As the full scope of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continues to unfold, there's another energy-related drama in California. This one threatens the Golden State's landmark law (AB 32)  to limit the greenhouse gas pollution that is already harming California and to promote a host of related clean energy policies that would benefit the state. A proposition that is now certified for the November ballot, Proposition 23 —  known as the “Dirty Energy Proposition” — would kill investments and job creation in the new energy economy already spurred by AB 32 since it was enacted in 2006. This is one of the most important environmental campaigns of 2010, with implications far beyond California.

                 “We’re not waiting for permission or for someone to save the day-we have to take action now.”

                                                                                                                                                       -Gavin Newsom

San Francisco Mayor and California Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom is a man who stands up for what he believes in. His willingness to take bold political risks and his unwavering personal integrity have led him to constantly be ahead of the curve on many important social and economic issues, from marriage equality and universal health care to homelessness and education. But the environment is truly the sole issue where Mayor Newsom’s unrelenting desire to create revolutionary reform by staying true to his personal convictions is most apparent.

Mayor Newsom’s political record proves that he is a fierce and passionate advocate for the environment. In 2006, while most of this country’s leaders were engaged in a contentious debate over whether or not climate change is real, Mayor Newsom had already authored the Urban Environmental Accords, closed a fossil-fuel burning power plant, created the country’s largest alternative fuel fleet of buses and cars and passed numerous laws to help San Francisco’s residents and businesses be more environmentally conscious. From solar panels and mandatory composting and recycling to authoring the strongest municipal green building standards in the United States for new construction and major renovations, Mayor Newsom has turned San Francisco into one of the greenest cities in the world and has established himself as one of the greenest mayors in the country.

When it comes to the environment, Mayor Newsom makes an effort to practice at home what he preaches in public. He owned a Saturn EV1 electric car in the 1990’s, recently purchased a Tesla Roadster and his official mayoral SUV is a hybrid. His winery, CADE, located in Napa, recently received Gold LEED certification, making it the first winery in the state to achieve this status. Though Mayor Newsom openly admits that “it’s not enough that [he has] an electric car”, it is clear that he, like many Californians, is dedicated to living a greener and more sustainable life.

As California’s Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Mayor Newsom wants to raise California’s environmental consciousness. He wants to get our floundering economy back on track by growing California’s clean energy economy. He wants to end California’s addiction to fossil fuels by transitioning to clean energy sources. He plans to combat climate change and pollution by supporting AB 32 and prioritizing research and education toward green energy and environmental innovation. And he plans to conserve California’s vast natural resources by opposing the expansion of offshore drilling, promoting sustainability and protecting California’s land, coast and waterways. Mayor Newsom recognizes the symbiotic relationship between California’s economy, educational system and the environment and as lieutenant governor, he will work hard to restore the strength and ensure the longevity of each of these areas.    

Mayor Newsom’s personal and political commitment to the environment has not only earned him the respect of his colleagues and constituents in San Francisco. As a candidate for lieutenant governor, he has been endorsed by some of the most revered environmental leaders and organizations in the country. California State Senator and co-author of AB 32 Fran Pavley, has said that Mayor Newsom is a “bold, innovative leader who has proven that job creation and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive” and that Mayor Newsom is “exactly what Sacramento needs for California to continue to be a beacon of environmental leadership around the world.” Mayor Newsom has also been enthusiastically endorsed by two of this country’s leading environmental organizations, The Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters.

Robert F. Kennedy once said that, “the future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of American society.” Mayor Gavin Newsom’s penchant to take bold, seemingly impossible dreams and turn them into reality has garnered him international attention and solidified his reputation as one of this country’s great environmental leaders. He has proven time and time again that he possesses a deep personal passion for environmental issues, the reason and ingenuity that is necessary to get things accomplished in a volatile political arena and above all, the immense courage required to take on the environmental challenges facing the state of California today.

As if the oil companies from Texas – and their allies in the corridors of power – hadn’t done enough harm to our country already (for more, see the late, great Gulf of Mexico), now they are at it once again.  This time, it’s Valero and Tesoro, pouring money into a campaign this election season to undo California’s landmark, clean energy and climate law, AB 32.  On Tuesday, the oil companies’ proposition was certified for the November ballot. The fight, as they say, is on!

Why should you care?  Let us count the ways.

In the aftermath of Katrina, nearly everyone pitched in to help (except George Bush, but that’s an old story).  Even Wal-Mart lent is vaunted logistics expertise to the devastated Gulf Coast.

This time around, in a man-made disaster more insiduous than Katrina, the oil industry that chomps at the drilling bit to pump crude from any crevice without regard to consequence, sits idly by, unwilling to lift so much as a pen to help out in the Gulf.  Worse still, Occidental Petroleum, Tesoro and Valero, along with a few secretive allies, have put up over $2 million to pass an initiative here in California that would effectively elminate AB 32, our land mark green economy and clean air legislation, simply to make more money from fouling our state. They see BP and raise a California.

