Free Republic

The Orange County Register ran a great article written by columnist Susan Shelley addressing ironic comments made by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who created the state’s AB 32 Global Warming Solution Act saying that people have “tuned out” the climate change activism movement because it is “stuck in despair and confusion.”Her column addresses the climate alarmism politics that have taken over and flooded the public air waves and press articles that parrot endless doom and gloom pushing the global wide climate alarmist campaign. She notes the following key climate activist schemes: “The wild exaggerations of climate doomsayers have been...

The woman who led California through the development and implementation of some groundbreaking environmental policies could soon be headed to Washington, D.C. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced her resignation this week, and already people are speculating about who will next head the agency. One name on nearly every pundit's short list: California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols. Nichols would be a controversial pick, as would most any candidate with a strong environmental record. She was rumored to be a finalist four years ago, but President Obama picked Jackson, a chemical engineer who had served as former...

Extraordinarily smart people at the California Air Resources Board have taken to using the term "leakage" as they go about devising the experimental cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases. Homer Perez, head boiler mechanic at Pacific Coast Producers' tomato cannery off East Main Street in Woodland, might use a word that is more familiar to the rest of us: "layoff." The cannery has been operating under one owner or another since the 1920s. A cooperative of 16 growers in Yolo, Solano and Sutter counties owns it now. Perez has worked there for 28 of the past 29 years....

Big business sees California's global-warming law as a job killer, a $1 billion tax that could force some of the state's heaviest industries to flee. ..state regulators, trying to ease the burden, are studying whether to give hardship breaks to dozens of companies. ....the state would dole out extra carbon credits – the precious allowances that will give industries the license to emit greenhouse gases starting in January.... could save companies millions of dollars. Like practically everything connected with..the Global Warming Solutions Act, the idea is controversial. ..."We're … concerned about the system being gamed," said Kathryn Phillips, director of...

California's landmark global-warming bill was a white-hot topic in the 2010 governor's race and remains former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature environmental achievement. But as the state prepares to unroll the law's cap-and-trade program in November with the first state auctions of emissions permits, a new poll finds that 57 percent of Californians say they have never heard anything about the program. The statewide poll by the Public Policy Institute of California further found that 30 percent of respondents said they had heard "a little," while just 12 percent said they had heard "a lot." "Cap-and-trade is a very complicated issue...

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will make a rare political public appearance today, with his schedule opening up to join Gov. Jerry Brown in San Diego at the groundbreaking and dedication of the Sunrise Powerlink — a large transmission line project that will run from the Imperial Valley to San Diego. Schwarzenegger promoted and supported that project more than four years ago.

For the past 10 years, California has struggled with huge budget deficits and wrenching cuts. Suddenly, however, the state is poised to raise billions from an unusual new source: the proceeds from its landmark global warming law. The windfall could come as soon as this fall, when state officials are set to begin auctioning off pollution credits to oil refineries, power plants and other major polluters as part of a new "cap-and-trade" system. The amounts are potentially enormous: from $1 billion to $3 billion a year in 2012 and 2013, jumping to as high as $14 billion a year by...

In 2006 California’s Senate Bill 107 codified a requirement that by 2010 all electricity retailers in the state were to procure 20% of their electricity from “renewables.” That same year L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich established Nuisance Abatement Teams that started combing the Mojave desert hitting isolated residents with ever-expanding lists of code violations, imposing whatever it took to drive residents out, and they made their intentions perfectly clear . . . . . . Apparently it is not enough that our green crony capitalists are getting billions in taxpayer subsidies, or that that rate-payers are forced to buy their...

The state of California has made a full-blown commitment to reducing reliance on fossil-fuel energy and other limited resources. Utilities are required to use solar, wind and geothermal sources for a third of their electricity supply by 2020, while owners of homes and businesses are being urged to install solar panels. The state is mandating that automakers dramatically ramp up sales of battery-powered and other low-emission cars. It is imposing new cap-and-trade emission controls on business with hefty fees. Essentially, the state is trying to force California into an entirely new economic structure, claiming, in Gov. Jerry Brown's words, that...

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...