Now they want to suck it dry
H/T Amy Miller
CARB (the California Air Resources Board) is the “clean air” agency in California, another bureaucratic nightmare that started innocently as a way to combat the smog that was prevalent in California back in the 1960s and ended up a job killing money wasting machine controlled by the Democrat Party.
Fresh at Big Government, the money wasting;
A study released last month, which draws positive conclusions regarding CARB’s favored “feebates” program, cost a whopping $796,641 according to a document found at CARB’s own site. That has some observers scrutinizing CARB’s activities thinking it could come under renewed and sustained criticism.
Yeah, in addition to killing trucking/transportation jobs (also wiping out any income tax that may be generated by those jobs), they insist on blowing money directly.
But California’s steps to curb climate change, including AB 32, have recently been taking a lot of incoming fire with the state’s finances, and economy, in the hole. “There is a sense, even among some Californians who generally do consider themselves ‘green,’ that they’ve gone too far,” a California political source told Capitol Confidential. “CARB in particular has come in for a lot of criticism, and their dropping this sort of money on a study that seems designed to validate their pre-existing conclusions is probably not going to help, especially when voters are angry about 12 percent-plus unemployment and the budget situation.”
Earlier I wrote how the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has directly affected my workplace by overnight making obsolete the two recently purchased tow trucks by adding a requirement that they be retrofitted with Diesel Particulate Filters (DPF). No small expense, we were now looking at upward of $20,000 to comply with CARB’s new requirement.
Then the economy tanked, fuel nearly doubled in price, and as businesses around us started to fold, our business decreased by almost 25%.
So with the California economy in the crapper, we asked (begged actually) our California representatives to suspend AB-32, the so-called “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006″.
Known without affection as the Global Warming Final Solutions Act, what it requires is;
…requires that by 2020 the state’s greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels, a roughly 25% reduction under business as usual estimates. The California Air Resources Board, under the California Environmental Protection Agency, is to prepare plans to achieve the objectives stated in the Act.
As defined in the bill, “greenhouse gases” include all of the following gases: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These are the same gases listed as Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the Kyoto Protocol.
What it does is kill jobs;
The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) serves as a non-partisan fiscal and policy advisor for the California state legislature.
State Senator Dave Cogdill (R-Modesto, District 14) made a formal request to the LAO for an analysis on the impact of AB 32 “The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006“.
Last week on March 4, 2010, Mac Taylor, the Legislative Analyst, submitted a 10 page response to Senator Codgill’s request and concur that AB 32 will see negative job losses over time.
Interesting key points made by the LAO:
We believe that the aggregate net jobs impact in the near term is likely to be negative, even after recognizing that many of the SP’s programs phase in over time.
Certain individual businesses and households, however, would be seriously affected.
Energy Prices. Measures in the SP directly affecting energy prices, such as, cap-and-trade program, would almost certainly raise the near-term prices of electricity, gasoline and certain other energy sources.
Now, the question remains as to how much political pressure will it take to get AB 32 to be overturned or modified in light of the LAO findings.
Our GOP legislators attempted a rollback of AB-32, just a suspension for a couple of years to allow the economy to recover somewhat.
No dice. The Democrats wouldn’t hear of it and in April voted to oppose any effort to suspend the job killing provisions of AB-32.
According to Steven Maviglo at California Majority Report, “California Democrats are united to defeat efforts by greedy Texas oil companies to try to undo our state’s clean energy law,” says California Democratic PartyViceChair Eric C. Bauman. “Our party will lead the fight to defeat this dirty energy proposition that will kill thousands of high quality jobs in California’s growing clean energy economy and further pollute our air.”
Note to job killing idiots in the Democrat Party; It’s not “greedy Texas oil companies” trying to undo the idiotic rules imposed by you and your CARB board, it’s tax paying Californians tired of being out of work because of stupid policies coming out of Sacramento.
It can be stopped temporarily via the California jobs Initiative, and they need your support. The left is already trying to demonize the initiative, as above, so blast it out.
As Amy Miller noted above;
It’s time for California to prioritize. The Golden State is currently being held hostage by ideological dogma and rampant fiscal irresponsibility. Her citizens are slogging through a 20% unemployment slump, and the prospect of a crippling tax increase to pad the budget isn’t going to help. Bureaucrats’ inability and unwillingness to pull their heads out of the organic fertilizer and think long-term—instead of rolling with en vogue hippie legislation—is destroying the lives of the people “the system” is supposed to support.
