California Cap and Trade is the wrong answer

As any and every Environmentalist knows, the earth, water and atmosphere are all one completely inter related system. When developing or regulating anything in the environment, we do so at our complete peril when we fail to remember this fact.

This week the California Air Resources Board voted to implement a 3000 page cap and trade regulation on those industries that remain in California. Under this regulation, those industries remaining in California will have a number assigned to them of the maximum units of carbon they can consume, if they go over that maximum number they can buy credits through an exchange, much like the exchange that led to California's electricity debacle that we as a state have yet to recover from. The credits would allow the industry to use more carbon than the State of California allows. The credits would be created by those industries using less carbon than their allowance selling them at a fixed price to the exchange who would then be allowed to sell the credits at any price above the fixed price. Call it what you will its a gigantic tax , the state estimates worth $20Billion in 2020, on California manufacturers.

What this means is that in the middle of the deepest recession in seventy five years, where California's unemployment rate is 30% higher than the nation as a whole, the California Air Resources Board has passed a new tax that companies outside of California are not subject to. California already has the tightest most difficult regulations in the world for industry. One major reason we have such high unemployment is that our industry is fleeing because in a one world economy, even with the most efficient machines and workers on earth, they can't compete when the horrific costs of California's regulations are added to their backs.

Many small companies have relocated to Arizona, New Mexico and Idaho. Each of those states has more relaxed regulations than California now has. These regulations are more like California's regulations of the late 1980's and represent a burden that these companies can already meet or do better than. They don't have to spend all their capital meeting California's ever changing ever more demanding regulations, or trading with enviro thieves on an exchange just to keep their doors open. Many of the remaining California industries will relocate to other States, rather than attempt to stay in business with a new back breaking tax that no one else in America faces. This of course will increase un employment in California and the states economic crisis.

Many more larger companies have moved their manufacturing to Latin America and China. With this new California only carbon tax, they will continue to do so. In those countries where there are either no regulations or local government officials co-operation can be bought cheaply, these companies usually operate completely filthy dirty factories that look like something directly out of late 19th Century photographs of disgusting inhumane industrial conditions. There are no filters or masks for the workers, no scrubbers in the smokestacks, no detention and clean up facilities before the industrial waste hits the water. Communist China is where the most base industrialists with the least care for the workers and the Earth go to supply our lust for shiny glittery things. Workers paradise indeed.

When I complain about these and many other California regulations people say to me "Yes, but the air here is so much cleaner than it was thirty years ago." Indeed it is. This is not, however, because the products we use are being made in a more environmentally friendly and safe manner. There are in fact, in the main, being made in a less environmentally safe and friendly manner than they were made thirty years ago. We are just under two delusions:

First that it's SOMEONE ELSE'S air, water and soil being polluted and
Second that this is PERFECTLY FINE, since our air, soil and water are not being polluted.

Friends, this is an obscenity. It is also environmental classism, nationalism, xenoism and racism. The thinking goes that pollution to make my toys is fine as long as I don't have to deal with it and if the Mexicans, Bolivians, and Chinese are "willing" to choke themselves to death making my Nikies, Apples, Ipods and so on, well HooRah for the one world economy! Really? This is I again repeat, nothing more than colonialism, classism, racism and stupidity done in the name of the environment. It is morally, scientifically, and even politically bankrupt. There will be a overall world system increase in pollution, directly due to this California only cap and trade law, even if that pollution is reduced in California. That's not good for the planet, or for California.

What we need instead is a national carbon and pollution tax on all products sold in the United States. Not an exchange where some enviro pirates can get rich, but a direct tax on every product that taxes the pollution used in it's manufacture and shipping to our market, NO MATTER WHERE IT WAS MADE. This would, with America still the world's chief consumer, tend to make companies worldwide clean up their act to sell to us. It would also tend to bring jobs and manufacturing back to the United States and back to California, while filling the national budget deficit. Its a win for the united States, a win for California, and a win for the Earth, Water and Sky.

P.S. Hey- Who ELECTED the California Air Resources Board? Think about it.