Race for '08: Voters split on global warming cost

SANTA MARIA – In this former industrial town built on grime, grit and California crude, Republican voter Bob Engel sees the past and the future.

Engel & Gray Inc., which Engel runs with his older brother Carl, provides labor and construction services for Santa Maria's oil fields – the working remnants of a petroleum town that in the late 1950s once numbered 1,775 oil wells.

Now, Santa Maria is known as much for new subdivisions and bountiful coastal California wine vineyards. And Engel's family has diversified, opening Harvest Blend Compost to renourish soil at former oil exploration sites and transform residential and agricultural "green waste" into eco-healthy compost.

"We've had a very balanced thought process," Engel says.

That's why he is torn on the presidential candidates and the environment and what to do about global warming blamed for climate change.

Engel, an undecided voter, is uncomfortable with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's self-proclaimed California crusade against global warming and by the state's decision to sue the Bush administration for blocking California's effort to impose the nation's first greenhouse gas emission limits for cars and light trucks. He's willing to make environmental changes that make sense for his company but doesn't want California businesses to bear an unfair burden.

Along the lower Central Coast, an environmental consciousness was born and a debate over America's petroleum use was triggered back in 1969 when 35 miles of beaches were soiled by a massive oil slick from an ocean rig off Santa Barbara.

Today, from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo, the discussion is reinvigorated. As the Feb. 5 California presidential primary approaches, voters are tuning in as candidates debate reliance on fossil fuels and embrace or dismiss climatologists' warnings about melting polar ices, disrupted weather patterns and related environmental threats.

In Santa Maria, Engel agrees with statements by Republican candidate and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that America shouldn't "distort our whole economy and our life" on global warming. He agrees with former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who says it makes no sense for America to make economic sacrifices if China and India don't.

"I'm worried we might be going too crazy and we have to have a balanced approach as far as global warming," Engel says. "We have all kinds of air regulations being passed in California, and we're putting the state at a severe competitive disadvantage."

To the north in Arroyo Grande, where Gail Roberts pours a fine pinot noir in the tasting room at the Laetitia Vineyard & Winery, she also wonders if global warming is "over-hyped" by politics. Yet she says there should be no taking chances.

The Laetitia Vineyard is already experimenting by planting a new wine grape – a Spanish tempranillo – because "our summers are getting hotter here," she says, and it can grow in warmer climates.

Roberts says she supports Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president, seeing him as an inspiring figure who can spur change in environmental policy after eight years of President Bush and Republicans in Washington, D.C., "shackled by the energy industry."

She favors the move by Republican Schwarzenegger, who in 2006 signed California's landmark Assembly Bill 32. It pledged to use market incentives to entice industrial polluters to clean up in order to curb the state's greenhouse gases by 25 percent – to 1990 levels – by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050.

The California policy has since become a mantra for virtually all Democratic presidential candidates and one Republican – Arizona Sen. John McCain. The state of a former Democratic candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, joined in California's lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over auto emission standards.

But in downtown San Luis Obispo, where Morgan Matus, 22, was stocking locally produced olive oil at the We Olive store, no candidate has come close to what she says must be done.

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• Call Peter Hecht, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5539.