Your eyes on California Government

Katy Grimes: With Europe rolling back massive subsidies on unaffordable green technology, it’s difficult not to ask why California lawmakers are not paying closer attention to the economic disaster European countries are now trying to reverse.

Spain announced recently that its jobless rate surged to more than 20.33 percent at the end of 2010, the highest level in the industrialized world, and a 13-year record for the country. And much of the high unemployment can be blamed on Spanish lawmakers hell-bent on leading the rest of the world into the renewable energy and green technology revolution. Instead, Spain’s economy sank first.

Despite already being a leader in solar energy, the industry was subsidized by as high as 50 percent by the Spanish government, and ended up killing more private sector jobs than were created by green tech.

France and Germany are also taking a time-out from subsidies for solar and green tech projects to allow economic recovery, and Australia recently announced that it plans on cutting funding for solar power and green tech projects in order to pay for the clean-up after the recent devastating floods.

France recently estimated that taxes on electricity would have had to triple to meet the increasing costs of renewable energy, which would have killed more jobs than created.

Australia estimates that it will save more than $2.8 billion by reducing climate change and green tech subsidies.

California recently endured seven years with a governor who was more concerned about his legacy than the state’s fragile economy. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can rest assured that he has a legacy in place, as he is as responsible as anyone for continuing to push the costly climate change mandates on the state.

If California’s climate change legislation (AB 32) regulations fully go into effect, the state will become the largest market for carbon trading in the country, costing the state’s taxpayers, property owners, and businesses record-high levels of taxation and regulations, and only strangle the remaining businesses.

Despite plenty of contrary science dispelling much of the climate-change myth, California’s lawmakers, together with the California Air Resources Board, forged ahead on a plan to carbon-tax everything that isn’t nailed down in the state.

In a scientific analysis used to severely boost the state’s clean air standards, CARB was caught grossly miscalculating pollution levels by 340 percent, resulting in the removal of as many as 150,000 diesel vehicles in California, including many independent truckers.

Independent researchers found the massive overestimates in the Air Board’s work on diesel emissions, tracked it back to a CARB employee with a phony Ph.D., and eventually attributed the defective work to his faulty method of calculation.

But CARB continues to forge ahead with plans to strengthen and enforce the ridiculous air quality mandates.

While Europeans seem to be waking up from the global scam known as climate-change, California lawmakers appear instead to be stubbornly clinging onto the fairy tale that the state can lead the world to a happy place with cleaner air… at any cost.

Wasting taxpayer money has become an entitlement that statists won’t give up on without a fight. And from climate change will likely spring another such scam.

JAN. 28, 2011