That’s why Courage Campaign Thursday called on those companies to donate at least that much money to efforts to rehabilitate the Gulf, to help the tens of thousands whose lives have been upended or worse by the petro-sharks.

The usually incisive Josh Richman of the Contra Costa Times  had this to say:

But… really? Isn’t demanding that Tesoro and Valero pay to mitigate a BP oil spill sort of like demanding that Honda recall and fix Toyota’s cars? Think what you will of out-of-state oil companies buying a California ballot initiative to protect their profits, but it’s odd to advocate expanding one company’s responsibility and liability to an entire industry just like that. Or, were we supposed to think that big oil – one of the world’s richest, most politically connected industries – would instantly abandon all of its political efforts and slink away due to BP’s ecological and economic trainwreck

It does not seem odd at all. Honda did not seek to weaken safety laws when Toyota began to fail. Imagine if Honda had put millions of dollars into a ballot measure that called for a moratorium on safety checks for five years. You can’t.  No other industry would be so brazen and outrageously rapacious.  That’s the analogy here.  

A well-run company (think Berkshire Hathaway) works toward sustainability which is in the best interests of its shareholders.  Putting tons of oil into the sea and investing in legislation that encourages similarly destructive practices is short-term thinking at its worst. This is the same thinking that allows employee-CEOs to become billionaires by cutting corners and taking profits without investing in the future.  It’s not only legitimate to call on these companies to help out when their industry fails so blatantly, it’s a kind of litmus test.  If they are not willing to help out when people, animals and the nation itself are drowning in dirty crude, we can imagine what will happen if they pass this legislation in California. Screw California and the country:  we want our bonuses.

The end of a green economy and a continual reliance on oil at any price from any place will not be their problem.  It’ll be ours.

I used to work at Occidental Petroleum.  I know that companies can do bad and good.   Oxy, Valero and Tesoro should at least take a page from Wal-Mart’s book–no corporate Boy Scout–and lend a hand in this time of need.  It won’t make them any money, but it’s what good citizens and sustainable businesses do.  

Note from Robert Cruickshank – Calitics has a policy of promoting diaries from electeds and candidates to the front page when the diaries are topical, important, or provide valuable information to our readers, and this one certainly counts as all three. However, this should not be construed as an endorsement of Peter Schurman.

Cross-posted at Huffington Post and at Daily Kos.

On June 8th, Californians will choose our party nominees for Governor.  I’m running as a progressive challenger to Jerry Brown in the Democratic primary.

For nearly twenty years, I’ve been a bare-knuckled fighter for regular people and common-sense, progressive values. I was the Founding Executive Director at MoveOn.org, America’s strongest progressive advocacy organization. Although I’ve never run for elected office, I am qualified to be Governor and here’s why I’ll do a better job for California than Jerry Brown.

California needs a fighter right now.  Six-plus years of Republican rule have left our state in crisis.  We need a leader committed to aggressively confronting and cleaning up the mess the Republicans have made, not someone who wants to split the difference.

Here are three of the biggest challenges facing California.  As our party’s front-runner, Jerry Brown should be facing these issues head-on.  Instead, he’s running away from them.

* Money: California, the golden state, has a larger economy than all but 7 countries — yet our government is broke, and regular people are struggling to make ends meet.  Every day we hear another story of budget cuts to vital state programs.  The human costs of these cuts include schools cramming almost 40 of our children into single classrooms, domestic violence shelters closing, massive tuition hikes at our public colleges, and thousands of layoffs from our Healthy Families program.  Why are we letting this happen?  

We have a choice.  Instead of rolling over and accepting these cuts, we can raise the $19 billion we need to turn our beautiful state around.  We can do it mainly by making the oil companies, the big commercial property owners, the corporations, and the richest people pay their fair share — which none of them are doing today.  We can also legalize and tax marijuana, tax services like lawyers as we do physical goods, and end incentive programs that aren’t working.  On my website, I’ve laid out a specific plan to raise the $19 billion it will take to close our ongoing budget deficit and stop the cuts, so we can start taking care of our children instead of the oil companies and real-estate tycoons.

I will do this without raising the burden on struggling Californians.  In fact, I’ll make things easier for people in the lowest income bracket, because right now they’re paying a bigger share of their income than anyone else, and I’ll change that by making the big guys start pulling their weight.

Budget cuts and the $19 billion deficit driving them are arguably the most serious problems facing our state.  What’s Jerry Brown’s answer?  He has none.  He says only that he won’t raise taxes.  He may think that’s smart politics, but it’s not the kind of leadership we need.

