Free Republic

Green Politics: Golden State regulators have passed sweeping emission standards requiring one in seven new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. What can go wrong? Plenty, for if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that industrial policy and telling consumers what they need and must have vs. what they want and find useful doesn't work. Only the marketplace can accurately pick winners and losers. The government, having no competition, usually picks losers. We have also learned that climate change is an overhyped fantasy based on ideology rather than science. Yet the...

Gov. Jerry Brown said Sunday that cap-and-trade fees could help pay for high-speed rail, and that the cost would be well under the $100 billion forecast by the California High-Speed Rail Authority just three months ago. “It’s not going to be $100 billion,” Brown said. “That’s way off.” The voter-approved project would create a 220-mph train from San Francisco to Anaheim with eventual connections to Sacramento and San Diego. According to a transcript of the interview in the Sacramento Bee, Brown said, “Phase 1, I’m trying to redesign it in a way that in and of itself will be justified...

Gov. Jerry Brown's budget proposal includes nearly $500 million in spending from the proceeds of California's first-in-the-nation cap-and-trade program, but the plan is raising questions about whether the governor is using the new money to cut the budget deficit instead of promoting new greenhouse-gas-reducing programs. The controversial cap-andtrade program essentially puts a price on carbon emissions by limiting the amount of CO2 that can be produced by the state's largest polluters. They have to purchase credits from the state to cover the amount of carbon emitted. While the program went into effect Jan. 1, the state's first auction to sell...

Fresno, Calif. (AP) -- A federal judge is blocking California from enforcing its first-in-the-nation mandate for cleaner, low-carbon fuels, saying the rules favor biofuels produced in the state. . . . The California Air Resources Board adopted the low-carbon fuel standard as part of the state's landmark 2006 global warming law.

Hours after Gov. Jerry Brown issued a spirited attack on politicians who doubt the significance of climate change, Brown's predecessor -- former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- praised Brown but urged a spirit of inclusiveness. "To me, it made no difference if a Democrat had a great idea or a Republican had a great idea, or if someone from the outside had a great idea, or if someone from within the office had a great idea," Schwarzenegger said this afternoon at Brown's conference on climate change at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. "The more inclusive you are about...

The Weather: Regulations finalized by the California Air Resources Board establish the nation's first state-run cap-and-trade regime. Despite Solyndra, the state will gather solar panels while it may. The 262 pages of regulations implementing California's 2006 global warming legislation, Assembly Bill 32, approved by CARB last Thursday, will probably reduce employment more than it reduces emissions. The only thing it will cap is economic growth by bleeding a patient that is already hemorrhaging red ink. Signed into law in 2006 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cap-and-trade regulations are intended to force California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels...

California became the first state to cap greenhouse gas emissions across its major industries Thursday when air regulators unanimously approved a plan to allow companies to sell pollution credits as a way to ratchet down heat-trapping gases. The state Air Resources Board took the action almost a year after a nearly identical plan was approved, then delayed by environmentalists who demanded the board consider taxing carbon as an alternative to the cap-and-trade strategy. By 2013, refineries, power plants and the rest of the state's top 600 industrial sources of greenhouse gases will have to cut emissions on average by 10...

California plan(s) to launch their long-promised cap and trade program to fight global warming starting tomorrow (Oct. 20, 2011). (Not coincidentally) Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will include these two headlines that are up already online: Japan Reconsiders Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions And, EU Weighs Pullback on Cutting Emissions

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer. Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like. Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country. Of course, in spite of all of its problems, California is still one of the best places in the country to build a successful small business. All you have to do is start with a...

At a California Senate oversight hearing yesterday called by Senator Pavley, a joint author of the state's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), Air Resources Board Chairman Nichols reaffirmed her agency's commitment to proceed with implementation of a robust package of clean energy policies backed up with a cap-and-trade program to cut the state's emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Chairman Nichols also announced a major new addition to the AB 32 package - CARB will require that major industrial facilities in California, such as refineries and cement plants, implement cost-effective reduction measures that will provide significant greenhouse...

The state can go ahead with its plans to cap carbon emissions by California's largest refiners, utilities and other industrial companies, under a ruling by a state appellate court on Friday. The 1st District Court of Appeals in San Francisco overruled a lower court ruling in May that ordered the California Air Resources Board to halt all work on its cap and trade program. The cap and trade program was set to begin operating in January and ARB officials had been working to develop the program's enforcement rules, oversight procedures and reporting requirements for heavy polluters.

