California’s Suspend AB32, deceptively entitled “California Jobs Initiative,” is one of the stupidest ideas cooked up in a state not named Utah or Texas.  AB32 is California’s landmark climate law, requiring the state to reduce its greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020.  A Republican member of the state assembly, Dan Logue, has proposed that the law be suspended until unemployment drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters — effectively gutting the law entirely, as unemployment has rarely been that low for that long.  

The initiative ran into financial trouble last month, but it’s been resurrected from the grave.  The money behind this particular zombie looks like it’s coming from two large Texas-based refiners, Tesoro and Valero.  If so, the initiative may be in violation of California Fair Political Practices Committee regulations.

When last we heard from Suspend AB32 in mid-February, it was dying from lack of the mother’s milk of politics, a shortage of funds, along with a renaming (thanks to once-and-future governor Jerry Brown) from “California Jobs Initiative” to the far more accurate “Suspends air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.”  However, as any fan of George A. Romero knows, some creatures are hard to kill.

Greenwire, via New York Times, has the story: Texas refiners mum about funding push to halt California’s climate law.  “Several well-placed sources in Sacramento” report that two refiners based in San Antonio, Texas — Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp. — are the sole funders behind the new push.  (Spokespeople for Valero, Tesoro, and Logue have refused comment but are not denying the assertion.)  Signature gathering has moved from Logue to Goddard Claussen, which bills itself as an “issue advocacy” firm with clients like “Californians to Stop Unfair Rate Increases,” in actuality “several of the nation’s leading insurance companies” and “Floridians For Lower Insurance Costs,” in actuality State Farm.  (All information taken from the firm’s website.)

Valero and Tesoro both operate refineries in California: Valero in Benicia and Wilmington, and Tesoro in Martinez and Los Angeles (formerly Shell).  Valero has an astroturf Voices for Energy campaign, warning falsely that cap and trade is a hidden tax that will cost 77 cents per gallon.  Tesoro repeats the lie on its Tesoro Action Center page.  In reality, AB32 has virtually no economic impact on small businesses and has been praised as a clean energy jobs powerhouse.

The California Fair Political Practices Committee now requires that any ballot measure

must list the economic or other special interests of their $50,000 donors in descending order in its committee name. This list must precede and not be interspersed with constituencies such as “concerned citizens,” or “taxpayers.”

Suspend AB32’s website has lists of proponents and endorsers, all California-based, but no mention of Valero or Tesoro.  Logue fancies himself a Columbo, but as I recall, detectives work to enforce the law, not circumvent it.

Is someone running afoul of the FPPC?  I don’t know, but I do know that this zombie clean energy jobs killer initiative needs to die, once and for all.  And, as a Californian, I’m not too happy with out-of-state institutions spending millions on ballot initiatives telling me who I can marry and what kind of air I can breathe.

(x-posted at DailyKos)

There is nothing worst than watching your child suffer due to the “crud in the air,” regardless of how the air became so filthy. Inhalers and trips to the emergency room are routine for “breathing treatments.” Watching your child gasp for breath is a horrible, and to a great deal, a preventable experience. No, there is nothing quite like it. There is also nothing quite like legislators attempting to roll back clean air laws with disputed facts.

For the past few weeks I have read various articles on the attempts by Assembly Person Dan Logue and Congress Person Tom McClintock, and their attempts to repeal CALIFORNIA ASSEMBLY BILL 32, which was signed into law by our current Governor. They have attacked the law, which is not even close to being implemented yet, as a “job killer.”  The bill, and now law, is NOT and never was a “Jobs” bill, as they attempt to make the case for (including their rejected attempts to have it described so on official documents to gather signatures to put on the ballot by the State of California). It is a CLEAN AIR LAW and certainly, when you look at the facts, NOT A JOB KILLER now or later, when fully implemented.

Last night I read an article regarding the Logue/McClintock attempts to undo AB 32 and just how wrong headed the attempts to roll back the “air quality” bill are. The author, THOMAS D. ELIAS, also addresses how even an untruth can (and is) used to make the case for a problem and a credible solution to an existing law that simply does not exist. In my opinion, the following article pretty much destroys the argument put forth for repeal of current law. As far as I am concerned it should be published in the voter guide and sent to every voter in California. The artice is presented below with permission of the author.

“THE MISGUIDED OPPOSITION TO AB 32 AND CAP AND TRADE”

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

Whether or not Congress eventually approves the greenhouse-gas reduction agreements reached late last year in Copenhagen, California will soon have a cap-and-trade system in place.

