Posted on 07/13/2005 10:48:58 PM PDT by goldstategop
Arnold, how could you? You were the GOP’s great gubernatorial hope. Sure, you had no political experience, were “squishy” on social issues, and had married into America’s foremost Democratic family. But you were going to terminate the state’s financial problems. How could you mandate a global warming program that will leave your people drowning in red ink long after you’ve said, “Hasta la vista, baby!”
Bypassing the legislature, Schwarzenegger last month signed an executive order mandating drastic cuts in so-called greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. "The debate is over," Schwarzenegger wrote July 3 in a London newspaper. "We know the science.”
But the Governator is thinking with his biceps, and clearly taking cues from his über-environmentalist Cabinet Secretary Terry Tamminen who seems to be living the title of Schwarzenegger’s film, True Lies.
We don’t even know for sure that any warming is man-made, rather than the earth’s natural cycle that brought on both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Were it man-made, even trying to slow it would be devastatingly expensive, as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg and others have cogently argued.
But Schwarzenegger and Tamminen know better. "Many people have falsely assumed that you have to choose between protecting the environment and protecting the economy," he wrote in the British paper. California will show how to “to solve global warming problems,” confidently declared Tamminen.
Yet signers of the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 pact to roll back greenhouse emissions, are finding they cannot. This though Kyoto only calls for a return to 1990 levels, not California’s 80% below. Emissions from the original European Union 15 member states have INCREASED since 1997.
Schwarzenegger says he would reduce gas emissions with increased energy production from windmills, solar panels, geothermal power and biomass conversion. But all are far more expensive than the fossil fuels they replace. According to calculations by Competitive Enterprise Institute adjunct scholar Joel Schwartz, based on federal Energy Information Administration data, Arnold’s antics will cost Californians “several billion dollars per year.”
That’s more than a meal for four in Beverly Hills, including drinks and tip.
Further, says University of Virginia environmental sciences professor Patrick Michaels, “If every nation in the world lived up to Kyoto, the amount of warming prevented would be 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. California’s contribution works out to about 0.003 of a degree.”
How did Schwarzenegger become Conan the Greenarian, determined to wield and ultimately sacrifice his state to slay a beast that’s either mythical or invincible?
Think Tamminen. When Schwarzenegger appointed him California EPA secretary in 2003, environmentalists rejoiced. He “may hold the most powerful environmental job in the U.S. outside of Washington, D.C.,” declared an interviewer. And that was BEFORE Schwarzenegger heaved him upstairs to Cabinet Secretary, where he presides over Cal/EPA and ALL the state agencies.
Tamminen is greener than the Jolly Green Giant. Until the Arnold appointment, he was executive director of Environment Now. He was or remains affiliated with a forest of environmentalist organizations including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Baykeepers, Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay, Malibu Foundation, the Waterkeeper Alliance, Energy Independence Now, and coalition of about 50 green groups called Clean Farms Clean Water.
He’s on the board of directors for the Wishtoyo Foundation, which he approvingly says is “making the environment a cultural and not a scientific issue.” Lovely.
Schwarzenegger never promised a “pro-science” administration, but did say he was pro-business. Tamminen’s appointments therefore would seem awfully curious except that he admitted to an interviewer that much can be attributed to being a longtime friend of Schwarzenegger’s environmentalist wife Maria Shriver, who is also a cousin of outspoken environmentalist and long-time Tamminen colleague Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Blood is truly thicker than water.
But some analysts see Tamminen as just the first Kudzu plant that will rapidly spread and eventually choke off California development. It’s distressing that an attorney with whom he’s affiliated through the Waterkeeper Alliance, Sejal Choksi, was appointed last year to a state environmental committee even as she was chief counsel in a lawsuit against the state.
How many new laws will these Kudzu characters ram through that will send taxes soaring, force businesses to fail or flee, and leave employees with notices stating: “You’ve been terminated!”
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
How did Schwarzenegger become Conan the Greenarian, determined to wield and ultimately sacrifice his state to slay a beast that’s either mythical or invincible?
Think Tamminen. When Schwarzenegger appointed him California EPA secretary in 2003, environmentalists rejoiced. He “may hold the most powerful environmental job in the U.S. outside of Washington, D.C.,” declared an interviewer. And that was BEFORE Schwarzenegger heaved him upstairs to Cabinet Secretary, where he presides over Cal/EPA and ALL the state agencies.
----
Didn't aRnie say he was going to 'blow up' the CalEPA when he jumped in the Recall race?
suhprize suhprize..
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
I can't wait 'til he tries to implement his plan, and all the Limousine Liberal NIMBYs come out to protest: can't put wind turbines here, can't put solar panels there, I don't want that stinky biomass plant near my house...
A decade ago, he was a struggling actor working cleaning swimming pools in Malibu. Yet Arnold makes him Cabinet secretary! But what should we expect from an Austrian with a mail order degree in marketing fitness? He makes a mockery of it all. This is a bad joke and a nightmare at the same time.
From Pool Guy to the Halls of Power (Schwarzenegger new Cabinet Secretary, Terry Tamminen)
(CNN) -- Arnold Schwarzenegger laid out his environmental plan for California on Sunday, vowing to cut in half the state's air pollution if he is elected governor, and insisting that one can be both pro-environment and pro-business.And of course, before the recall election, Carry_Okie gave us an excellent, paragraph by paragraph, analysis of where Arnold was going on the environment, and who was pulling the purse strings.An environmentally responsible life does not require giving up luxuries, he told several dozen supporters in the coastal community of Carpinteria, about 84 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
(snip)
"You can protect jobs and the environment at the same time; all it takes is leadership," he said. "As governor, I'll bring leadership, and I'll make sure that this stays the Golden Coast it is."
An Analysis of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Environmental Policy
This is a NON-ISSUE being pushed as a hit-piece on Arnold to help hurt him from the right as he's being pummeled from the left in his 'year of reform'. Let's look at reality: The state's debt is being paid down, there's no new borrowing, revenues are up, no new taxes, cities and counties are getting paid back a year early and the deficit is down from 15 billion to just over 4 billion.
It SOUNDS perfectly reasonable until you consider the details. Almost invariably, these "energy conservation" measures end up using more energy in a manner similar to the way ethanol supposedly increases energy independence but requires more energy to produce.
It's deliberate. Arnold's primary beneficiaries and political associates are heavily invested in petrochemical energy production, looking to cash in on artificial energy shortages.
This is a NON-ISSUE being pushed as a hit-piece on Arnold to help hurt him from the right as he's being pummeled from the left in his 'year of reform'.
We pay for it, and it doesn't come cheap. That makes it an issue. Worse, there has been significant environmental damage because of these "environmental" policies. That's an issue too.
Let's look at reality: The state's debt is being paid down, there's no new borrowing, revenues are up, no new taxes, cities and counties are getting paid back a year early and the deficit is down from 15 billion to just over 4 billion.
Your "reality" is bogus. Davis' deficit was $8 billion. Arnold borrowed $15 billion. Last I heard, the deficit in the current budget is $6 billion WITH A 9% INCREASE IN SPENDING (that's a 50% higher rate of growth than under Davis). The debt being paid down is funded with new debt. Where's the good news in that?
Good Lord! How can you even begin to think you can find ANY redeeming social value in this GANG-GREEN infected mal-administration!!! Pathetic!!!
Arnold seems to really believe the impossible hype that he vents. The very young can easily be fooled into thinking that we have an 'air quality' problem, but those of us that lived through the 50s know better. Too bad that the generation that made California a state cannot appear on television; they could testify to the constant blanket of smoke that covered all but the coastal fringe, due to the near-constant burning of the brush that covered the state.
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