Mary Nichols, the former chair of the California Air Resources Board under Pat Jerry Brown, was named today to be the new head of the board tasked with implementing the landmark global warming legislation passed last year.  She was a cabinet secretary under Gray Davis and served in the Clinton Adminstration working on the environment.  The early accounts are glowing, particularly from her predecessor.

…the appointment of Nichols, one of the state’s first environmental attorneys, is likely to blunt complaints from administration critics that Schwarzenegger’s actions on the environment are not living up to his bold promises.

“She’s superb, and she will be an independent person,” Sawyer said. “I’ve known Mary for a long time, we’ve served together on the air board, and I would find it hard to think of a better person.”

He said under Nichols’ previous tenure as air board chair, historic regulations were implemented on unleaded gasoline, catalytic converters and other regulations that helped cement the board’s reputation as the world’s most innovative and toughest air pollution agency.

“She’s a lawyer and she knows the Clean Air Act probably as well as anybody in the state,” he said.

I was all set for an industry lobbyist or something to be installed, but Schwarzenegger does seem to know that his brand is being threatened with the appearance of meddling into AB 32 [ed. — last year’s Global Warming Solutions Act].  Mary Nichols sounds like an excellent appointment.  But this will not stop Friday’s hearing, and it will not stop the demands for accountability on the Governor’s attempts to subvert a law he signed. 

…I should also mention that without the outcry over the other resignations on the board, there is no way Arnold would have replaced them with anyone nearly as qualified.  Fighting back actually can work.

UPDATE: The Flash Report is whining.

Catherine Witherspoon resigned today, and unlike Robert Sawyer, it appears that this resignation was legitimate.  Witherspoon was incensed by Sawyer’s dismissal and the repeated attempts by the Governor to change the landmark global warming law through implementation in ways that he couldn’t change it in the legislative arena.

In interviews with The Times, Witherspoon said there had been a pattern of interference by the governor’s top staff in favor of industry lobbyists seeking to weaken or stall air pollution regulations, including the state’s landmark global warming law and proposed regulations on diesel construction equipment and wood products containing formaldehyde.

“They were ordering us to find ways to reduce costs and satisfy lobbyists,” she said, adding that the governor’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, and Cabinet Secretary Dan Dunmoyer took the lead on pressuring the agency staff and board chairman.

Adding insult to injury, she said, members of the governor’s staff have publicly blamed her and Sawyer for not doing more — conduct she described as “Orwellian … a triumph of appearances over reality.”

This will go completely nowhere on the national scene, where Arnold actually governs.  But within the state, more journalists are questioning the Governor’s commitment to the noble goals on global warming that he wastes no time espousing worldwide.  On the flip…

Here’s Evan Halper in the LA Times:

In public hearings and private negotiations, administration transportation officials are working to slow a planned crackdown by regulators on aging diesel construction equipment — among the state’s most noxious machinery and a major source of greenhouse gases […]

It is not the first time the governor has made bold promises on the environment while his administration dragged its feet behind the scenes. Schwarzenegger has vetoed bills that would put new taxes on polluters, spur the development of alternative fuels and help clean the air. He has accepted $1 million in campaign cash from the oil industry, and he had threatened to veto the global warming bill unless it was made more business-friendly.

Although the governor says he wants to hold polluters more accountable, administration officials recently signaled lawmakers that Schwarzenegger may not support a separate legislative crackdown. Lawmakers are proposing to prohibit the dirtiest equipment from being used on public works projects bankrolled with state bond money approved by voters last year.

Here are Greg Lucas and Matthew Yi in the SF Chronicle:

“The governor has made his name across the world as the jolly green governor, and now we have the regulators saying his inner circle has pressured them to go slow because the big industries don’t want us to go too quickly,” said Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights, a consumer watchdog group.

The air board shakeup has as much to do with politics as air quality. After Schwarzenegger pledged to sign AB32, his chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, tried to shape the measure in the Legislature. After AB32 became law, the governor’s staff tried to control its implementation, according to lawmakers and others involved in passage of the bill.

Much of the responsibility for implementation rests with the air board, whose members are appointed by the governor, but who have a long history of independence.

“Every signal the board got from the governor’s office staff was, ‘Slow down, don’t hurt industry, don’t get ahead of us on greenhouse gases,’ ” Witherspoon said in an interview on Monday.

Schwarzenegger simply doesn’t practice what he preaches, and the high-profile resignations on the Air Resources Board are waking people up to that. 

Democratic leaders have rightly called for hearings this week to assess the political pressure being applied by the governor to the board.  And Dan Walters notes that Arnold’s attempt to manufacture AB32 into solely a cap-and-trade law is being met with resistance:

Environmental groups, backed by Democratic legislators, have denounced the administration’s cap-and-trade policy as beyond the intent of AB 32, however, favoring a more direct regulatory mechanism on emissions. The Democratic version of the state budget, in fact, seeks to deny funds for any development of cap-and-trade policy until broader studies are completed.

That’s fairly strong, and I applaud it.  But the court of public opinion is really the only one Schwarzenegger pays attention too.  Democrats who want AB 32 to be implemented as it was written need to fan out and make the case to their constituents that Arnold is trying to stop progress on global warming.  This could drag his popularity down considerably and weaken his hand in future negoitations.  The time is now.

