tagged w/ Prop 23
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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Since national energy reform is on the rocks, ethanol subsidies for the Midwest and ballot propositions to roll back progressive energy legislation in California are the most important policy fights to watch right now.
Neither will revolutionize the way Americans get power, and in both cases, moving forward could actually mean moving away from a sensible energy future. In California, voters could turn back progress the state has made towards holding down carbon emissions. And Washington’s support for ethanol reveals the static thinking that’s smothering our ability to address climate change.
More important than legalizing pot
In 2006, California passed a law that would take effect in 2011 and put an ambitious plan in place to decrease the state’s carbon emissions by 2020. Even after the law passed, however, the debate over its merits continued. This being California, that debate made its way onto this November’s ballot.
The most commonly floated line of reasoning against the law focuses on negative impacts to job growth: Increasing the price on carbon increases the cost of doing business, limiting economic growth and the resources that businesses have to dedicate to expansion. Proposition 23, a ballot initiative that will come to a vote next Tuesday, would delay the carbon bill’s enactment until the state’s economy takes a turn for the better.
But Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard knocks down the economic argument against the 2006 law (AB32):
While enacting AB32 could cause job loss in some sectors, most independent experts actually forecast growth in jobs in the renewable energy, transportation, and efficiency sectors. In fact, green jobs are pretty much the only sector growing in the Golden State. The number of green jobs grew 36 percent in California between 1995 and 2008. The rate of growth for regular old jobs was only 13 percent.
Double trouble
Activists have focused on shutting down Prop 23 (check out, via The Washington Independent’s Andrew Restuccia, this clever campaign to flip “yes” voters), but as Amy Westervelt points out at Earth Island Journal, that initiative is not the only one that could free companies from their environmental responsibilities.
It turns out another California proposition, Prop 26, could raise the threshold legislators would have to meet in order to make companies pay for their pollution, including from oil spills. As Westervelt writes:
While some companies have steered clear of the Tea Party-backed Prop 23, which seems to be losing popularity every week, California companies interested in slowing down AB32 and maybe ridding themselves of responsibility for pollution altogether have been quietly funneling money to Prop 26.
California has long been a leader on energy issues. If either of these propositions goes the wrong way, it will be yet another troubling sign of the failure of progressive energy policy.
The other ethanol
Although environmentalists have fought hard since 2008 to pass cap-and-trade, the policy was always fundamentally conservative one. The Obama administration has always tried to map out a middle path on energy policy, and so far it has been ineffective. Ethanol is yet another case in point.
As Lynda Waddington reports at the Iowa Independent, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced last week that the administration was moving forward with a program that aids farmers producing crops (in addition to corn) that could be turned into ethanol. Switchgrass, the foundation of Brazil’s much-touted ethanol system is one example. Notably, the arguments Vilsack advanced for the program had more to do with the economy than with energy.
Pros and cons
This type of cellulosic ethanol, Brooks Lindsay explains at Change.org, would go mainly towards fueling cars. Lindsay weighs the pros and cons of producing this sort of ethanol in general, and comes down against it. His reasoning: “At best, cellulosic ethanol is just a stop-gap measure while electric cars slowly replace liquid-powered cars….But, a stop-gap fuel does not deserve massive investments and government attention.”
Indeed, progressives across the board have long argued that politicians’ support for ethanol derives from political calculation, not from practical policy. (Ethanol states are swing states.) Ethanol is energy-intensive to produce, and it has a slew of negative environmental consequences that outweigh the cuts in carbon emissions.
Rethinking the politics
Before they rush to back the Obama administration’s policies, however, policymakers should consider this news from Heather Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong. Rogers reports for The Washington Monthly:
As I discovered on a recent reporting trip through Iowa, many farmers there would welcome a way to break free of the ethanol-industrial complex. The people I met said they’d rather cultivate crops using ecologically sound methods, if they could do so and still earn a decent living. It’s not as if midwestern farmers don’t know—better than the rest of us—that growing crops for biofuels damages their soil and keeps them at the mercy of predatory multinational corporations.
The article is worth reading in full, but fast-forward to the end to find Rogers’ sensible policy proposal. Instead of enlisting farmers in a complicated energy-production procedure that ultimately keeps Americans in their cars, why not aide the work they’re already doing to reduce carbon emissions on their farms? After all, farms are responsible for a huge portion of the country’s carbon burden — they just have lobbyists savvy enough to keep their business from being regulated. As Rogers puts it:
Paying farmers to sequester carbon is sound public policy, but it’s also, and just as importantly, good politics. By helping to preserve farmers economically while also allowing them to be the stewards of land most want to be, it peels farmers away from the agribusiness coalition that is pushing the Obama administration to bet the country on a failed biofuels energy strategy.
