Jerry Brown, making it more hard for a future governor to roll back efforts to reduce the state’s emissions. Jerry Brown legislation that would require health insurance plans to notify customers if state regulators have deemed their premiums unreasonable.
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Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) cast the issue as a moral one.
“So bring it on”, Brown said.
“In the 10 years since the California Global Warming Solutions Act became law, our state’s jobs, economy and renewable energy generation capacity have grown, while climate pollution and oil and electricity consumption have dropped”.
Editor’s note: This was written before the Legislature’s action on the bills Wednesday. It also adds a definition for the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions for the board to include in evaluating the cost-effectiveness of measures developed to achieve reductions. The chamber decried the new rules as “command and control regulations”. Cullenward’s calculations indicate the auction raised less than $10 million of what could have been hundreds of millions of dollars for environmental programs. Our members and industry experts estimate AB 1066 will ultimately hurt the agricultural economy and its workers by resulting in $4,500 in reduced annual income per farmworker; $5.4 billion loss in crop production; and a total of 78,000 lost jobs.
California’s program to cap emissions and trade carbon permits is a crucial component of a broader effort to reduce the state’s output of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the end of the decade.
California state controlled allowances that were not sold in August will not be offered again until two auctions clear above the floor price, representing a temporary tightening of the cap and a way for the program to self-adjust to temporary decreases in demand.
“Today’s failed results are yet another reminder that this government program is inherently troubled and should be abandoned”, Senate Republican Leader Jean Fuller said in an email.
The program is now before the state Court of Appeals on a challenge from industry groups that it violates Proposition 13, a 1978 constitutional amendment that requires a two-thirds vote to raise taxes.
The current version of SB 32 does not extend the state’s cap-and-trade system, which is set to expire after 2020.
A Brown adviser acknowledged the legal ambiguity and repeated her assertion earlier this month that authorization might come through another bill or via ballot initiative (ClimateWire, Aug. 5).
SB 32 also ignores the elephant in the room – the legality of the existing program.
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“It shows us that we’re in a period of serious concern about the future of California’s climate policy”, said Danny Cullenward, an energy economist and lawyer who researches climate policies at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “Shoring up the cap-and-trade program – either through the Legislature or by the voters – will provide that certainty”.