* Democracy: You might think we have a democracy in Sacramento, where we settle our differences by majority vote.  In fact, we don’t.  Instead, Sacramento has a 2/3 rule that gives the Republican minority the power to hold our state’s finances hostage, even though we elect solid majorities of Democrats to represent us.  Republicans exploit this power ruthlessly, preventing us from raising the revenues we need, because their Wall Street backers don’t want to pay their fair share.  It’s one of the biggest reasons our state’s in such a deep hole.

We’ve got to end the 2/3 rule and get the Republican boot off our neck.  There’s just no way around it.

You’d think Jerry Brown would agree.  But, incredibly, he’s taken steps this spring to sabotage the campaign to end the 2/3 rule.  As Attorney General, he changed the wording of an important ballot initiative in a way that scares people away from standing up for our rights.

I support ending the 2/3 rule, and so do 70% of Californians.  But Jerry Brown is carrying water for the Republicans, not fighting for us.

* Health Care: Our health care system is a mess.  The problem is the health insurance companies.  They are parasites, sucking up massive sums of money, and giving us paperwork, rate hikes, and denials of coverage in return.  Although President Obama’s new health care law reins in some of their worst abuses, it also perpetuates the problem, by forcing us to buy their inadequate product, and offering no other option.

A better answer is “Medicare for All”, also known as single-payer health care, the most robust form of the “public option” that Californians asked for.  It’s simple and elegant: by getting the insurance companies out of the way, we get better care, and we save tons of money.  

With Medicare for All, the average California family will save more than $300.- per year.  Employers who insure their workers will save almost $800 per employee per year — freeing that money up to hire more people.  California as a whole will save $8 billion in the first year, and $343 billion over ten years.

The California Senate has passed our Medicare for All bill, SB 810 (sponsored by Senator Mark Leno).  The state assembly has passed similar legislation in recent years.  I’m committed to signing it if I’m elected Governor.  Sadly, Jerry Brown refuses to make the same commitment.

—–

California needs a leader we can count on: one whose values are clear, and who fights for us reliably.  I love this state, and I’m fighting for it with everything I’ve got.

But with all of Jerry Brown’s experience, if he’s not willing to stand up and fight for us, what makes me think I can?

Take a look at my track record:

   * Stopping President Bush: As MoveOn’s Executive Director, I ran the campaign that defeated President Bush for the very first time after 9-11, when the U.S. Senate rejected his choices for judges on America’s top courts.  

   * Stopping President Bush again: Working closely with Hill leaders including Rep. Henry Waxman, I led MoveOn’s campaign that defeated President Bush’s 2004 budget in the House, despite Republican control there.

   * Protecting our Climate: I organized most of the grassroots support to pass California’s car emissions law, AB 1493, which was the basis for President Obama’s excellent new nationwide clean-car rules.

   * Getting Corporate Money out of our Democracy: I also organized the bulk of the grassroots support to pass the McCain-Feingold law, banning corporate “soft money” from our political system.

   * Protecting People from Air Pollution: Working for the American Lung Association, I persuaded several states to release their air pollution data in real time, so people with asthma can plan their days in safety.

   * Protecting the California Desert: At the Sierra Club, I helped secure crucial final votes to pass the California Desert Protection Act, the only major pro-environment law passed in the Clinton Administration.

   * Helping Eliminate the U.S. Budget Deficit: I helped run a young people’s campaign in 1992 that put deficit reduction on the front of the national agenda, helping spur President Clinton to balance the budget.

These are just a few examples of the difference I’ve made fighting for progressive values since the early 1990s.  My background, defeating Republican power and moving a positive agenda in the face of an entrenched opposition, is exactly the kind of leadership experience we need in our next Governor.

Governing California will require management chops too.  I have an M.B.A. from Yale, and my management skill is reflected in the enduring strength of organizations I’ve built:

   * As MoveOn.org’s Founding Executive Director (2001-2005), I grew the organization from 350,000 to to 3 million members, and grew its budget from $81,000 to $6.5 million.  I built a solid team, paid them competitive salaries, kept the books in order, and led MoveOn’s millions of members in winning several game-changing victories over the Bush administration.

   * As the Sierra Club’s first National Student Organizer, in the mid-1990s, I secured permanent funding for the Sierra Student Coalition, recruited and trained a corps of skilled student campaign leaders, and created new ways to engage 30,000 students in campaigns like protecting millions of acres of the Mojave Desert as wilderness.

My values are clear and consistent, and I’ve fought for them reliably over nearly twenty years.

I don’t owe favors to anyone, because I’ve always fought for the public interest, against the corporations, and I’ve never taken big money from any industry.  Can Jerry Brown say the same thing?

