Charles and David Koch are among the most committed and influential free-market champions in America today. According to an editorial in the New York Times, the Koch brothers have invested about a million dollars to try to save California from self-destruction, courtesy of the nation’s most ludicrous energy program: AB-32. That’s a noble effort on the part of Kansas petroleum magnates, even though debt-ridden, job-starved California seems determined to follow Spain’s disastrous path leading toward an unattainable green-energy nirvana.
Naturally the Times doesn’t quite see it that way, assuring readers that the Koch brothers are a dangerous part of sinister, right-wing forces who have aligned to kill California’s bright green future. The Times describes the provisions of AB-32 accurately, although they treat the fantastical goals contained in the bill as though they could be met with a wave of the hand:
The 2006 law, known as AB 32, is aimed at reducing California’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent at midcentury. To reach these targets, state agencies are drawing up regulations that would affect businesses and consumers across the board — requiring even cleaner cars, more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and power plants that use alternative energy sources like wind instead of older fossil fuels.
More regulations, more government control of private industry, more unreliable, expensive wind power: what could possibly go wrong?
Sure the Times acknowledges that California might have a few economic problems, but AB-32 will fix everything if only those darn boys from Kansas would go away:
The Koch brothers have contributed about $1 million, partly because they worry about damage to the bottom line at Koch Industries, and also because they believe that climate change is a left-wing hoax. They have argued that the law will lead to higher energy costs and job losses, arguments that resonate with many voters in a state with a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. But this overlooks the enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies — and the jobs associated with them — since the law was passed.
When you’ve got a 12.4 percent unemployment rate, it’s pretty easy to ignore “the jobs associated with” an “enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies.” It should be readily apparent that the state wouldn’t have an unemployment rate thirty percent greater than the nation’s already dreadful unemployment rate if hyper-aggressive green energy programs like AB-32 actually created meaningful numbers of jobs.
What these sorts of statutes actually encourage is what those of us involved in the energy business generically call “pixie dust projects.” Pixie dust projects – miraculous energy solutions that usually violate at least two laws of thermodynamics – have always been around, but under this administration there has been an explosion of such efforts, with shady characters and snake-oil salesmen galore clawing to get to the front of the line to grab government cash so they can perfect their version of the flux capacitor. No state is more awash in pixie dust these days than California, and its horrific unemployment numbers reflect that fact.
Of course, though the Times dutifully parrots the Obama administration’s mantra that green energy will solve our economic woes, they can’t help but get a lick in to defend “global warming/climate change/climate disruption” (or whatever we’re calling greenhouse gas hysteria this week): “The Kochs and their allies are disastrously wrong about the science,” the Times sniffed, demonstrating once again that nobody on the Times is actually interested in understanding the science any more than they care about what’s actually happening in China.
On the latter point, the Times declares that if AB-32 is defeated: “…he biggest winners will be the Chinese, who are already moving briskly ahead in the clean technology race.” Really? The Chinese are only winning on if one defines “moving briskly ahead” as building a new coal-fired power plant each week, failing to operate the environmental controls installed in the power plants they’ve already built, damming up ever river they can find and producing mounds of solar panels to sell to gullible Americans.
If the Kochs and other free market defenders are not successful and AB-32 remains in place, California’s economy won’t look much like China’s, but you can be assured will look an awful lot like Spain’s.