Why the November, 2010 election in California is so important....
Today's post: Wednesday, 8-11-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just 4 years from now.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Today’s post:
Since California passed AB32 & Governor Swarzenegger signed it showing that California was serious about cutting back on CO2 emissions and rapidly and massively increasing renewable and sustainable energy, literally millions of dollars of venture capital have gone into companies that will help do the job. Most of those have been in California and have added new jobs here that would otherwise not have existed.
Even more important, if AB32 says in place and is implemented two very desirable things will happen. These positive trends will continue and thousands of new jobs will be added. Secondly, when California pioneers a new trend that works, often the federal government and/or many other states will emulate California’s success.
That’s extremely important -- and I think may be critical for preventing economic collapse in the United States. Peak oil is predicted for 2014 & at today’s prices, production has already flat-lined. This trend towards very expensive and less available oil will keep growing rapidly now. Economic growth is expanding in the near term and even if it stalls, population growth will not stall and will keep increasing demand.
In addition, it turns out that more expensive oil comes from places like deep water oil drilling such as the well in the Gulf of Mexico that caused such severe problems. And, it comes or may come from oil from shale. It turns out that extracting oil from shale is one of the worst polluting ideas mankind has ever conceived. It manages to add strip mining to risks of pollution spills comparable to the recent oil spills in the Gulf and in Michigan. People who live in the areas affected are beginning to fight this, understandably. Their efforts are likely to decrease the amount of oil from these sources and make them cost more. This will NOT be a positive for the economy if we haven’t cut back on oil use and begun to bring clean energy alternatives online and on a large scale.
AB32 is not perfect. But given how important its goals are and that it has begun to make a real dent in this problem and will start to bring solutions online when little else of comparable size has yet been done, I think it is critical to put it into place and give it a fair trial. The good news is that the initial results have been quite good. In part because of the promise of AB32, solar and other clean technology companies have been the one sector in California that has consistently added jobs during the recession.
When you add in the facts that had the credit markets not collapsed to slow that job growth, it would have been two or three times as high and the credit markets are now in better shape, it seems clear to me that the LAST thing someone who cares about adding jobs in California would want to do is to stop AB32!
So, how does the upcoming November election in California relate to that?
Some people DO want to stop AB32 including some who SAY they want more jobs here in California.
If they succeed, none of this positive progress will happen or it will become an anemic, tiny part of what it would and should have been.
The buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when the market changed from buggies to cars by thinking of themselves ONLY in those narrow terms instead of as makers of useful components for vehicles. In almost the same way exactly, today’s oil companies think of themselves as oil and gas companies and have not really done the diversification they would and should have done into renewable energy had they actually realized they were in the energy business. The management at Exxon even heard this from most of their shareholders from the Rockefeller family and declined to do much. (They have added to their position in Natural Gas which I think will help them in the short run as that natural gas is used to make some of the electricity for electric cars. But I think of their stock as a long term sell unless their management improves.)
The problem is that in California, that management style has caused two Texas oil companies to fund Proposition 23, which is worded as if it is a postponement of AB32 but also includes a restart clause that is quite likely never going to happen. In essence, this means that they are funding a disinformation campaign to turn off AB32 entirely.
Please do job creation in California a favor and vote NO on Proposition 23!
Next, we have two races one for our next Governor and one for one of our two US Senators.
For Governor, we have Jerry Brown who, as our attorney general for California, thinks that increasing the solar part of renewable energy is important enough he just sued the Federal Agency that shut down an innovative funding plan to add the cost of building solar on your home to your property taxes.
Meg Whitman who is running against him said that even if Proposition 23 was defeated by the voters, one of the first things she will do if elected will be to suspend AB32. She can rationalize all she wants about this not slowing job growth in California. To me, it means she is so poorly informed she is not qualified to be our Governor.
I think that choice is quite clear, because even if you aren’t super sold on Jerry Brown in other ways, we will have more jobs in California and a more stable and secure economy if Jerry Brown is elected.
For US Senator, the choice is even clearer.
Barbara Boxer, the incumbent, has seniority and has been one of the strongest and most effective supporters in the country for clean and renewable energy.
Meanwhile her opponent, Carly Simon, is getting funded by oil and coal executives who not only are trying to avoid the needed changes in energy policy due to peak oil, they don’t believe that the data collected by scientists showing global warming is real.*
Here again, if you want more jobs in California and the United States and you want our future economy to be safe and secure, Barbara Boxer is dramatically more likely to deliver that.
*In my view, they are showing themselves to be close-minded, very poorly informed, and incompetent managers in so doing. I’d very strongly prefer we have a US Senator who they are not influencing with their money.
The data DO show global warming has been happening; and some of effects we are seeing are scary such as the current heat wave and fires in Moscow and the ones that happened not that long ago in Greece and near Oklahoma City in the United States. The percentage of CO2 in the earth’s air has been documented as going up and up and up.