California must put an immediate halt to work on its cap and trade program until it completes a review of alternative approaches to reducing climate change, a state judge said Friday. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith ruled in March that the California Air Resources Board failed to conduct such a review but left open the question of whether the agency could conduct rule-making, environmental studies or do any other work while the legal issues were being resolved. The state said at the time that it would appeal. On Friday, Goldsmith enjoined the ARB from "engaging in any cap...

A leading environmental group has called on Gov. Jerry Brown to take another look at the cap-and-trade rule adopted by the Air Resources Board late last year, saying the regulation doesn't go far enough to meet the standards set by the state's 2006 greenhouse gas emission reduction law. In a letter sent Monday, Sierra Club Director Bill Magavern writes that the rule change approved at the end of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's term "has some serious flaws that will limit its effectiveness in reducing emissions and generating green jobs, and call into question its compliance with the environmental justice requirements...

Tackling climate change just got a little bit easier, with some help from federal funding. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded grants to five local and tribal governments in California for projects that include reducing waste, improving energy efficiency and planting drought-resistant gardens. Nationwide, 50 communities will receive funds for localized efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, totaling $20 million in two years. While there isn't a national target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the state's Global Warming Solutions Act (known as AB 32) mandates a reduction to 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. In the Bay Area, Alameda...

California's attempt to implement its landmark global warming law with a market-oriented "cap-and-trade" system of pollution credits hit a snag Monday with a judge's ruling that the state had not looked hard enough at alternatives. The ruling by Judge Ernest Goldsmith of San Francisco Superior Court does not prohibit the state Air Resources Board from adopting cap and trade or explicitly require that officials delay the system's scheduled implementation next year. But Goldsmith said the board must first analyze other options, such as a tax on carbon emissions, and explain why it did not choose them. The state agency "seeks...

California and five other states are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to let them sue power companies whose plants emit greenhouse gases, saying legal action is needed as a backup for the Obama administration's embattled efforts to curb pollution that contributes to global warming. The case, to be argued April 19, pits the states and environmental organizations against an unusual alliance: the energy industry, which opposes the emissions limits, and the Obama administration, which says such restrictions should be imposed by Congress and federal agencies, not the courts. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue regulations in May 2012 that...

SPECIAL REPORT-The California Carbon Rush (Hold the Eureka!)It could be worse than sticky, argues Gary Stern, a power utility executive. Stern lived through the disastrous deregulation of the California power market a decade ago and fears the carbon market will be small and open to manipulation. The state refuses to set a limit for prices. Traders could learn how to corner the market (think Enron) and then hold hostage utilities and factories with no option but to buy sky-high permits on the open market.State officials say they are working on new safeguards to stop just such efforts and will unveil...

In March 2010, Nor-Cal Produce, a family-owned produce business in West Sacramento, was fined $32,500 by the California Air Resources Board (ARB, or CARB). The company was not charged with, or even accused of, illegal emissions; like many other businesses, it had merely failed to notice a new regulation posted by CARB requiring all semi-trailers, shipping containers, vans, and rail cars with diesel-powered refrigerators to file a report with the agency. “We had no knowledge of the law,” Nor-Cal’s Chief Financial Officer Todd Achando told CalWatchDog, a news blog that monitors California government. “My operations manager happened to see it...

The latest legal challenge to California's landmark climate-change legislation isn't coming from big polluters faced with a series of new regulations. Instead, groups representing low-income residents are challenging the environmental law as unfairly burdening their beleaguered communities. A handful of community groups, represented by the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment have filed a motion that could delay the implementation of parts of the Global Warming Solutions Act, also known as AB 32. The groups suing the Air Resources Board argue in part that fledgling law violates the California Environmental Quality Act because the air board failed...

States: A court has tentatively ruled against California's cap-and-trade law because alternatives were not considered. But then, neither were climate facts or the economic impact. There's a delicious irony in the ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith barring the California Air Resources Board (CARB) from implementing AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. In the opinion of the court, CARB failed to complete the required environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act because it did not adequately analyze the legislation to see if there are better ways to get the job done. One of the...