Now there’s a bit of thinking that could move energy policy forward.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Since national energy reform is on the... more
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Prop. 23 not just for hippies | Daily Titan
Due to an upcoming proposition on November’s ballot, the viability and competitiveness of America’s economy is being threatened by postponing a piece of legislation known as Assembly Bill 32. The goal of California AB32 is to set a standard for the 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels by reducing 15 percent of today’s emissions by 2020.Prop. 23 not just for hippies | Daily Titan
Due to an upcoming proposition on... more
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Who is paying the Proposition 23 campaign bills? KQED has created a clever Google map illustrating where the biggest contributors to the campaigns for and against the initiative live.(http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=105270551637173844123.000491e1311c5acdc4e14&ll=41.046217%2C-100.634766&spn=25.135533%2C57.568359&z=4)
A quick glance shows that more of the “Yes on 23” money is coming from out-of-state, with big money donations pouring in from San Antonio, Texas, Witchita, Kan., Smithville, Mo., and Washington, D.C. Major funders include oil interests, Valero, Tesoro and Koch Industries. (http://www.baycitizen.org/proposition-23/story/report-highlights-prop-backers-pollution/)
But the “No on 23” campaign is getting some big donations from far-flung allies, too, in New York City and Lummi Island, Wash. In California, some of the largest donations to "No on 23" are coming from Silicon Valley, with venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife Ann Doerr kicking in $2 million.
Prop. 23 would suspend AB 32,California’s land-mark greenhouse-gas emissions law, until the state’s unemployment rate reaches 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters. With unemployment currently stuck above 12 percent, the initiative would nullify the state’s global warming law for years.
With Congress failing to pass a clean energy bill this year, the national battle over climate change has shifted to California, which has the toughest global warming law on the books in the country. Since Prop. 23 could stall that law, the big donations from out-of-state underscore the importance of this initiative in the national debate over how to address global warming.Who is paying the Proposition 23 campaign bills? KQED has created a clever Google map... more
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Opponents of Proposition 23 released a report on Wednesday detailing safety violations at Valero’s and Tesoro’s refineries in California. The two Texas-based companies, which operate refineries in the Bay Area in Benicia and Martinez, are the largest financial backers of Prop. 23, the ballot initiative that would suspend AB 32, the state’s landmark global warming law.
The report, entitled “Off the Charts: How Tesoro and Valero Routinely Violate California’s Health and Safety Laws,” was issued by the No on 23 campaign and is based on documents obtained from state Air Quality Management districts through public record requests. The districts regulate the refineries.Opponents of Proposition 23 released a report on Wednesday detailing safety violations... more
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Here’s a little story about a speech given by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger last Sunday that you might have missed. Given who he is and what he's saying this should have been a big news story but I heard about it 4 days later on a English news site The Independent.
By Guy Adams, The Foreign Desk, Thursday, 30 September 2010 at 7:45 am
"It’s never been easy to take Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chitchat about climate change all that seriously, given his ownership of Hummers (see token archive pic, left) and habit of commuting from Los Angeles to Sacramento, via private jet, to carry out duties as Governor of California.
Yet on Sunday night, in the twilight of what many consider a wasted eight years in office, the Governator delivered perhaps the most memorable, and certainly one of the most heartfelt speeches of this or any other recent mid-term election season.
Speaking at a conference in Silicon Valley, he described in detail the underhand efforts of two Texan oil companies to derail his efforts to reduce California’s ludicrous carbon footprint, which despite the virtually endless local supply of clean and free sunlight and wind, is amongst the highest per capita in the world.
The two firms, Valero and Tesoro, have spent tens of millions of dollars on a misleading PR campaign to persuade the Califorrnian electorate to vote on election day in November to effectively abolish a green energy bill."
To read the entire post click here. http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/09/30/the-governator%E2%80%99s-finest-hour/Here’s a little story about a speech given by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger... more
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Passing Prop. 23 In California Would Send 'Terrible And False' Message To Rest Of Nation, Says EPA Official
As right-wing think tanks continue to claim that California's clean energy legislation is hampering the state's economy, federal EPA Administrator Jared Blumenfeld has come forward to dispel that myth and to protect the environmental regulatory programs the state currently his in place.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/01/passing-prop-23-in-califo_n_702477.html#commentsPassing Prop. 23 In California Would Send 'Terrible And False' Message To... more
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