California's AB32 global warming law put on hold by judge

“Spanner in the works!”

More than one in five (21%) of California small-business owners do not expect to be in business in California in three years, according to a recent survey by Small Business California, an advocacy group in San Francisco. (Read the story at link below.)
http://jan.ocregister.com/2011/03/08/are-calif-businesses-closing-or-leaving/55995/
IF AB32 is enacted, you can expect a lot more then 1 in 5 small businesses leaving the state; you can expect medium and large businesses leaving too. IF the object of AB32 is to generate major unemployment and high energy costs, Sacramento has found the way with this law.
The STUPID Politicians that are in office who support AB32 are living in a dream world. They fantasize that AB32 is going to generate all sorts of green technology that will create jobs. Yet, two different studies in Spain and England say, it destroys jobs.
At one time, California was a great place, BUT the STUPID Ultra-Liberals took over and are really making a mess of this state. At least the Judge gave us a break from some of their stupidity.
Bob Diaz

So essentially the law site is about the law not being harsh enough in destroying industry???
Mailman

William Briggs has a write-up on this rather confusing matter:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=3650
I thought it was a spoof, at first.

“Association of Irritated Residents” — now that’s telling it like it is.

I doubt that this will help much. The decision belongs to the ‘environmental justice’ movement, which says that poor people should be surrounded by pure natural wilderness with NO JOBS. In other words, EJ’s goal is to turn Western countries into Haiti. (Detroit is already halfway there!)
The Calif governor and legislature will now proceed to make the law more acceptable to EJ. The obstacle to cap-n-trade won’t matter much because cap-n-trade is already fading; and I guarantee the alternative will be worse.

I stopped reading when the article made the claim that the recent ballot initiative to stop this madness was funded by the oil industry.
The LA times will never let go of a usefull lie.

All carbon taxing schemes and tradeing scheme will drive up the cost of energy hurting the poor the most. Fat cat traders will scam the system pulling the money form the poor and middle class and when the scam collapses there will be lots of socialism for Wall St. to prevent big buisness losses and Main St. will be the source for the bail outs just like the Asset Backed Paper fiasco of 2009/2010.

This is fun – a real performance. Waiting for Mrs. Pelosi etc to pick this up, pointing on the forces of evil (big oil, gas, whatever).
A newspaper that is agenda-driven, really poor. A state that is exporting jobs and is, after years and years of liberal policy close to bankruptcy is trying to wipe out the rest of its industry and power generating capacity. Go, California!! If one wants to understand why California is in the toilet, see this discussion and the initiatives.
Not being US-American it is sad to see the US going down for internal stupidities, as if there arent enough external challenges. Admitted that it is not better in Germany …

My take on the decision is that an activist judge bought into the social justice argument that poor people living near carbon emitting industries must be protected by forcing big emitters to reduce emissions or close their plants. He questioned the trade part of cap and trade that he sees as allowing big emitters to maintain the status quo, or even expanding, by purchasing carbon quotas and credits from others.
This is a set back for those advocating for rational energy policies in CA no matter how you slice it.

“Atlas Shrugged” is looking prophetic.

M.A.DeLuca II says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:43 am
Karen D, I know we say that a lot, that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere *isn’t* a pollutant, but is that really true? Why isn’t an excess created by human industry considered “pollution” in the sense that it’s not there until we put it there by essentially dumping it in the air as industrial waste? Carbon monoxide occurs naturally in the air, but when there’s lots of it created by vehicle emissions, we consider that “smog” and think of it as pollution, right?
I’m not claiming you’re wrong, I’m simply wrestling with this concept. I suspect there’s something fishy about your concept of pollution or mine and I’d like to get to the bottom of it.