I respect someone who says that there may be other reasons for these effects or that the CO2 burning fossil fuels has put into the air may not be the main cause. One book writer even has argued that global warming driven by fossil fuel burning may not wind up being that harmful. You often don’t find out the whole truth in science unless contrarians make you look for data that might fit these kinds of ideas. Even though none of the current data seem to support those views, some might exist. And, if we don’t look for that data, we may miss something real.
But these folks are certifiably incompetent managers. They may be not quite sane due to their lack of connection to reality.
Jack London once said that the contest is not always won by the strong nor will the victory in a race go to the swift, but that’s the best way to bet. The data show so far that it’s about 100 to one that global warming is real, has extremely dangerous effects, and is so far mostly triggered by burning fossil fuels.
If these executives said that they were holding onto some of the old ways in case the one chance in a hundred comes up, that’s fine. If they say that in their local community, the jobs doing it the old way are important and those workers and their local economy need some kind of protection, that’s reasonable and even responsible management.
But the ones that simply aren’t able to look at the data, understand they are likely real and make the best bets they can to move to a future they can be a part of if they are real are, in my view not competent managers and their connection to reality is suspect.
Since peak oil and global warming do look real and that dangerous and threatening to our economy and total amount of jobs, I strongly urge all voters in California to vote NO on Proposition 32 and to vote for Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer.
Showing posts with label why vote no on the California proposition to delay AB32. Show all posts
Showing posts with label why vote no on the California proposition to delay AB32. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Why vote NO on the Texas oil company proposition to delay renewable energy....
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-12-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
In last week’s post of my effort to add to possible future California Senator Tom Campbell’s energy policy I included that he should come out against the Texas oil company’s proposition to the California policy that is now set to create sharp but still modest increases in how much renewable energy is built in California.
Since this policy will also increase THEIR costs, their clear purpose in sponsoring this is to save their own short term profits by telling California voters to delay both the increase in their costs AND the planned increase in renewable energy here.
This past Monday, 5-10-2010, the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on this issue titled, “Business leaders split on bid to delay AB32.”
The article makes it quite clear that there are two issues involved.
The first issue is the most critical one though the second is a sufficient reason to vote no.
1. One of the business people they interviewed summarized the key issue very well. “….Andy Ball, president of Webcor Builders in San Mateo,” said this: “ “ Our days of Cheap hydrocarbon fuel are ending whether we like it or not. It may be painful now, but every year we wait is going to create more pain downstream.” “
This is the key issue but is NOT put strongly enough! The more pain is a LOT more pain!
The three points this comment leaves out are that:
The amount of pain the current renewable energy plan will cause Californians is modest. (It’s somewhat greater for the oil companies. But it likely will only cut their profits some & will not cause them an actual loss.)
The delay before even more pain sets in if this delay proposition is passed will likely be less than two years in my judgment.
And, the really scary part is that the more pain if we delay is NOT 15 % more costs, it’s likely to become 400% more costs or more and may even cause our economy to collapse.
In California and the United States, we depend almost entirely on gasoline and diesel fuel to transport people to work and to transport everything we buy and eat.
But the world is about to produce LESS of the petroleum these fuels are made from. Worse, the world-wide demand for this oil is rising and the population of the world is rising.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world-wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Do you remember the sudden run up in gasoline prices just before they helped trigger the current recession?
Unless we build a lot more renewable sources of electricity, use more plug-in hybrid and electric cars and make much more biofuels at reasonable cost, in California we will have $10 a gallon gasoline or more within 10 years.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five to 10 years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
2. The second point is that keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
The clean energy economy has produced jobs over the last year or two in California even as some of their expected bank funding disappeared and the rest of the economy LOST jobs
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
California is one of the world centers for innovation in clean and renewable energy. Vote in this proposition and many of these kinds of jobs and the money in this field will go to Germany and China that could have gone here to increase California’s stature in this critically important area.
This will NOT help California’s economy. It will HARM California’s economy instead.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
One of the supporters of this proposition, said that California is losing manufacturing jobs and implies that this will worsen if the proposition is not passed. To put it bluntly, he couldn’t be more wrong.
It will not influence the main causes of this loss in manufacturing jobs. (His belief that it would do so is incorrect in my view.) In fact, it will prevent manufacturing jobs in clean energy companies in California from being created. Worse, since it will help ensure HIGHER gasoline and diesel costs within 5 to 10 years, it will cost all kinds of jobs here including manufacturing jobs in other industries.
3. There is also the third issue. Intentional deception by the Texas oil companies who wrote the proposition.
Some of the supporters say that this is “just” an attempt to cut Californians a short break in having slightly higher costs while we are in a recession.
It’s NOT. Not even close. It’s an attempt by the oil companies sponsoring it to delay a hit to their profits indefinitely -- to forever if they can manage it.
