Our View - Wednesday

GOING ALL GREEN NOT QUITE SO EASY

California regulators face reality on mandate

Once again utopian thinking combined with top-down government coercion falls short when reality bites.

The California Air Resources Board is an agency officially charged with bringing about "the effective and efficient reduction of air pollutants while recognizing and considering the effects on the economy of the state."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the ARB seems to emphasize its government power to reduce air pollutants more than it is concerned with "recognizing and considering the effects on the economy."

On Friday, the board made a concession to reality, voting to reduce from 25,000 to 7,500 the number of zero-emission vehicles automakers will be required to produce from 2012 to 2014. This is a major concession to the fact that automakers simply won't meet the previously imposed quota of 25,000 vehicles. Production changes that require long lead times, reliability studies and technological innovations don't happen with the wave of a magic wand, or by edict from government regulators, no matter how much those regulators would like to be able to wish technology into existence.

Environmental groups, as expected, are outraged. "I really feel dissed by this," said Sherry Boschert, a Sierra Club spokeswoman, who also is vice president of Plug In America, a group promoting electric cars, said of the ARB scaling back its mandate. Boschert didn't explain how the cars are recharged without adding to those pesky greenhouse gases pumped out by power plants. Perhaps she doesn't worry so much about that because California buys a large portion of its electricity from out of state, so the Golden State would see all of the benefits but pay relatively few of the costs.

But as is often the case with government's heavy hand trying to direct economic decisions, the ARB found its zero-emission vehicle program created in 1990 to "spur technological advancements" is based entirely on arbitrary decisions arrived at by bureaucrats, rather than actual buyer and seller preferences arrived at in a free market. No one should be surprised the bureaucrats' ideal proves unworkable.

To complicate this top-down economic manipulation, ARB Chairman Mary Nichols ordered her staff to look at another revision of the zero-based emission program to factor in "climate change benefits." That means finding a way to make the scaled back regulations work in conjunction with new regulations yet to be drummed up to curb greenhouse gases, such as CO2, which until recently never was even considered a pollutant.

The board appears to reflect Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's philosophy, embodied in his words in January: "We've got to force the car manufacturers, the car companies, into making cars that are running on electric power and on biofuels . . . ."

The governor wants to "force" and Nichols vows to "continue to push for all types of technologies" in their quest to fulfill the ARB's mission. But dictates from on high, oblivious to economic reality, not only interfere with free, private decisions, they often are simply unworkable.

Will car makers be able to meet the new quotas? Only time will tell. What's more important is how the ARB will react if they can't. Somehow we won't be surprised to learn in coming years that the newest mandates also must be scaled back, as California's governmental manipulators come face-to-face again with real-world economic realities.

WARMING TO A GOOD IDEA

A nongovernmental panel of renowned scientists recently concluded that not only is the slight warming of the atmosphere in recent decades insignificant, there now are signs of cooling, and even so, temperature fluctuations most likely are naturally occurring, and a resumption of warming would even be beneficial.

That's why we find great wisdom in growing sentiment among even scientists who believe warming is occurring and man-made greenhouse gases may have something to do with it, but suggest that instead of trying to reverse climate change, it's better to adapt to the inevitable.

In an analysis published in the journal Natural Hazards Review, Roger A. Pielke Jr., environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, argued that global warming this century will play a much smaller role in unleashing planetary havoc than popularly alleged.

The Los Angeles Times last week summed up the position of this new breed of skeptics this way: "Instead of spending trillions of dollars to stabilize carbon dioxide levels across the planet - an enormously complex and expensive proposition - the world could work on reducing hunger, storm damage and disease now, thereby neutralizing some of the most feared future problems of global warming."

Noted environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, author of "Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," has made the same argument for years. Efforts to stop global warming cost hundreds of billions of dollars, Lomborg notes, and "are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years."

Instead, Lomborg argues, focus should be on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and providing safe, fresh water, all of which can be done at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime.

Already, 48 percent of Americans say they wouldn't pay even one more penny in gasoline taxes to reduce greenhouse gases, according to a poll by the National Center for Public Policy Research. We find that utterly reasonable, as most people will when the trillion-dollar price tag becomes apparent to enforce Draconian measures for curbing so-called global warming.