I don’t think it’s any secret that there’s been a growing disquiet from progressives with how the California Legislature is doing business.  We won’t know the final tallies until the end of the session in September, of course, but just in the past couple months, Democratic leaders have given the Governor the ability to build 53,000 new beds for prisons without addressing rehabilitation programs that are the only way to cut costs and reduce recidivism.  They approved a shockingly anti-worker set of tribal gaming compacts, with only token protections in the side deals, and then tried to make the dishonest claim that they didn’t negotitate the deals in the first place so they can’t be blamed for them (um, then don’t approve them and force the Governor to start over, you have the power to do that, you know).  They combined their healthcare bills to negotiate with the governor without them even including guaranteed issue, meaning that insurance companies can continue to deny coverage to patients for pre-existing conditions (a separate state-run system would be set up to provide for these ill patients, which would make insurers even more loath to spend money on care, given the crutch afforded them by the parallel system for sick people).  And they allowed hostile amendments on patient-dumping to pass the Assembly Health Committee.  We don’t yet have a state budget, as it passed its deadline, and progressives are crossing their fingers that this trend won’t continue and some of the worst cuts for the needy preferred by the Governor won’t be allowed to remain.

So what is going on here?  Why is a Legislature with wide majorities in both houses, sufficient to pass pretty much everything but the budget and tax measures, seemingly caving in on all sides?  One article in the SF Chronicle offers a compelling explanation:

Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez’s decision this week to end an impasse with Indian gaming tribes and ratify new gambling compacts is designed to help pass a proposed ballot initiative that would allow him and other lawmakers to keep their jobs longer, his critics and political observers said Thursday.

For Núñez, the compacts landed him between the state’s two major special interest forces — wealthy Indian tribes that want to greatly increase the number of slot machines on tribal lands and labor unions that pressed for provisions that would make it easier for workers to organize at casinos.

The standoff between the two groups had placed Núñez in a politically precarious position of having to choose between his political base in labor or mollify tribes that have not been shy about using their deep pockets to buoy or sink political campaigns […]

“I think what (Núñez) wants to do is to make sure there is no opposition to term limits, not necessarily building support for it,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles. “He may have just removed a major monied interest against the measure.”

If this is the motivating interest, then this term limits measure is killing the state, and the ability to make any progress for Californians.  And there’s even more evidence for this.

Schwarzenegger, however, is not alone in squeezing Núñez, et al. An even more blatant threat came from the Professional Peace Officers Association, an umbrella group for rank-and-file police who bitterly oppose a bill that would allow public access to police disciplinary proceedings.

The measure, Senate Bill 1019 by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, cleared the Senate but was stalled in the Assembly after John R. Stites, president of the police association, sent messages to legislators that were the bill to be passed, the union would oppose the term limit modification and added ominously, “Ensure that it be understood that this will only be the beginning.” Thereafter, the Assembly Public Safety Committee held the bill without a vote — an action that had to have leadership blessing.

Legislative leaders doubtless cringe at the vision of having their term limit measure denounced in television commercials by uniform-wearing cops. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents prison guards, contributed to Núñez’s term limit drive, but he angered union leaders by helping Schwarzenegger enact a prison construction-reform program.

You can read more about how SB 1019 was bottled up in an Assembly Committee.

Obviously, Democratic leaders don’t want the Governor against them when the term limits measure comes up for a vote in February, and so the budget and the health-care debate may suffer in the process.  But they also appear to be determined to silence any potential interest group that may criticize the measure and fund its opposition.  Therefore you see these caves on sunshine for police disciplinary actions and the tribal compacts, and perhaps the homeless dumping bill as well.

This fits with a consistent pattern that is doing nothing but angering Democratic activists.  The vast majority of the public isn’t paying attention to such matters, due in no small part to the fact that media outlets are abandoning their Sacramento bureaus.  But progress in California has completely stalled in this legislative session, perhaps out of a small-minded desire to stay in power for an extra six years.  It calls into question why such “leaders” would want to remain in power in the first place.  But we can all surmise the answer to that one.

People are still trying to figure out what led to the resignation of the chair of the CARB (California Air Resources Board) yesterday.  If you scan the article strictly for quotes from the governor’s office, their take is that Robert Sawyer was fired for dragging his feet on implementing air pollution and global warming initiatives.

In the statement, Schwarzenegger also criticized the board for approving a request by San Joaquin Valley air quality authorities to seek an 11-year extension of a federal deadline for complying with the Clean Air Act.

“I was deeply disappointed,” Schwarzenegger said. “The air board let the federal government off the hook by seeking delay.” […]

Schwarzenegger’s deputy chief of communications, Adam Mendelsohn, said the governor’s office did not think the air board or its staff were moving aggressively enough on air pollution and global warming.

“The issue really came to a head after the decision to ask for an extension in the San Joaquin Valley, and the lack of early action items that we wanted done … last week,” Mendelsohn said. He said the items Sawyer proposed were minor, while the governor’s office was seeking far tougher measures to control emissions from concrete factories and other sources […]

Mendelsohn said the administration first became upset with the agency when Witherspoon, without consulting the governor’s office, sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last spring seeking a long postponement of a federal deadline to clean up diesel soot.

“With the health threats of California air quality, this is a very high priority,” Mendelsohn said.

Well, OK.  And yet some environmentalists are defending Sawyer and saying things like “he deserved better.”  And then there’s this curious passage (on the fliip):

Sawyer … said he was called by a Cabinet secretary who ordered him to limit to three the number of so-called early action measures the board was considering to slow global warming.

So the governor was disappointed in Sawyer dragging his feet on global warming initiatives, yet he was called last week and told to… limit global warming initiatives?

Not sure what’s going on here, but you can be sure that it’s not as simple as Governor Schwarzenegger’s paid spinners are making it out to be.  Greg Lucas’ article for the SF Chronicle certainly makes it clearer:

Robert Sawyer, appointed by the governor in 2005, was one of three air board members who voted “no” last week when the board adopted three new policy changes to curb carbon dioxide and other emissions statewide. Sawyer, like several environmental groups, thought the board should have made more changes than those the governor sought.

That makes more sense, given what we know about Arnold’s “fight-global-warming-with-words-more-than-actions” approach.