Environmental Welfare

Many Californians live in California because they love the natural beauty that surrounds them at every turn. The beaches, the mountains and the desert are, in my mind, some of California’s greatest assets. There is nothing quite as satisfying as waking up on a morning like today and seeing the crisp outline of the San Bernardino mountain range capped in snow while enjoying 70 degree weather.

If we are being honest, the weather and natural beauty are probably some of the only things keeping many Californians from fleeing the state because of high taxes, unemployment, an inept state government and an oppressive business environment. It would make sense then, that we should try to protect those natural resources at all costs. This is the garbage that the opponents of Prop 23 would have you believe, where in today’s world everything not “green” might as well be labeled “poison”.

Take a look at just what Prop 23 is up against. In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act. The mere name of the bill should give you the idea that they were trying to compensate for something with that lofty title, namely- common sense. What AB 32 did was create a government entity with incredible power not only to levy regulations on businesses that emit greenhouse gasses but also to create cap-and-trade laws to slow CO2 emissions.

The grand plan for AB 32 is to return California to 1990 levels of emissions over the course of 14 years, making 2020 the target year to achieve environmental nirvana. Obviously, reducing emissions isn’t a terrible idea… in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum and other factors have to be taken into account, mainly the economic cost and the loss of freedom that would come from turning over something so arbitrary as ‘the right to emit’ to the jurisdiction of the government.

Start with the title. I’m not a scientist, but I have read enough over the years to understand that global warming (and cooling) has been happening since the beginning of time regardless of CO2 emissions. I also know that the scientists who are hired by ‘green’ companies to prove global warming might not have the purest intentions based on where their funding comes from. With the incredible push in the last ten years towards ‘clean’ and ‘green’ jobs, often at the expense of politically unfavorable jobs in the industrial sector, I have a hard time believing that in the future, with AB 32 in full swing, a job that isn’t ‘green’ will struggle to survive.

The problem is that green jobs created simply because they are ‘green’ are not sustainable. Why does it matter if a job is green or not? The mere fact that the government has to categorize jobs as green means that they are giving it some intrinsic value that it lacked in the first place. In this case, that value is profitability. In a healthy economy, jobs exist because they are making someone besides worker money. Green jobs very rarely make money. Green jobs are essentially environmental welfare- a money sink that takes in far more cash than it could ever hope to create. Look at the process: the government takes money from non-green businesses in the form of fees and taxes, and then distributes it to consumers as a tax credit for installing ‘green’ appliances or to an overseas developer to manufacture clean power sources. Remind me again how this benefits Californians?

The negative impact that AB 32 will have on businesses when it is fully implemented is staggering. A 2009 Cal State Sacramento study predicted that small businesses will pay an average of $46,961 and families will face annual cost increase of $3,857 because of AB 32. The combined annual business loss would be $182.6 billion, or, as the study recommends, 1.1 million lost jobs.

These are daunting predictions to be sure. Frightening, in fact. The mere fact that legislators in Sacramento have had these numbers in hand for over a year and are still fighting Prop 23 is an indication of just how entrenched in the ‘green’ myth they have become. Prop 23 would suspend these regulations until the statewide economy improves to a point where it could support environmental welfare, which, at least in regards to AB 32, should be never.