SACRAMENTO-Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Marysville, today announced that his bill, Assembly Bill 118, to suspend the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) will be heard in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on Monday, January 11, 2010.
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From the Wall Street Journal:Could Californians finally be serious about turning around their sputtering economy? One hopeful sign is a ballot initiative that would repeal the Golden State’s version of a cap-and-trade carbon tax.This feel-good law to reduce the state’s carbon footprint was enacted with great hoopla by the Democratic legislature and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 when the state’s economy was growing and the jobless rate was 5%. The law requires that starting in 2012 the state must ratchet down its carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The politicians and green lobbies told voters this energy tax would create jobs—the same fairy tale many in Washington are repeating today.
Now the jobless rate is 12.3%, 2.25 million Californians are unemployed, and the state government is broke. So Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue has begun collecting signatures for “The Global Warming Solutions Act,” a ballot initiative that would suspend California’s cap-and-trade scheme until the unemployment rate falls below 5.5%. He’s aiming to get it on the November ballot.
No matter what one thinks of climate science, it makes little sense for an individual state to unilaterally impose major new tax and regulatory costs on its own industries. The impact of California’s gesture on global temperatures will be infinitesimal, but the economic impact will make the state even less attractive to start or expand a business.
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.