If it really was what these people say it was, it would indeed be a short delay.
The bill would read something like when there was general agreement that the recession has ended in the rest of the country and California’s unemployment rate dropped below 10 % for three consecutive months, the delay would stop.
Read the proposition for yourself. It would take several quarters of an unemployment rate of less than 5.5% to turn off the delay.
The oil companies know that the big run up in oil prices coming soon will likely prevent that from happening in the foreseeable future or maybe ever happening unless we remake our energy economy to not rely on oil.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
Why make the big run-up in oil prices worse to save the Texas oil companies a few bucks of profit?
Why turn off creating renewable energy jobs in California?
Why increase the risk California’s economy will collapse as oil begins to run out?
Why indeed!!
Vote NO on this proposition!
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-12-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
In last week’s post of my effort to add to possible future California Senator Tom Campbell’s energy policy I included that he should come out against the Texas oil company’s proposition to the California policy that is now set to create sharp but still modest increases in how much renewable energy is built in California.
Since this policy will also increase THEIR costs, their clear purpose in sponsoring this is to save their own short term profits by telling California voters to delay both the increase in their costs AND the planned increase in renewable energy here.
This past Monday, 5-10-2010, the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on this issue titled, “Business leaders split on bid to delay AB32.”
The article makes it quite clear that there are two issues involved.
The first issue is the most critical one though the second is a sufficient reason to vote no.
1. One of the business people they interviewed summarized the key issue very well. “….Andy Ball, president of Webcor Builders in San Mateo,” said this: “ “ Our days of Cheap hydrocarbon fuel are ending whether we like it or not. It may be painful now, but every year we wait is going to create more pain downstream.” “
This is the key issue but is NOT put strongly enough! The more pain is a LOT more pain!
The three points this comment leaves out are that:
The amount of pain the current renewable energy plan will cause Californians is modest. (It’s somewhat greater for the oil companies. But it likely will only cut their profits some & will not cause them an actual loss.)
The delay before even more pain sets in if this delay proposition is passed will likely be less than two years in my judgment.
And, the really scary part is that the more pain if we delay is NOT 15 % more costs, it’s likely to become 400% more costs or more and may even cause our economy to collapse.
In California and the United States, we depend almost entirely on gasoline and diesel fuel to transport people to work and to transport everything we buy and eat.
But the world is about to produce LESS of the petroleum these fuels are made from. Worse, the world-wide demand for this oil is rising and the population of the world is rising.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world-wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Do you remember the sudden run up in gasoline prices just before they helped trigger the current recession?
Unless we build a lot more renewable sources of electricity, use more plug-in hybrid and electric cars and make much more biofuels at reasonable cost, in California we will have $10 a gallon gasoline or more within 10 years.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five to 10 years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
2. The second point is that keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
The clean energy economy has produced jobs over the last year or two in California even as some of their expected bank funding disappeared and the rest of the economy LOST jobs
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
California is one of the world centers for innovation in clean and renewable energy. Vote in this proposition and many of these kinds of jobs and the money in this field will go to Germany and China that could have gone here to increase California’s stature in this critically important area.
This will NOT help California’s economy. It will HARM California’s economy instead.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
One of the supporters of this proposition, said that California is losing manufacturing jobs and implies that this will worsen if the proposition is not passed. To put it bluntly, he couldn’t be more wrong.
It will not influence the main causes of this loss in manufacturing jobs. (His belief that it would do so is incorrect in my view.) In fact, it will prevent manufacturing jobs in clean energy companies in California from being created. Worse, since it will help ensure HIGHER gasoline and diesel costs within 5 to 10 years, it will cost all kinds of jobs here including manufacturing jobs in other industries.
3. There is also the third issue. Intentional deception by the Texas oil companies who wrote the proposition.
Some of the supporters say that this is “just” an attempt to cut Californians a short break in having slightly higher costs while we are in a recession.
It’s NOT. Not even close. It’s an attempt by the oil companies sponsoring it to delay a hit to their profits indefinitely -- to forever if they can manage it.
If it really was what these people say it was, it would indeed be a short delay.
The bill would read something like when there was general agreement that the recession has ended in the rest of the country and California’s unemployment rate dropped below 10 % for three consecutive months, the delay would stop.
Read the proposition for yourself. It would take several quarters of an unemployment rate of less than 5.5% to turn off the delay.
The oil companies know that the big run up in oil prices coming soon will likely prevent that from happening in the foreseeable future or maybe ever happening unless we remake our energy economy to not rely on oil.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
Why make the big run-up in oil prices worse to save the Texas oil companies a few bucks of profit?
Why turn off creating renewable energy jobs in California?
Why increase the risk California’s economy will collapse as oil begins to run out?
Why indeed!!
Vote NO on this proposition!
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