Russ Steele
Ben Boychuk writing at National Review Online cover some to the Prop 23 and AB32 issues that we have been writing about on this blog.
The ongoing fight over California’s Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, isn’t really about combating climate change. It’s about jobs and profits and — more important — losses.
On Tuesday Californians will vote on Proposition 23, which is dubbed the California Jobs Initiative by its backers and called much less charitable names by its opponents. The purpose of the initiative is to soften the effect of AB 32’s draconian rules and regulations, which are aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020. According to Prop. 23 supporters, those regulations will worsen the state’s already awful economy and raise unemployment even beyond its current desperate level.
You can read the whole article here, but his was my favorite paragraphs.
Less rosy still is a little-noticed and little-discussed draft report circulated last year by the California Air Resources Board’s economic and allocation advisory committee. In it, the panel seriously contemplates using some of the hundreds of millions of dollars the state hopes to collect in carbon “allowance fees” to pay the unemployment benefits of people thrown out of work by new regulations.
And that’s not all. “Some firms are likely to experience a reduction in profits as a result of AB 32,” the draft report says. “This burden depends on the extent to which costs rise and the extent to which firms can pass these cost-increases forward to consumers.” Those candid assessments somehow did not end up in the committee’s final report, published in January.
CARB knows that AB 32 is a job killer, and now you know. VOTE YES on PROP 23.