Oh this is delicious sweet irony…they adopted a plan but didn’t bother to make a complete environmental review like any other project in the state is required to do. That’s what they get for ramrodding the thing. From the:Calif. cap-trade plan dealt blow by S.F. judgeWyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Sacramento BureauFriday, February 4, 2011(02-04) 04:00 PST Sacramento - –The California Air Resources Board violated state environmental law in 2008 when it adopted a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gases and again last year when it passed cap-and-trade regulations, a San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled in a tentative decision. If...

California's sweeping plan to institute cap and trade and regulate "greenhouse gases" has been thrown out by a San Francisco judge. SFGate.com reports: The California Air Resources Board violated state environmental law in 2008 when it adopted a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gases and again last year when it passed cap-and-trade regulations, a San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled in a tentative decision. [snip] In his decision, Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith ruled that the air board approved the larger plan to implement AB32 prior to completing the required environmental review, and that the board failed to adequately consider alternatives to cap and...

Sacramento -- The California Air Resources Board violated state environmental law in 2008 when it adopted a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gases and again last year when it passed cap-and-trade regulations, a San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled in a tentative decision. If the decision is made final, California would be barred from implementing its ambitious plan to combat global warming until it complies with portions of the California Environmental Quality Act, though it's not yet clear what the air board would have to do to be in compliance. The state's plan, which implements AB32, the Global Warming...

The fact that the lame-duck Congress balked at endorsing "cap-and-trade" legislation didn't deter California from approving its own version of the extreme green scheme for restricting industrial emissions. The move bolsters the state's reputation as the left coast's home for ideas out of left field. Soon Americans will witness what happens when global-warming hysteria worsens an already sick economy.California's Air Resources Board approved a cap-and-trade system on Dec. 16 that covers 360 businesses at 600 locations statewide. In its first phase, starting in 2012, electric utilities and other large manufacturers will receive free permits allowing emissions at their current...

Schwarzenegger, who counts legislation combating global warming as one of his signature achievements in office, suggested he might be interested in a post dealing with energy or the environment. "I'm a big believer in environmental issues," Schwarzenegger said, who added that he wanted a post where he could use his "celebrity power … knowledge and experience" to impact public policy. "I've traveled the world. … I'm very familiar with the world."

SAN FRANCISCO --California regulators late Thursday adopted the first large-scale cap-and-trade program in the U.S., in a move officials say will protect the environment without hurting the state's still-struggling economy.

California often leads the nation, especially in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The act of leading is one thing, however. Leadership's outcome is another matter entirely. On Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the bureaucracy charged with implementing AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, adopted a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions by about 15% by 2020. CARB's regulations go into effect in 2012. The unelected officials at CARB intend to reorder California's use of energy. In so doing they blandly declaim that their rules will create jobs while admitting to higher energy costs...

California has approved an extensive carbon-trading plan aimed at cutting greenhouse emissions. State regulators passed a "cap-and-trade" framework to let companies buy and sell permits, giving them an incentive to emit fewer gases.

California hasn’t learned from the failure of the Chicago Climate Exchange this year, when a ton of Carbon traded for a mere 5 cents. Nobody wanted to buy it even at that ridiculously low price. But, like a zombie, carbon trading rises again in brain dead broken California.final day on CCX - click to enlarge Now the the AB32 madness begins, and PCarbX (which sounds like some over the counter antacid remedy) is the new trading scheme. I give it two years, max. Here’s the story from the San Francisco Chronicle.California poised to enter carbon-trading marketAndrew S. Ross Today could...

The California Air Resources Board on Thursday approved the creation of the nation's first broad-based program to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and to begin charging large emitters for the excess carbon dioxide they put in the air. After an all-day meeting, the board voted 9-1 for the proposal, which will take effect beginning in 2012 and means California is once again moving forward with climate change policy while efforts on the national level have stopped. "The comment 'the world is watching' is sometimes an idle comment. It's not idle this afternoon," said Air Resources Board member Ronald...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California regulators on Thursday approved the first system in the nation to give polluting companies such as utilities and refineries financial incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases. The Air Resources Board voted 9-1 to pass the key piece of California's 2006 climate law — called AB32 — with the hope that other states will follow the lead of the world's eighth largest economy. State officials also are discussing plans to link the new system with similar ones under way or being planned in Canada, Europe and Asia. California is launching into a "historic adventure," said Mary Nichols,...

