06-23-10 by dugan
Californians are getting sick to death of corporate-sponsored ballot initiatives. And they’re catching on to who’s behind the slogans, voting down two deceptively marketed initiatives on the June ballot that were wholly owned by a power company and an auto insurance company. But here it comes again. A ballot initiative mostly funded by a pair of oil refining companies will be on the November ballot. It will be marketed as a job-preserving initiative. It’s really an effort to kill California’s landmark environmental law–which would make big emitters like refineries pay for their pollution, and spend the proceeds on new jobs in green energy.
The oil industry intitiative seeks to repeal California’s AB32, the toughest state law against global warming emissions, and the most supportive of green tech. Supporters say they only want to suspend the law until California’s unemployment rate, now 12%, drops to 5.5% for a full year. That blue-moon condition has been met once in each of the last three decades. So forget the "suspend" thing. The initiative backers are out to kill AB32.
The political front men for the oil money talk piously about lost jobs and high energy prices and call the new environmental requirements a tax, which is a fighting word in California. It doesn’t take much follow-the-money savvy, though, to find out that refiners have refused for decades to update or expand their refineries, which would trigger federal clean air requirements (EPA "new source review") that refiners don’t want to meet. Doing nothing, or as little as possible, is cheaper. And dirtier. California’s AB32 doesn’t give big polluters the choice–refiners and other highly polluting industries would have to pay for their pollution.
What may kill the new initiative is plain old voter disgust. The default vote on any ballot initiative these days is "No." Corporate funding is just a booster to the No votes. And a majority of Californians still favor the state’s global warming/clean air law.
So far, Chevron, BP, Exxon and other major producers and refiners in California are sitting back. What would really help Big Oil’s image, which could hardly get any worse, would be for one of them–BP?–to come out big-time against the initiative. Now that would make news.
