At least Greens take a stand

I have seen multiple appeals for telling the California Air Resources Board to put some teeth into the regulations to implement SB 32's Cap and Trade program.  They have come from:

• California League of Conservation Voters:
• Union of Concerned Scientists 

Now, you can add the Green Party of California to that list. 

If I get any calls on this, since I am so freely quote, I hope that I am equal to the task.

California's ARB fails again.

When Governor Schwarzenegger appointed Mary Nichols to head California's Air Resources Board (ARB), I was skeptical. In fact, I suggested that she be fired.

Since then, the ARB has muddled along. The strongest action they have taken was to put controls on diesel engine emissions, long known to be a health risk and particularly bad in the corridors leading to the ports in Oakland and Long Beach / San Pedro. Now, even that is falling apart.

To begin with, the retrofit to older diesel exhaust systems is costly, as much as $11,000 per truck. There was a $15 million fund to provide assistance to independent truckers, but that was exhausted long before most of them got around to applying. Now those trucks would be banned from entering the port after Jan 1.

Having long ago criticized the ARB for being in-effective, Green Party of CA continued their criticism yesterday. The fact is that even if the State Government were to line up the trucks and pay for the retrofit directly, it would save the California Economy so much that it might be a good deal. After all, a study from CSU-Fullerton Economists Jane V. Hall and Victor Brajer put the cost of our bad air at $28 billion per year.

If this were not enough, we found out yesterday that much of the ARB's analysis work on rulemaking for diesel exhaust was performed by a man who lied about his academic credentials, and ARB Board Chair Mary Nichols knew it. She just decided to let it slide. It is incomprehensible to this writer that a person in her position could be so tone deaf to the political realities that she would just pass this off or hide it.

Most would agree that there was nothing wrong with the analysis done, nor the conclusions reached by the ARB but Nichols must be politically tone deaf not to understand that this was dumb.

So, everything is now delayed even more, and the costs of California's health care wil go up, emergency room visits for asthma will continue high, some might die, and there is no one to blame other than Nichols. Once again, I will repeat what I said a year ago. Nichols should resign.

Do you like fresh air and cool weather?

California has passed and Governor Schwarzenegger has signed a bill knows as AB-32. That was in 2006. Since then, it has become the shining star of climate related legislation even though nothing has yet to be implemented. However, it did help move Fran Pavley from the Assembly, where she was the author of the bill, to the State Senate where she has been named to Chair the Committee on Resources.

So, where are we in the implementation cycle, or what has California accomplished in 2 years? Click Read more! to find out.


To begin with, AB 32 mandated that the Air Resources Board start by putting together a Scoping Plan. This was to be an attempt to tell us all just how things would work and what it would finally cost. That plan is in the final review process. The 2nd and last public hearing on AB 32 will be held on Dec. 11 in Sacramento.

I have two serious concerns. The first is the simple fact that carbon trading schemes will not work, no matter how good the intentions or the goals might be. Schwarzenegger's pick to implement the cap and trade program, Mary Nichols, did similar work when an Assistant Administrator in the Clinton Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Not only did that fail, she neglected compliance issues at the same time as all attention was focused on the pollution credit scheme.

This post at Climate Progress make the point very effectively.

Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?

A: Lipstick.

Carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securities are quite similar in that is impossible for the vast majority of people, even experts, to know what value they have, if any.

Similarly, Cap and Trade mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol have not worked. It is too easy for major multi-international corporations to circumvent them and at least one organization that is supposed to police compliance has been booted from the job.

Then, in her effort to sell the plan, Nichols has done what they all do; exaggerate the benefits and ignore the rest. Before anyone takes this all seriously, they should read the peer review comments on the economic modeling that the Air Resources Board did to back up their pet project. Even those who are sympathetic to the goals of AB 32 has a hard time believing the case being presented. UCLA Economist Matthew Kahn is one.

In this review, I will highlight why I believe the current modeling exercise underestimates the cost of meeting
AB32’s goals. I will present a research methodology for cheaply collecting the necessary data to test whether the optimistic numbers reported in Table I-2 of
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/scopingplan/document/economic_appendix1.pdf could be accurate
estimates of the expected net costs of this regulation.

The first public meeting on the AB 32 scoping plan turned in to a bit of a circus. I would hope that this is a repeat, and that they repeat until someone gets it right. I doubt that Nichols is the one to do it.

How much change can we handle?

In my most recent posts, I have focused on the fact that the Democratic Party seems hell bent on returning William Jefferson to Congress from the 2nd Congressional District in Louisiana. This at a time when these same Democrats are cheering over their defeat of Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens. Both Jefferson and Stevens suffer from the same malady, they are apparently crooks. The only difference is that Stevens has been convicted and Jefferson still awaits trial, even though one of his aides has confessed, been sentenced and has agreed to testify against Jefferson.

This indicates that a lot of change is still required from both parties. There is one broad where the scope of the changes that this nations required so vast, the special interests so entrenched that you would question whether anything will change at all. I am talking about the conjoined problems of climate change, energy and the environment. Follow me to Read more!


Bill Becker, writing today at Climate Progress, makes the following assertion.

America’s de facto energy policy is a hodgepodge of self-defeating laws, programs and subsidies. Congress must make a critical decision: We either have to phase out fossil fuels or abandon any pretense that we care about climate change, despite its profound implications for public health, national security, peace and economic stability.

That hodgepodge has been crafted based on the inputs from all of those special interests that bring so much weight to bear on Congress, who can send armies of experts to testify at hearings and whose bottom line interest is just that, the bottom line.

Becker goes on to outline a basic action plan for the Obama Administration. As the head of the Presidential Climate Action Project, he has been responsible for the development of a series of policy statements that truly call for significant change.

What I fear is that we have a group of policy wonks who are buried in think tanks talking to themselves and nodding in agreement over the good things that they do. At the same time, we have an entire array of apparently well meaning people who are clearly not committed to any kind of change, conservative in the sense that they want to maintain the status quo, lacking the imagination to envision a new future.

Democrats talk about the need to support union jobs, while the Teamster's union calls for more drilling, more oil, exploitation of Canada's tar sands or the US large reserves of oil shale even though the results would be catastrophic, not only for climate change but also for fresh water supplies that need to be preserved as rainfall patterns change and our population continues to grow. I am not sure why we support unions that do not support us but that is a subject for a different discussion.

With think tanks policy wonks talking to each other and politicians making profound public displays of intention we often forget that the public is still not on board and that many legislators fear a public backlash that could cost them their seats. One of our Senators, Barbara Boxer chairs the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee and would appear to be in position to create the kind of forward thinking plans that we need. She surely sounded that way this week.

My skepticism about the wide chasm between public pronouncements and implementable policy is expressed in this week's GPCA press release, expressing the same agreement with the expressed intent of Governor Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Conference but asking that he replace Mary Nichols as Chair of the Air Resources Board specifically because the board has, under her leadership, abandoned compliance and put all of her faith in the same market mechanisms that failed when she introduced pollution credit trading as an assistant administrator of the US EPA.

We need to establish the fact that Green Change is somehow different, more attuned to the needs of the individual, of the public at large and not just another rant against the status quo. Rather than talking truth to power we need to be talking the future to the electorate; where are we going and how are we going to get there.