What state ranks third in unemployment, second in foreclosures, has the nation’s worst credit rating, is running a $19 billion deficit – yet insists on spending billions on a greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan that can’t possibly impact global warming?
Yes, it’s California, land of the Governator, who signed a bill that may say “Hasta la vista, baby!” to perhaps a million jobs. Yet there’s hope the prosperity terminator can be stopped.
The state boasts that the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, better known as AB 32, is “first-in-the-world.” It requires that by 2020 the state’s greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels, about 25-30 percent less than they’d otherwise be. It demands another 80 percent reduction by 2050. This even as the state’s population is projected to grow from 34 million to 59 million by then. Minor implementations have already begun and the law fully kicks in during January 2012.
The Golden State has prided itself for decades as a national leader in business and economic trends. Lately the focus seems to be on showing the rest of the United States the quickest path to financial ruin. Already poised at the edge of the cliff as far as jobs go, California is about to let AB32 push it over and finish the job.
As I pointed out in a previous post, the green jobs story spun by environmentalists and progressives has been nothing more than a leftist fairy tale to this point. The sales pitch for the artificially propped-up “industry” has become so sour that its most prominent champion-President Obama-has stopped trying to make it.
Noticeably absent from President Obama’s latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through “green” energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration’s original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful.
The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects – combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. – appear to have killed the administration’s appetite for pushing green projects as an economic cure.
The plan to shackle and financially strangle profitable, proven energy sources and replace them with a renewable energy industry that has no real-world success stories (large scale) is losing steam on both ends of the political spectrum now.
Even some of the administration’s liberal allies have expressed skepticism over the original stimulus package’s use of green investments as a way to spur quick employment growth at home.
“Spending on renewables is slow to get out of the door. Leaks to foreign companies is an inadequate driver of jobs and growth and may not create a strong exporting industry,” said Samuel Sherraden, an economic analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based progressive think tank.
AB32 was passed and signed into law at a time when California was still one of the largest economies in the world and had an unemployment rate almost eight points lower than it is now. There was money available to subsidize technologies that had yet proven themselves profit-makers on their own. Now the government here gives IOUs instead of state income tax refunds.
After decades of hyper-regulation poisoning the business climate in California, lawmakers here are still prepared to add more and do little more than cross their fingers, waiting for an almost fantastical outcome.
Originally the California Air Resources Board (CARB) forecast that by 2020 the law would expand economic production by $33 billion annually, increase overall personal income by $16 billion and per capita income by $200, while adding more than 100,000 jobs. But when that failed the laugh test, CARB rejiggered the numbers.
A new CARB report in March forecast continued economic growth for California, while also concluding that AB 32 would barely slow it. Indeed, under CARB’s best-case scenario, the law would actually add 10,000 jobs. Ah, but the study had four other scenarios. All of them indicate job losses – as high as 320,000.
The once-proud economic engine in California doesn’t have any wiggle room to absorb (as President Obama would say) the damage even more misguided energy regulation would cause. AB32 needs to, at the very least, be suspended until the state can provide some measure of solvency and return its citizens to work.
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