Crazifornia: Why the Golden State may have just doomed cap and trade
“Mary Nichols, one of the most dangerous women in America, looked out into the packed California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearing room late Thursday after an eight-hour hearing and declared, “We’ve done something important.”
Nichols is the chair of CARB and therefore the person most responsible for implementing the California Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, the state’s crusade to save the planet from the scourge of greenhouse gases. A former assistant administrator of EPA under President Clinton, Nichols now controls multiple programs designed to penalize conventional energy sources to the benefit of not-yet-competitive alternative sources. She has already forced the toughest diesel engine standards in the country onto California — standards that will cost the state’s battered trucking industry $12 billion — and Thursday she trumped that by ushering in the biggest playing field-leveler yet, the nation’s first state-run carbon cap-and-trade program.
California, in going where no other state or the federal government has dared to tread, certainly has done something important, but just what “important” means is a question for the historians. Nichols’s focused direction of the herculean effort to get the 262-page mega-regulation approved indicates she may have little faith in her own promises about the resilient, robust green economy it is supposed to spawn. The tide is turning against high-cost, low-return green energy subsidy programs and the politicians that promote them, so Nichols may have felt a sharp sense of urgency to set California’s course before the next election could make that more difficult.”
Via Daily Caller
