Will Gov. Brown Suspend AB 32?

APRIL 20, 2011

By JOHN SEILER

In negotiating, each party are expected at some point to put forth a “good-faith effort” to show that it is serious — that it will give something in return for gaining something. So far in the state’s budget negotiations, Gov. Jerry Brown has shown no good-faith effort toward Republicans in his quest to put his $12 billion tax increase on the ballot.

He has done nothing to allay their concerns over the businesses that would leave the state to avoid the tax increases, nor to save jobs in a state that suffered an unemployment rate of 12 percent for March, still second highest in the nation after Nevada’s 13.2 percent.

One good-faith action he could take would be to suspend AB 32 for one year. Such an action by a governor is allowed under the law, the Global Warming Warming Solutions Act of 2006. The act mandates reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in California of 20 percent by the year 2020. Acting now would show that Gov. Brown at least is aware of Republican concerns that AB 32 could kill up to 1 million jobs.

There are many reasons why now would be a good time for such a suspension, reasons that Brown could use to palliate the negative reaction inevitable from his environmentalist allies:

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Drop 15 Percent

Reported the Financial Times:

Greenhouse gas emissions in the US dropped to their lowest level in 15 years in 2009 as the impact of the financial crisis led to decreases in fuel and electricity consumption, according to newly published figures.

In 2009, the US saw its emissions of the six main greenhouses gases drop 6 per cent year-on-year to 6,633m metric tonnes, the lowest total since 1995. Despite that annual fall, emissions rose by more than 7.3 per cent between 1990 and 2009.

If greenhouse gas emissions already have dropped because of the recession, then a one-year’s delay in implementing AB 32 obviously wouldn’t change things all that much.

No Climate Refugees

Recent forecasts of climate catastrophe have not happened. According to Spiegel Online, the German publication:

It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world’s media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: “It is not a UNEP prediction,” a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP’s website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

In October 2005, UNU said: “Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of ‘refugee.'”

It added that “such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions.”

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

For some reason, that cache link doesn’t work right now. But the map is here. And I’ve reproduced it here (click on the map to enlarge it):

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As you can see, according to the 2005 predictions, massive numbers of climate refugees were supposed to be scattered across the world. Well, here we are and it’s 2011 and none of that happened.

The year 2005 is important because the doomsaying of that year led to AB 32 being enacted in 2006. This is from the “Findings and Declarations” section of AB 32, indicating the alarmist atmosphere of those days:

The potential adverse impacts of global warming include the exacerbation of air quality problems, a reduction in the quality and supply of water to the state from the Sierra snowpack, a rise in sea levels resulting in the displacement of thousands of coastal businesses and residences, damage to marine ecosystems and the natural environment, and an increase in the incidences of infectious diseases, asthma, and other human health-related problems.

None of that has even come close to happening. So suspending AB32 would have no effect on delaying the predicted disasters that never occurred.

Climategate Scandal

The Climategate scandal of fall 2009 continues to reverberate around the world. Some top alarmist scientists who have pushed the global-warming scare were revealed, from documents leaked to the Internet, to have rigged data and suppressed dissent.

After the Climategate scandal broke, some of the top alarmist scientists even tried to suppress journalist James Delingpole, who had commented sharply against the global-warming hypothesis. In Great Britain, free speech rights are not as strong as in America. They don’t have the equivalent of our First Amendment.

They actually have something called the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in their government. Warmist scientists tried to get the PCC to censure Delingpole. Instead, Delingpole just reported:

I wasn’t going to crow, really I wasn’t. But I’m afraid I can’t resist, especially since it’s my last blog post for a while and this is an event of some significance. I’m talking about the Press Complaints Commission’s ruling on a complaint brought against this blog by our old friends at the University of East Anglia. They lost. We won….

Basically the UEA were trying to use the PCC as a way of gagging this blog from speaking unpalatable truths about the shoddy goings-on in its notorious Climatic Research Unit.

To its enormous credit the PCC stuck up for fair comment and freedom of speech. This is a massive victory not just for me and Telegraph blogs, but for bloggers everywhere – especially those doughty souls around the world who are battling against Establishment lies, bullying and cover ups to try to reveal the truth about the corrupt, mendacious Climate Change industry.

If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Delingpole’s article includes the full ruling by the PCC.

For California, what this means is that the rest of the world is catching on that “global warming science” is far from proven — but our state isn’t catching on. We’re stuck in a 2006-Schwarzenegger-global warming alarmism mindset.

Indeed, despite his rhetoric, Schwarzenegger himself isn’t concerned about global warming. He tools around Los Angeles in a giant Mercedes G-Wagon, a voracious gas guzzler.

Will Brown Act?

So, the question remains: Given all these facts about how the world is not ending for California because of excess greenhouse gases, will Gov. Brown postpone the implementation of AB 32?

Will he give Republicans something to sweeten negotiations on his tax increases?