Outside the Beltway: California Dreamin’ Up Ways to Avoid Economic Disaster
Mike Brownfield /
California, the land of sunshine, surfing, soaring unemployment and ballooning deficits, may be making moves to strip itself of one of its most costly and draconian environmental regulations: the cap-and-trade carbon tax. Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles is turning to private industry for help in digging out of a financial hole.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, California Assemblyman Dan Logue started a campaign to suspend the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which The New York Times calls the “nation’s furthest-reaching global-warming law.” It was designed to reduce the state’s carbon emissions and is set to take effect in 2012. However, all indications are that the law would have devastating effects on the state’s already dismal economy.
From The Wall Street Journal:
This feel-good law to reduce the state’s carbon footprint was enacted with great hoopla by the Democratic legislature and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 when the state’s economy was growing and the jobless rate was 5%. The law requires that starting in 2012 the state must ratchet down its carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The politicians and green lobbies told voters this energy tax would create jobs—the same fairy tale many in Washington are repeating today.
Now the jobless rate is 12.3%, 2.25 million Californians are unemployed, and the state government is broke. So Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue has begun collecting signatures for “The Global Warming Solutions Act,” a ballot initiative that would suspend California’s cap-and-trade scheme until the unemployment rate falls below 5.5%. He’s aiming to get it on the November ballot.