Taking the lead where Washington has wavered, California on Thursday is expected to adopt the nation's most ambitious plan yet to curb global warming. The California Air Resources Board is all but certain to vote to approve comprehensive "cap and trade" regulations designed to cut greenhouse gases. The regulations would impose limits, or "caps," on emissions from large industrial polluters through permits, or allowances, that could be traded on a market. California's plans to forge ahead are in sharp contrast to the lack of action from Washington, where Congress has rejected cap and trade at the national level. While the...

MR. BLUMENFELD: So today we recognize this person for an extraordinary vision and leadership as an early, ardent and articulate champion in the defense of our planet against global climate change. This person had a great team. I want to recognize Terry Tamminen and Linda Adams, who are both here, who really -- you can't do this stuff alone when you're sitting -- (Applause) And the job at the top is lonely and so when you surround yourselves by people you want to have people that free you up to take action and those are the type of people that...

He has been, in many ways, a governor of firsts:• The first to take office as a result of a recall election.• The first to commute, on an almost daily basis and via private jet, between the Capitol and his Southern California mansion. • The first to have served in the Austrian army, the first to have won the Mr. Olympia body-building title seven times, and - as far as we know - the first California chief executive to have nude photos of himself widely available on the World Wide Web.But "first" does not necessarily mean "great," or even "good."And...

Arnold Schwarzenegger dished out make-believe mayhem during his action movie hero days, but he must be a closet masochist. Why else would he say, as he often does, that he'd love to remain governor of California? He's already one of the most unpopular governors in state history, and he's leaving behind an economy that's erased more than a million jobs and a state budget deficit that's worse than the one he inherited seven years ago. A rational man would jet to his ski lodge in Sun Valley and return to Sacramento just in time to hand the mess to successor...

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, there were 30 clean-tech companies in the Sacramento region. Today, there are more than 100 such companies in the area employing thousands of workers. With weeks remaining in Schwarzenegger's administration, the fledgling green economy in Sacramento and the rest of California owes a debt to Schwarzenegger's stewardship of the state's climate-change law and his administration's policies, clean-tech advocates say. "(Gov. Schwarzenegger) helped to spark a clean-energy revolution in our state and ignite a national dialogue about the importance of climate change legislation," said state Sen. Fran Pavley,...

Encouraged by what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called clean energy's "greatest referendum in history," California officials are pushing ahead with a new greenhouse gas accord with developing foreign countries. Schwarzenegger today launched the third Governors' Global Climate summit at the University of California, Davis, saying this month's landslide defeat of Proposition 23, an oil industry backed initiative to roll back the state's landmark climate change law, shows broad support among voters for climate change initiatives. "I hope that our success encourages you to fight and keep fighting and fighting because science is on our side, the economics is on our side...

Public carbon trading dead in the USA Posted on November 8, 2010 by Anthony Watts Gore’s grand experiment has flatlined. As we reported almost two weeks ago, the Gore and Pachauri advised Chicago Carbon Exchange (CCX) has closed. Closing price? A nickel per ton of CO2.Here’s the final day closing page for posterity:A 16 lb bag of charcoal briquettes is worth more than a ton of CO2. About 220x more. Here’s more on the story:Carbon Trade Ends on Quiet Death of Chicago Climate ExchangeBy John O’SullivanRepublican mid-term election joy deals financial uncertainty among green investors as the Chicago Climate Exchange announces...

"The taxpayers gave and they also took away. On one hand, the people said by a majority, 'Give us a budget.' On the other hand, they said, 'Don't pick my pocket.'" This was Jerry Brown's verdict on California voters' picks on ballot measures delivered at his post-victory press conference Wednesday. In passing Proposition 25, which allows the Legislature to pass a budget with a simple majority vote, the people made it easier for Sacramento to pass a budget. But in approving Proposition 22, which prohibits using funds dedicated to local services to close the state's budget hole, voters made it...

November 3, 2010 Calif.'s Little-Noticed Prop 26 Squeaks Through in Dead of Night By COLIN SULLIVAN of Greenwire The same California voters who rejected a proposition yesterday that would have suspended the state's climate change law also approved a separate ballot referendum that could undermine how cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are implemented by changing the definition of environmental fees. Proposition 26, which passed officially early this morning, will tighten how the state constitution defines taxes and regulatory fees. It has been called the "evil twin" of Proposition 23 by environmental activists who fear it would inhibit the state's ability...

