Today's Sacramento Bee features a column by Dan Walters entitled, "Greenhouse gas plan has big shortcomings." 

He starts his column with the observation that, "Arnold Schwarzenegger is a proponent of the all-gain-and-no-pain school of public policy, especially when he peddles the notion that California can radically reduce its greenhouse gases while reaping immense economic benefits."  The basis of Walters' opinion comes from a Legislative Analyst's Office report prepared for Republican Assemblyman Roger Niello that finds that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) AB32 greenhouse gas reduction plan is so full of holes as to be "inconsistent and incomplete" while economists recruited for a "peer review" come to similar conclusions.

Several months ago, I wrote to CARB chair Mary Nichols with specific concerns relating to the CARB's draft plan to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 25 percent by 2020 without any additional nuclear power.  Since nuclear power produces about 6.5 million times more units of energy per unit of mass than coal or natural gas, it is the most efficient way to produce power with little in the way of greenhouse gas emissions.  Chair Nichol's response was underwhelming, to say the least, as she put faith in hope, one supposes, that we can meet our aggressive numbers with measures like proper tire inflation, as-yet-to-be-developed technology and wishful thinking.  Of course, a complete economic collapse would also lead to a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases.

Walters quotes Harvard University's Robert Stavins, one of the CARB report peer reviewers, with a particularly devastating observation, "I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the economic analysis is terribly deficient in critical ways and should not be used by the state government or the public for the purpose of assessing the likely costs of CARB's plans. I say this with some sadness, because I was hopeful that CARB would produce sensible policy proposals analyzed with sound scientific and economic analysis."

It should be interesting to see what our friends over at TheLiberalOC.com have to say about all of this.  Chris Prevatt and others were critical of my stance against AB 32 back on September 16, 2007 in an Op-Ed I wrote for the Investor's Business Daily.   In my piece, I noted that: "Passing the law was the easy part. Now we implement." And, "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% in 13 years while growing the economy to support 7 million more people will, to put it mildly, be a challenge. Thirteen years is not a long time to dramatically change the way California uses energy."  

One wonders what they, and the lawmakers who passed this terrible piece of legislation, have to say now as it is becoming more apparent by the day that the emperor has no clothes.

Passing a bill without also showing how that bill can be implemented amounts to symbolic political posturing.  Unfortunately, AB32 is likely to be economically painful while at the same time, largely ineffective.  

I'll say it again: the only way to achieve the sort of large scale reductions in California greenhouse gas emissions and still have jobs for working Californians is to lift California's obsolete ban on the construction of modern nuclear power plants.