Posted: 08/31/2006
California Embarks On Symbolic Climate Change Policy
Golden State's Actions to Have Greatest Impact on Business Climate, Says NCPA Scholar
DALLAS (August 31, 2006) - In what amounts to a "go-it-alone" strategy to tackle perceived global warming, California will become the first state to impose a cap on all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from industrial plants, under a landmark deal reached this week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats. A scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) warned that these policies will have their greatest impact in dampening California's business climate, not in improving the Earth's climate.
"California's actions will do little or nothing to prevent future warming, even if humans are a significant cause of the present warming cycle," said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. "But what it will do is harm the California economy and increase the price of food and fuel in a state that already has among the highest prices for these goods in the nation."
Under the agreement, California will attempt to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels over the next 14 years - an approximately 25 percent reduction.
"Once again the California legislature, in a gesture of supreme political grandstanding, has turned its back on the poorest residents in the state," said Burnett. "They are the ones who will suffer as fuel prices rise and as companies leave the state."
Burnett predicted the business community might challenge these regulations in the Court system. While California as long had an exemption to impose stricter clean air regulations than the federal government has, this power has traditionally been viewed as extending only to areas where the federal government has issued regulations. Since the federal government has neither adjudged CO2 to be a pollutant nor regulated it, it's not clear that California has that authority.
For example, California and several environmental activist groups are currently presenting opening briefs defending regulations the state adopted previously to limit CO2 from automobiles. A lower court, in a split decision, overturned California's auto emissions law. If the Supreme Court upholds this decision, then California's new effort may be moot as well.