Now that California’s Prop 23 to suspend the AB32 global warming law has failed, you get some real clarity from the players. If you ever doubted that our current crop of “save the planet” bureaucrats think they are above answering to the very citizens that pay their salary, this quote should put any doubt you may have had to rest.From public TV station KQED’s “climate watch” blog: “They didn’t know who they were messing with,” said Mary Nichols, when the first numbers came in from the polls. Wow. Just wow. Hubris maximus. Lady, you need a reality check.Read the holier...

FRESNO, Calif. -- Elections officials in Fresno County say hundreds of thousands of voters are getting ballots that incorrectly describe the ballot measure that would suspend the state's greenhouse gas emissions law. The county's 380,000 voters are being issued ballots that characterize Proposition 23 as requiring "major polluters" to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A Sacramento judge threw out that wording earlier this year, and ordered the language to be changed from "major polluters" to "major sources of emissions."

California’s business tax climate is second worst in the nation, better only than New York’s, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation. New Jersey managed to move up two spots on the list after four straight years as the nation’s worst business tax climate... The index is based on the premise that taxes matter to business and states don’t raise or lower taxes in a vacuum. “The modern market is characterized by mobile capital and labor. Therefore, companies will locate where they have the greatest competitive advantage...

(article contains multiple charts) ....The graph on the left depicts the total cumulative global emissions (about 1.1 trillion tons) from 1946-2009, and the average California annual temperature over the last two decades. Clearly, California does not have a "global warming" problem caused by humanity's large increase in CO2 emissions. In addition, "global" warming is actually regional warming, and the U.S. is a major region that is not warming at all. IPCC and climate alarmist scientists inform us that every human CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere from hundreds to thousands of years, incessantly causing temperatures to increase. Thus, per the...

Roughly 600 of California's major polluters -- from oil refineries to power plants and factories -- will face mandatory limits on the amount of greenhouse gases they emit, starting on Jan. 1, 2012, under new rules released today by state air regulators. The facilities will be able to trade pollution credits under a new "cap and trade" market, and will be allowed to use projects that offset global warming, such as tree planting, to cover up to 8 percent of their emissions limits. The new rules are part of AB 32, the landmark law signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in...

With voters headed to the polls Tuesday to decide the fate of California's climate change law, regulators are pressing ahead with a key part of the statute that puts limits on how much the state's companies can pollute. The California Air Resources Board today will unveil new rules and regulations for a cap-and-trade program. It will set a ceiling on the amount of carbon that refiners, power companies and major manufacturers can emit each year. While details of the regulations aren't yet available, ARB officials have already indicated that they plan to take a pro-business approach. They will initially give...

I love this quote from clean-tech exec Eric Dresselhuys to the San Francisco Chronicle's David R. Baker: "If California isn't leading the charge on implementing these technologies, why be here? Do you want to be here for the high taxes, the high cost of living? Right now, you want to be here because California is where the action is." In a nutshell, that is the argument against Proposition 23 -- which would stall the impending implementation of AB32, California's landmark 2006 global-warming bill, until unemployment dips to 5.5 percent. If voters delay AB32, they will staunch the creation of clean-tech...

Economists are famous for avoiding definitive statements by saying “on the one hand” followed immediately by “on the other hand.” In the case of California’s Proposition 23, however, the sound one would hear from economists is both hands clapping. Voters will take up Prop. 23 in less than four weeks, but the ramifications will last decades. The bill would suspend AB 32, the Global Warming Act of 2006 by freezing all its provisions until California's unemployment rate drops below 5.5 perecent for four consecutive quarters. The state’s economic situation is difficult, to say the least. The latest unemployment numbers published...

Industrialists who own private company with annual revenues of £62bn have channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite. But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month's midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil.

California is the nation's laboratory in green job initiatives of the type that so many politicians in Washington, D.C., and the states see as America's economic passport to the future. The Golden State was first in the nation in renewable energy standards, it is the home of the most stringent cap and trade legislation (called AB 32) to reduce carbon emissions, and it has poured hundreds of millions of state tax dollars into renewable energy research. So where are all the green jobs? A new 2010 study by the University of California-Berkeley comes to the sobering conclusion that "the green...