Pollution is the contamination of something with impurities which result in the contaminated item becoming inferior to what it was before the contamination occurred.
To determine whether or not contamination has occurred, you must first determine the starting point of view. If you begin with the Earth’s earlier atmosphere, you would find that it was composed of >99 percent or 999,900 parts per million of carbon dioxide and was more than 100 times more massive than the present day atmosphere. Using that comparison, it would be an impossible task to find the addition of a few gigatons of carbon dioxide to an atmosphere having less than 1 percent carbon dioxide or only 350-380 parts per million as adulterating the condition of the earlier atmosphere.
If you change your point of view to somewhere about 2.5 billion years ago, Life began to adulterate the atmosphere with massive quantities of Oxygen while it removed nearly all of the carbon dioxidde from the atmosphere and sequestered it in the lithosphere and biosphere. Oxygen could beregarded as a genuine pollutant, because it killed off most anaerobic lifeforms. Consequently, it would be fair to say all present day aerobic lifeforms are guilty of polluting the Earth’s atmosphere and environment with a deadly contaminant in the form of Oxygen while depleting the carbon dioxide vital to anaerobic and aerobic lifeforms.
During the Phanerozoic Eon of the last ~560 million years, aerobic lifeforms, especially the Plant Kingdom, have further fluctuated polluting Oxygen while reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from about 10,000 parts per million to less than 300 parts per million. Plant life has aggresively consumed and depleted carbon dioxide to the point where it had to develop new methods of photosynthesis to survive the extremely low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide it caused.
Now we live in a period of time where humans have joined with the other lifeforms to interact with their environment and are polluting it with their presence and activities. The question must be asked whether human caused releases of carbon dioxide are adulterating and contaminating the atmosphere with overall detrimental consequences, or is it restoring the carbon dioxide and purity of the atmosphere with overall beneficial consequences after other lifeforms had polluted it with detrimental consequences?

I think it’s simpler that any of the above stated theories.
I believe it to be rent seeking originations simply needing to be funded.
Where do they get their funding? From you the tax payer!
How?
Here is the PJ Media explanation.
http://tinyurl.com/27l5t4e
Here is the video.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=174&load=3206

D. Patterson says:
March 22, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Plant life has aggresively consumed and depleted carbon dioxide to the point where it had to develop new methods of photosynthesis to survive the extremely low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide it caused.

I have the impression you are mixing up photosynthesis and Calvin cycle (C3, C4 and CAM plants). If not, I would be interested in reading what the other methods of photosynthesis are.

D. Patterson says:
March 22, 2011 at 12:04 pm
======================
I like the way you think 😉
A sensible person would be more concerned that CO2 levels are so low………………

“The California lawsuit was filed by six environmental groups that represent low-income communities, including…..”
How poor do they think those communities will be after the low cost energy producers are destroyed, the jobs are gone, and energy costs increase sharply?
I guess those poor people will be cold too, if they get rid of the power plants and all of those ‘heat trapping’ CO2 emissions! };>)

Happy Birthday William Shatner, 80

Have you got a bio on the head of the Association of Irritated Residents? I guess he or she would have the official title, “AIR Head.”

Australia is sometimes liked to California – both in climate and in our laid back, easy going style.
Our fine PM, good Queen Green-julia is doing her best to see that we follow California forward to the middle ages or even further forward than that.
Whom am I, not to applaud?
Yes if you must:
/ Sarc off

M.A.D. & D. Patterson;
E.M. Smith, “Chiefio”, has a fine post here: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/got-wood in which he explores the idea that plants tend to, and have, drive down the level of CO2 to the point of starving themselves. They then must wait for a major re-release of more from massive basalt flood volcanoes or other such events.
We are (demonstrably) helping plants thrive by bringing levels up slightly. They’d actually prefer about 2,000 ppm, but even if we burned all the fossil fuel known to exist, all at once, we wouldn’t even get back to 1,000. Too bad!
Releasing all the methane clathrates etc. would help, because they oxidize in a few years to H2O and CO2. And coking as much limestone as possible, etc., would also be good.
🙂