Unless voters here put a ballot initiative to the contrary on the November ballot and then pass it. Sponsors of this putative proposition call it the “California Jobs Initiative,” contending jobs will be lost in efforts to fight global warming by demanding lower industrial emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

“With unemployment at 12.5 percent and another looming budget deficit, this is not the time for California to attempt an overhaul of the entire economy at a cost of tens of billions of dollars,” writes Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue of Linda, in Yuba County, one of the initiative’s backers.

The presumption here and among many other opponents of doing much about climate change is simple: Fixing the environment will cost business billions of dollars and eliminate many thousands of jobs.

But they never back that bromide with facts. That’s because it is based on little more than reflexive, knee-jerk guesswork. Still, their campaign is effective. It even has led major polling organizations like Gallup and Harris to run surveys where a slight majority of respondents now favors economic growth over fixing the environment.

It turns out that’s a false choice. For doing something about greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t necessarily mean business will be hurt or jobs lost.

That’s the conclusion of a major report forecasting that cap-and-trade rules like those the “Jobs Initiative” seeks to cancel actually will cost most businesses pennies, if anything. Meanwhile, another study of the existing carbon market in Europe, the first large industrial region to make serious efforts at cutting greenhouse gases, demonstrates that cap-and-trade proved profitable to most businesses and gave them no reason to cut jobs.

Cap-and-trade is a system where companies are assigned limits for permissible emissions. These “caps” drop each year until environmental goals are reached. Companies that emit less than their quota can trade or sell the difference between actual gases they produce and what they’re permitted to others which emit too much. So outfits that do the most to cut the gases they produce stand to make profits. How much depends on the going price of emission credits.

The way this has actually worked runs completely counter to popular presumptions pushed by conservative politicians like Logue; initiative co-author Tom McClintock, the Republican congressman from Placer County, and many vocal talk-show hosts.

So pervasive is the belief that cutting greenhouse gases costs jobs that two current leading Republican candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, both base their campaigns in significant part on a belief that popular support for environmental measures is waning because of high unemployment.

The polls suggest some movement that way. That’s because the false environmentalism-kills-jobs line has been pushed so loudly and so often.

The fact is that cap-and-trade has not killed jobs or companies in Europe, where a UC Berkeley Energy Institute study shows that when carbon trading began there in 2005, stock prices rose for companies that produced the most emissions the previous year and therefore got the highest emission quotas. This happened because those firms had to do least to cut their pollution and thus had an easy time acquiring emission credits they could trade or sell.

“Rather than being hurt by imposition of…regulation,” the Berkeley study concluded, “(many) industrial sectors benefited.” Which means that big businesses can make large profits by cleaning up their operations, and the cleaner they become, the more they can make – so long as other companies opt to stay dirty.

At almost the same time, the Union of Concerned Scientists funded a study of its own showing that small business will suffer few impacts from AB32, the landmark 2006 law mandating greenhouse gas cuts in California.

“Most small businesses will not be regulated under AB32 (the law behind the planned cap-and-trade system here),” that report concluded. One of its case studies checked potential effects on the Border Grill, a Los Angeles-area restaurant chosen because eateries are more energy intensive than the average small business, while also creating more jobs than most types of small business.

The analysis found that a cap-and-trade system covering the electricity, natural gas and transportation companies used by the Border Grill would create pass-through costs of less than three cents for every $20 meal served.

Concluded the study, “The likely effects of AB32 will be minor for small businesses.”

All of which means the adamant and vocal opponents of doing anything about global warming have been master propagandists, causing much of the public to believe in a mostly fictitious conflict pitting business and jobs against efforts to fight climate change.

Email Thomas Elias at [email protected]. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

Thank goodness for Mr. Elias for destroying the Logue/McClintock argument for repeal of current law (AB32) and for permission to reproduce the column. Let us all breath a little easier, now and after the efforts to repeal current law fails, always.

Link to original column: http://www.californiafocus.net…

Today seems to be the big day to make a media blitz of sorts for the plan to repeal AB 32. Take this choice morsel from the Senate Republican caucus in their email “briefing report”:

The term “global warming” has recently shifted to “climate change” (thus allowing the alarmists to blame any change in weather/climate on humans).  Few deny that climate change exists; change is a defining characteristic of climate.  Whether mankind causes climate change and has the ability to overcome natural forces to stop it is another story.  It should be remembered that CO2 is a gas that occurs naturally in the atmosphere.  It is exhaled by humans, and is absorbed by trees and plants to produce oxygen, is not toxic and in fact, is essential to life on earth.  The growing body of evidence suggests that CO2 impact on climate change is marginal (if there is an impact at all).  Additionally, it has been revealed that much of the data to support AGW heretofore has been manipulated, skewed and compromised to support a highly politicized environmental-industrial complex.  The scientific “consensus” of AGW does not exist.  The state ignores this reality at its own peril.