Does Jerry Brown have what it takes to fight for us?

Let’s look at one more major example: California’s climate-change action plan, known as AB 32.  AB 32 is state law, democratically passed and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger.  But Meg Whitman is promising that if she’s elected, her first move will be to undo it.  She’s working for Texas oil companies, not California’s people.

What does Jerry Brown have to say about this?  He mounts a tepid defense of AB 32, saying he sees room for “adjustments.”

Here’s what I say about it:

Meg Whitman’s assault on AB 32 is utterly insane.  Undoing AB 32 not only threatens our survival, but it cuts the floorboards out from under our emerging clean-tech economy.  Building the new green economy will require investment, and investors need stability, not see-sawing.  Whitman is putting California at risk of blowing the greatest economic opportunity of this decade: green jobs.  Her attack on AB 32 is like going back 30 years and saying we shouldn’t develop the Internet.  Where would eBay be today?

This is the kind of vigorous fight against Meg Whitman and the Republicans that California needs.

With Whitman promising to spend at least $150 million from her Goldman Sachs bank account, Democrats need a candidate we can get excited about, one who can inspire the votes we’ll need to win in November.

Jerry Brown has a long record of service to our state.  But today, he’s not taking the leadership stands we need.  Is it any wonder that, according to a recent poll, 41 percent of people under 40 have no opinion of him?

We can do better.

I have the skills, the values, and the experience to lead our state successfully through the challenges we face today.  I’ve won major victories on behalf of regular people and common-sense values, and I’ve built powerful, enduring organizations.

Vote for progress on June 8th — or as early as next week, if you vote by mail.  Join my campaign for California’s future on Facebook, on Twitter, and at http://Peter4Gov.org.  Thank you.

If you’ve been reading Calitics very long, you’ve heard about Valero and Tesoro, the two leading funders of the initiative to eliminate AB 32, California’s landmark climate change bill. Well, now it seems that Arnold has noticed them as well.

“As you know, there are greedy Texas oil companies that are trying to take out AB 32 and roll it back,” Schwarzenegger said. “We of course do everything we can to fight them because for us it’s very important to protect those laws and not have outside oil companies that only think of one thing — and this is profits — to come into California and to try to take those laws out and roll them back and so on.”(Sac Bee)

For once, I get to say this: what Arnold said. I feel like the moon must be in some bizarre alignment to see myself writing that.

But, of course, he’s dead on. This is entirely about short-term profits, while ignoring the long-term effects of greenhouse gas pollution.  Here’s the thing with these oil companies, they’ve been getting a free ride for a long time.  The environmental impacts of their products just haven’t been priced into the costs.  That’s what AB 32, and the proposed regulations, will do.

We can’t let these greedy Texas oil companies come to California to mess with California. Texas already wounded the nation with one export in  the 2000 election. The last thing we need is more short-sighted policy from my childhood home.  Sorry, Texas, we’ll pass on this one, I’m waiting for my Texas barbecue instead.

( – promoted by Robert Cruickshank)

It is not a headline we would expect to see, but that is exactly what is happening in our state as we speak.

In 2006, the California Legislature passed AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act. The Governor then signed this law to make our state the leader in fighting greenhouse gas pollution.  I hope you will consider joining me in working to ensure that Big Oil does not get its way in California by eviscerating our landmark climate change legislation.  

California’s Attorney General is uniquely positioned to stand up for strong, effective enforcement of our state’s environmental laws. That is why I am calling on each and every candidate for California Attorney General — Democratic and Republican — to denounce this effort by Big Oil to slash through our state’s environmental protections for their own corporate gain.

There’s more, and also cross-posted on Daily Kos.

Texas oil companies want to stop California before we can really implement AB 32, our landmark climate change legislation. Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., both based in Texas, are almost single-handedly financing a measure that would eviscerate AB 32.   The two companies have pledged $2 million to help get the initiative on the ballot, and even tried to sneak their contributions past any observers.

We cannot afford to turn around now. Today, I want to make my support for this vital piece of environmental legislation crystal clear. I applaud Governor Schwarzenegger for his commitment to AB 32, and call on others to join the fight to protect AB 32.

I urge you to join me in supporting California’s landmark greenhouse gas pollution law by signing my petition for climate change solutions.

I am committed to protecting the environment, and that is why I am proud to be the endorsed candidate of the California League of Conservation Voters.  If you’d like to help my campaign to defend our precious natural resources, please consider donating to our campaign.

Economic studies show that we can fight climate change and can create jobs at the same time. We cannot let Texas oil companies muddy the waters so that they can continue to practice business as usual while the environment pays the price. California has always been a leader in protecting our environment, and together we can ensure that we never abdicate this role.

Kamala Harris is the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, and is a candidate for Attorney General of the State of California.