ALG Editor’s Note:In the following featured editorial, The Investor’s Business Daily points out that Cap-And-Trade has a chance at being repealed and good thing, as it has saddled California with massive unemployment.
Will Californians Repeal Cap-And-Trade?
Regulations: A California legislator pushes a November ballot initiative to free the state from the job-killing shackles of a 2006 law designed to fight climate change. The other choice is freezing in the unemployment line.
At last report, California’s unemployment rate was 12.3%, with 2.25 million residents looking for work. So one would assume the first rule of holes would apply — when you’re in one, stop digging.
Yet there was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touting his state’s green initiatives in Copenhagen as California barrels toward full implementation of its own version of job-killing cap-and-trade.
“The desire and hope and desperate need for planetary transformation is what brought me here,” Schwarzenegger said. “Is it a dream, a fairy tale, a false hope? If not, how can we make it real?”
“It” is Assembly Bill 32, signed by the governor in 2006, and Assemblyman Dan Logue wants it to go away or at least be put on hold.
Logue, who has advocated AB32’s outright repeal, is busy collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative that would block full implementation of the measure, scheduled to take effect in 2012, until the state’s unemployment rate falls below 5.5%.
California’s animus toward fossil fuels has blocked further development of its considerable offshore oil resources, and its fear of nuclear power has denied the state access to nonpolluting nuclear energy. This has helped contribute to what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says is the second most business-unfriendly regulatory climate in the nation after New Jersey.
Logue, a Republican from the state’s Central Valley, believes this is not the time to implement AB32. He believes, correctly, that the law’s effect on climate will be about the same as a drop of water in the Mojave Desert, where Sen. Diane Feinstein has moved to block a solar power project.
Increasing evidence, such as snow in Malibu, suggests the earth has been cooling for the past decade at least and will continue to do so for decades to come. So why further wreck California’s economy in a futile gesture while we drive electric clown cars to the unemployment office?
A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable, found that implementation costs for AB32 “could easily exceed $100 billion” and that the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household each year by 2020.
“This has been the blind leading the blind, political correctness that has collapsed the economy in California,” says Logue. “California already has the fifth-cleanest air in the country, so why are we doing this when no one else is?” California obviously wants to lead by example, even if it means going over an economic cliff.
According to a state Air Resources Board fact sheet, AB32 seeks to cap state-created greenhouse gases at 1990 emission levels by 2020. Logue figures AB32 will cost the state an additional 1 million jobs.
Supporters believe people who used to build houses will merely start building windmills. But the myth of green jobs is just that — a myth.
Spain found that each green job it subsidized came at the cost of 2.1 other jobs, and the cost to taxpayers for each green job was $700,000. Wind-turbine blades used in Texas are being made in China, helping the Chinese economy grow while pollution from the coal plants it builds wafts across the Pacific toward California skies.
Logue notes that “AB32 gives the California Air Resources Board (CARB) the power to enact draconian emission standards on California vehicles and businesses.” He says the recently unearthed e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Institute, showing researchers trying to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, destroying and manipulating data, and discrediting warming skeptics, demonstrate that “the ‘science’ that CARB has based its decisions on has been fraudulent.”
“We in California do not wait for Washington or Beijing or Kyoto,” Gov. Schwarzenegger said in Copenhagen. “We are moving forward and making great progress.”
We agree with Assemblyman Logue: Let the voters render their verdict in November.
