Your eyes on California Government

Katy Grimes: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has kept an important campaign promise to drop restrictive new regulations forcing the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other controversial rules passed in the final days of the previous administration.

The Alamogordo Daily News reported, “Officials at the state Environment Department have requested to keep the greenhouse gas reduction rules, as well as new pollution-control measures aimed at the dairy industry, from being published in upcoming editions of the register. Without publication, the rules will not take effect.”

Martinez promised during her campaign to halt restrictive cap-and-trade regulations and rules in order to help improve business and the economy in New Mexico.

Martinez’s administration contends that canceling the publication of the rules is necessary to comply with an executive order Martines issued on her first day in office, that halts all pending regulations by executive agencies in order to determine whether they hurt businesses in New Mexico.

The order specifically directs the state’s agencies to review existing regulations and rules, and determine which ones should be overturned — and this must be done by the end of the month.

New Mexico’s cap-and-trade rules were approved in November and published in December, by the previous administration.

Martinez demonstrated her leadership with another bold move, one that many Californians wish Gov. Jerry Brown would emulate – she dismissed the entire Environmental Improvement Board earlier this week, charging that “the EIB moved forward after state lawmakers rejected a similar proposal during the legislative process, and that a majority of the board members were more interested in advancing political ideology than implementing common sense policies.”

More states seem to be recognizing that cap-and-trade regulations will only further cripple the economy. But not California – instead, this state continues supporting cap-and-trade regulations, even to the detriment of the state’s already badly bloodied and bruised economy.

California has stubbornly continued to pursue and develop a greenhouse gas emission reduction “scoping plan” with the ultimate goal of linking California’s cap and trade program to the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) partner programs, founded by five Western state governors, in 2007, “thereby making it the cross-border initiative that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and industry insiders have deemed the most viable approach to cap and trade systems,” boasted the Awareness-Into-Action sustainable energy website.

And if that doesn’t worry taxpayers enough, Awareness-Into-Action divulges the real goals of cap-and-trade: ”The Western Climate Initiative is targeting not just carbon dioxide—by far the biggest culprit in global warming—but five other greenhouse gases as well. What’s more, WCI isn’t limiting its scope to power plants. It’s attempting to bring all major industries, transportation fuels and even the fuels destined for use in private citizens’ furnaces, stoves and hot water heaters into an emissions-trading regime that covers 20 percent of the U.S. economy and nearly three-quarters of Canada’s. Within WCI, only California and British Columbia have laws in place explicitly authorizing a cap and trade system. The rest will have to pass legislation for the system to fully take effect before trading begins in 2012.”

Attorney Richard M. Gittleman, the author of the previous paragraph, “currently represents the official creditors’ committee of a leading producer and marketer of ethanol, E85 and distillers grains operating in eight states.” Creditors’ committees are created in federal bankruptcy cases for groups of creditors who have an interest in seeing as much debt as possible recovered from the person or company filing for bankruptcy.

It’s not a group I would brag about representing, if I was trying to push the business model of the bankrupt company.

I hope Jerry Brown is paying attention to just how ridiculous California looks right now.

JAN. 6, 2011