Two years ago, as he was running for re-election to the governorship, Arnold Schwarzenegger did what he often did as a movie star – changed characters.
He transformed himself from a Hummer-driving tough guy who denounced legislators as "girlie men" into an Al Gore-like advocate for curbing global warming as he tried to persuade voters to give him more power.
A liberal Legislature seized the opportunity and enacted a climate change bill, Assembly Bill 32, which has earned the governor global publicity.
AB 32's goal is reducing California's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, long after Schwarzenegger's governorship ends. The heavy lifting was to be found in the regulations that a variety of state agencies, led by the Air Resources Board, would issue.
Two years later, it's becoming evident that meeting the goal will impose a very heavy monetary cost on a California economy that's now in freefall with no bottom in sight.
The ARB's "scoping plan," awaiting adoption, lays out sharp increases in electricity and natural gas service rates, much costlier gasoline and other financial burdens. And it's generating increasing resistance from business.
"The scoping plan will add to the worsening economic problems facing California companies and families," Shelly Sullivan, executive director of the business-backed AB 32 Implementation Group, said in a state Chamber of Commerce bulletin.
The coalition has published an 18-page critique of the ARB plan, saying it overvalues benefits and understates costs. Business advocates a "cap and trade" alternative to regulation that relies on market forces to reach goals.
The heavy cost of going green is also found in a new report by the California Public Utilities Commission charting the shift of electrical supply away from fossil fuel-fired plants and toward "renewable" sources such as windmills, geothermal and solar panels.
The state gets about 12 percent of its electricity from the latter now, and the avowed goal is 20 percent by 2010 – highly unlikely – and 33 percent by 2020. The state's voters this month rejected a ballot measure that would have increased it to 40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025.
Reaching even 33 percent by 2020, the PUC said, would require 70,000 gigawatt-hours of new renewable energy in 2020, tripling current production, and seven new major transmission lines to carry power. And, the PUC said, "such a target may require a state investment of about $60 billion in generation and transmission from 2010 to 2020."
Those costs would ultimately be borne by residential and commercial customers. And they could make the state even less competitive in a global economy – as even Schwarzenegger indirectly recognizes in seeking environmental exemptions for public works projects to jump-start the economy.
It's a big price for what could be nothing more than a symbolic act with infinitesimal effect on global warming.
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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