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The Prop 13 of the Environmental Counter-Revolution

Feb 07, 2010

Washington Examiner

By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
02/06/10 1:34 PM EST

An initiative petition campaign has been launched in California to suspend the state's anti-global warming program until  the unemployment rate there drops below 5.5 percent, a level it has not seen since 2007.

Known as AB32, the initiative is aimed at the Golden State's extremely aggressive state-level version of cap-and-trade that advocates claim would produce an estimated $20 billion in new revenue for the all-but-bankrupt state government. For more details on the measure, go here and here on the Los Angeles Times blog.

For an analysis of the deeply flawed case for AB32, see this post by the Institute for Energy Research. There is little doubt that, just as the federal cap and trade program would cost millions of jobs and drive up the costs of energy and everything that requires energy to be done or produced, so would the California program.

And considering the rapidly declining public support for measures like AB32 as a result of the growing evidence that the whole case for global warming is based on self-serving sensationalism by politicians like former Vice President Al Gore, UN reports using fraudulent data, official fear-mongering on behalf of measures to increase government power, and systematic suppression of contrary viewpoints by the Mainstream Media, the potential is there for the California ballot initiative to be the Prop 13 of the environmental counter-revolution.

Prop 13 was the California tax-limitation ballot measure that capped the amount of state and local government taxation, and thereby catalyzed the Tax Revolt nationwide in 1978 and helped lead the way to the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and a Republican majority in the Senate.

The centerpiece of Reagan's domestic program was a 30 percent across-the-board tax rate cut that led to the longest sustained economic expansion in American history, beginning in 1983 and continuing through 1989 and beyond. An estimated 27 million new jobs were created in an entrepreneurial explosion that financed among much else the digital revolution and the Internet.

The prospect of a similar Green Revolt in 2010 beginning in California is not lost on advocates from both sides of the present debate.

"We are on fire. People are calling from all over the country. This will be the most intense campaign the state has seen in 50 years," Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Marysville), a sponsor of the proposed initiative, told the Times.

And Mary D. Nichols, one of California's most visible environmentalist leaders, is warning compatriots about the significance of the ballot initiative, telling the Times that AB32 is "a campaign that has to be taken seriously. It would put all our efforts at energy efficiency and renewable energy in the deep freezer for a long time."

Nichols is chairman of California's powerful Air Resources Board, which oversees the state's many environmental measures, including the cap-and-trade program.

As with Republican Scott Brown's winning the U.S. Senate seat held for nearly five decades by Teddy Kennedy by running against "the machine," a successful suspension of AB32 in California could spark a natonwide Green Revolt against environmental extremism on global warming, energy exploration and production, automotive emissions, power generation for consumers and business, and many other fronts.

The question now, though, is whether conservatives, independents, Tea Partiers, libertarians, and Main Street business trade groups realize the immense potential of the AB32 campaign for restoring balance and sanity to America's environmental protection regime.