Except, oh, right consesus does exist. It is called the 2007 IPCC report, a report that surveyed all the literature, a great deal of scientists, and a whole mess of data.  To quote the IPCC:

“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

The Republicans counter back with some junk science bought and paid for by the oil companies, and just try to muddy up the waters enough so that they can pretend that the consensus is just a bunch of nerdy eggheads who don’t step outside. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee has a profile of Asm. Dan Logue, who is shepherding the AB 32 through the initiative process. After they get done with their comparisons of Logue to Peter Falk’s Columbo (the visual similarity is kind of hard to miss), they move on to the thornier issue for Logue: he hasn’t the resources to get this measure off the ground.

But Logue has not yet started gathering signatures and his drive is gasping for money – lots of it. He says he has $600,000 in commitments, but none has been collected, and $1 million more is needed. (SacBee)

Logue is facing a very steep battle here. There are many industry groups opposed to repeal, and the CalChamber has yet to come out either way.  But, in terms of money, Logue is going to face the biggest test there.  You see, Arnold Schwarzenegger views AB 32 as central to his legacy in California. Repeal would be the complete repudiation of what little big change he has accomplished in the state. You can be sure that Arnold will do his damndest to ensure that no big donors give to this POS.

No doubt that there is a lot of right-wing craziness out there right now. And they are certainly itching for a fight on AB 32, but whether this actually gets on the ballot to be considered, let alone passing, is an open question. Nonetheless, if you care about the climate change issue, the November 2010 election could be critical with or without this repeal. Meg Whitman has already signaled her intention to suspend AB 32 as soon as she gets a chance. The right-wingers have two cracks at the apple here, and only one needs to succeed to set our state back from our position as a leader on the fight against climate change.

Oh, and just as a toss-away in the Logue story, and a fact worth knowing about the man, the Bee mentions one of his big achievements as a Yuba County Supervisor: attracting a Wal-Mart to Marysville.  I’m sure the local businesses sincerely appreciated his efforts.

Some Republicans, including some legislators, are doing their best to repeal one of California’s landmark pieces of legislation: AB 32. The climate change bill is now finally being put into action. Arnold, while getting off to a rough start with the implementation, has allowed Mary Nichols and the team at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to do their jobs.

But, businesses and the right, well, they are apparently a tad bit chilly and would prefer a warmer clime with less water. So, they filed an initiative that would cease implementation until unemployment reaches some arbitrary figure. Here’s the title summary from the AG:

SUSPENDS AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAWS REQUIRING MAJOR POLLUTERS TO REPORT AND REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS THAT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING UNTIL UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS BELOW SPECIFIED LEVEL FOR FULL YEAR.  INITIATIVE STATUTE.  

Suspends State laws requiring  reduced greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, until California’s unemployment  rate drops to 5.5 percent or less for four consecutive quarters.  Requires State to abandon implementation of comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program that includes increased  renewable energy and cleaner fuel requirements, and mandatory emission reporting and fee  requirements for major polluters such as power plants and oil refineries, until suspension is  lifted.  Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on  state and local government:  Potential positive, short-term impacts on state and local  government revenues from the suspension of regulatory activity, with uncertain longer-run  impacts.  Potential foregone state revenues from the auctioning of emission allowances by  state government, by suspending the future implementation of cap-and-trade  regulations.  

This pretty much exactly describes the measure. Short-term small gains, long-term stupid. But Asm. Dan Logue disagrees, claiming the damned, dirty (or clean, as the case may be) environmentalists are behind this summary:

“I wonder if he’s running for governor,” Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Marysville), a backer of the initiative, quipped after reading the summary. “This looks like he handed this over to the environmental community and asked them to write this summary for them.” (LA Times

Logue says they might sue over the summary, but that happens with pretty much every summary. The AG has wide discretion over title and summary, and the case has to be outside of that discretion to be changed by the courts. In other words, it has to not really address the proposition. In this case, I’m not sure which of the points they would argue is factually incorrect.

The fact is that this measure would actually hurt our long-term economy. AB 32 stands to put California at the front of the green economy, but Logue and his ilk want to push us back to the days of coal and soot.