Once I was pulling into the parking lot of a state regulatory agency and I spotted a bumper sticker on a car that read: Visualize Industrial Collapse. I don’t know if the car belonged to an employee or to an activist-type who was visiting the agency, but the image made an impression on me in that it didn’t really matter whose sticker it was. What occurred to me was that the most extreme believers in any cause tend to have the tenacity to push harder than the rest of us, and over time that means they get results. Case in point, our infamous left wing, gerrymandered legislature and its beloved cause du jour, global warming.
Assembly Bill 32, currently being considered in the waning days of session in the State Senate (you can lookup and read the bill here), would establish caps on "greenhouse" emissions in the state. Yet if you read the legislature’s own analysis of the bill, they have no idea what the caps are going to be and what the economic impacts will be (maybe they don’t care). The bill would create a new, unaccountable state bureaucracy to determine what the caps will be through future regulations. It seems the bill’s proponents, including our own Dem Senator Nell Soto and Assemblyman Joe Baca Jr., who are co-authors, don’t care what the caps ultimately will be.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s Climate Action Team warned that a greenhouse gas cap in California "without other states (would) be an incentive for production to shift to other states to avoid the cap," and a situation in which "emissions may decline in the state, only to increase in other states." This is somewhat comparable to what would happen if the U.S. were to sign the Kyoto treaty, which sought to assign most of the responsibility for reducing greenhouse emissions to the U.S. while countries like China could have gone on producing staggering amounts of it with no reduction in sight. I checked on this, and I’m quite certain that California (except for San Francisco) is part of Planet Earth. So if global warming is threatening our survival and it’s being substantially caused by humans, it shouldn’t matter where on Earth it’s coming from.
Maybe the Governor actually did like the movie An Inconvenient Truth, so I’m sure it was convenient for him to say so at the time. He’s a genuine guy, right? Maybe he’s like my sister, who seems to enjoy just about every movie she sees. But having said that, with his re-election pending, the Guv is in a position where job producers are looking to him to temper the regulatory excesses of the legislature on the popular subject of global warming. It’s a tough spot to be in, because if he vetoes the bill there’s no doubt his opponent will say it proves he’s beholden to polluters and that he doesn’t care about global warming and by the way the world is coming to an end and the sky is falling.
The Inconvenient Truth about AB 32 is it would likely have several companies, including cement and steel manufacturers, rethinking plans for expansion and modernization in California. This could cost thousands of high-paying jobs along with the billions of dollars of assessed valuation and associated economic activity that come with these types of jobs. It would also further drive up the cost of such construction materials, which are critically needed to improve our state’s infrastructure.
Consider how low a priority transportation infrastructure already is to our legislature (unless you’re talking about light rail or bridges in San Francisco), only imagine our inability to fund highways got a lot worse because costs went through the roof. Don’t look now, but it’s happening. We already know about public works labor costs and how they’re inflated by prevailing wages, PLAs (project labor agreements) and the like. But there’s another, less-talked-about economic factor that threatens our ability to build the infrastructure we need. I’m talking about the cost of cement, concrete, asphalt, aggregate base, reinforcing and structural steel, and diesel and gasoline. In fact, the current rate of inflation used by CalTrans in its California Construction Items Index has an escalation factor of 24.1% annually. If you look at this chart, you can really see how the rate of cost escalation has taken off in the past four years. Think about what further cost impacts would likely result if we had to look to other states or countries for more of these materials. Among other factors, we would have AB 32 to thank, should it become law.
The Sacramento Bee editorial page doesn’t seem to see any economic threat here, seeming to say it would only affect the pocketbooks of industrialists, and characterizing the bill as an opportunity to "make California a leader in curbing global warming emissions" (whoopee!). The Bee also pits the Governor, who reportedly wants to be able to lift the caps under emergency conditions, against enviros: "If both sides would give a little, California would have something big to celebrate this session," the Bee writes (whoopee again!). Read it here.
I guess it’s like I tell friends who ask why I think our highways are so inadequate to serve our population (legal and illegal): Highways aren’t a priority to the State of California; social programs are. And so are feel-good environmental laws based on whatever science or non-science the majority party chooses to believe in. The legislature should be figuring out ways to make construction materials more affordable and available, not less so. But the kind of thinking that goes into the left’s blind allegiance to the global warming agenda is no accident. If what you want is industrial collapse, global warming isn’t an Inconvenient Truth. It’s convenient, because it supports your ultimate goal.
Visualize Industrial Collapse. I "visualize" that bumper sticker and wonder where all the tax money to pay for social programs would come from if we truly had an industrial collapse and all of the jobs, assessed valuation and production of those industries went away. Talk about inconvenient.