By Mr. Curmudgeon
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have gone a little flabby since his Mr. Olympia days, but one muscle remains robust…the one between his ears. The exemplar of all that is wrong with the “big tent” circus of Republican Party politics is in Copenhagen to lend his voice to the chorus of over 15,000 hysterical global warmers at the UN climate conference.
“The world’s governments alone cannot make the progress that is needed on global climate change,” Schwarzenegger told the London Financial Times, “they need the cities, the states, the provinces, the regions. California is the eighth largest economy in the world and also America’s trendsetter, so what we do has consequences.”
The consequences of environmental initiatives championed by the Left Coast’s movie idol governor will present a microcosm for the rest of the nation, if not the world, of the economic and human toll resulting from legislation to combat an unproven threat.
At Schwarzenegger’s urging, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 32, or the “Global Warming Solutions Act.” The State’s euphoria quickly evaporated as the nation slipped into an economic depression, with California suffering one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates (12.3%) due to its big-spending Democratic legislature and “reach-across-the-aisle” Republican Governator.
Sanjay Varshney, the business school dean at California State University, Sacramento, released a study estimating that California’s global warming law will cost the average household $3,857 annually, eliminate 1.1 million jobs and reduce the size of the state’s economy by 10 percent. The state measure’s draconian greenhouse gas reduction provisions will increase the costs of food, fuel and electricity to such an extent that it will drive down consumer discretionary spending by a whopping 26 percent.
Roger Sowell, a California attorney who represents individuals and companies in civil matters related to climate change, writes:
“It is hypocritical of government, in my view, to pass strict regulations to reduce tiny amounts of air pollutants with a goal of preventing a very small number of illnesses or deaths, but then to pass Carbon Dioxide reduction laws that will increase costs of electric power and transportation fuels, thus forcing millions of people to choose between paying for electric power, medication, food, transportation fuel, or rent.”
Sowell further states that the law’s “carbon capture” requirement for industry is a costly enterprise that will add 4 to 8 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. “That is roughly a 30 to 80 percent increase over current prices,” says Sowell, “Higher costs of electricity are deadly to the vulnerable groups in our society. Carbon reduction laws are wrong for that reason alone, if for no others.”
And there is no better evidence of the deadly consequences of softheaded environmental initiatives than the attempt to move from fossil to bio fuels. Ironically, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reported an overall 56 percent rise in the price of food for poor countries in 2008 – with a 74% increase for Africa.
According to Richard Walden, writing for the Huffington Post:
“Ethanol production using maize (corn) is growing rapidly at the expense of setting aside adequate amounts of maize for human consumption. This creates shortages and a spike in prices for a wide range of food products.
“…The displacement of petroleum by ethanol is a good thing but it won’t lower air pollution and may just kill people from the resulting riots and hunger caused by food shortages.”
This was born out in 2008 when Bangladesh, Egypt and Haiti erupted in riots due to surging food prices. World Bank President Robert Zoellick told CNN, “While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs…”
Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, said, “We've been putting our food into the gas tank – this corn-to-ethanol subsidy which our [US] government is doing really makes little sense.”
California may be, in Schwarzenegger’s words, “a trendsetter.” But the question is whether that trend is to the betterment or detriment of human beings. Arnold’s inability to make that distinction proves his skull is thicker than his Austrian accent.
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