Sure, people here are anti-growth, anti-change," he says.
"But they forget that if things carry on as they are, one day they are going to flush their toilet and nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to work."
- Independent