Right, then. In short order of the replies:
D.Patterson @12:04pm — Thanks, but you spent most of your reply discussing geological periods that really don’t apply to the discussion. If I read you correctly, you’re arguing that there have been a number of alterations of the earth’s atmosphere by processes and organisms over eons, and that humans are just the latest to do so. By that argument, nothing we spew into the atmosphere, whether directly to our benefit or as the byproduct of a separate process that is to our benefit, can be considered a pollutant.
You did introduce the interesting notion that contaminants to a quantity that result in an inferior quantity are pollution, and while that seems helpful at first, it begs the question of “inferior to what according to whom?” In this instance, I’d hardly be able to get away with telling a global warming alarmist that the atmosphere after contamination with man-made CO2 isn’t inferior, now would I?
Old Engineer @ 3:32pm — I introduced smog as an example of a legitimate pollutant, and wasn’t at all claiming that CO2 was a component in it. I mistakenly thought carbon monoxide was a component of smog, and knowing that CO is also naturally occurring, thought it’d make a good, accepted example of a naturally occurring gas that is considered a pollutant when humans make lots of it. And while I was wrong about carbon monoxide as a component of smog, it does contribute to the formation of smog, and is considered a pollutant when humans create it. (Perhaps by producing an inferior air quality as D. Patterson suggests.)
Now while you conflated CO2 with my smog example, you bring up the potentially useful suggestion that CO2 isn’t a pollutant according to the Clean Air Act. BUT! The Clean Air Act isn’t a scientific document, it’s a political one, and I suspect that the recent actions of the EPA are an attempt to amend the Clean Air Act such that CO2 is now considered a pollutant. Thank you, though.
Brian H. @ 10:37pm — I think this is the right track, thank you! CO2 is very useful to plants at levels three times higher than today, without any strong negative consequences (assuming the alarmist models are indeed wrong). But if CO2 really does contribute to global warming, then the waters become a bit less clear. It’s beneficial to plants, and the processes that produce it are beneficial to humans, but there might be negative consequences and D.Patterson’s idea suggests that the air could then be considered inferior in some ways when we add CO2.
Folks, I suspect the problem is in the definition of the word “pollution” itself. Like pornography, it appears to be a word used less than technically to describe something a finger-waving scold knows when he or she sees it. It strikes me that refuting an environmentalist’s claim that CO2 is a pollutant isn’t as simple a thing as Karen D. originally suggested. I thank you all for your input; even though I find the matter unresolved, you’ve each pointed out interesting things to consider.

M.A.De.
Au contraire.
Warming has a pretty much 100% correlation with boom times for humanity and every other species. Cooling, the reverse. Warming is a feature, not a bug.

From Harold Pierce Jr on March 23, 2011 at 1:00 am:

No problem. We just brew more beer, ferment more grapes and vent the CO2 to the air.

Great, now someone in Kalifornia is wondering how to (carbon) tax breweries and wineries. To be fair, they’ll also go after all those snooty micro-breweries and small pricey “family-owned” wineries. Then there’s all those many people making beer and wine at home. At least that segment is easy to take care of, they’ll just ban it outright by citing possible bacterial contamination thus an unacceptable health risk.
Oh, and then there are the bakeries! Lots of yeast used, lots of CO2 released. They’ll have to insist on proper venting and continuous monitoring of the dangerous carbon pollution as it’s released. And what of homemade bread? Will they tax individual packets of yeast? What of the popular electric bread makers, just a one-time charge at purchase based of estimated usage, or expected lifetime of the unit? Of course, the Smart Grid is coming. They’ll be able to track their usage by the unit’s ID# and bill accordingly based on estimated CO2 emissions that can be blamed on it, same for all your modern appliances.
Yup, Kalifornia’s future sure is bright (when the skies are clear during the daytime).

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that implementation of a straight carbon tax (which the law suit suggests is preferred by the Irritated Ones over a cap-and-trade system) paves the way for government to quite literally tax us for breathing…

Anderlan;
So much error and blown logic in one place! But let’s focus on one instance: your assertion that warming hurts crops and leads to more droughts. Neither is true. Cooling messes up the hydrological cycle far more, leading to droughts. Crop yields have increased steadily with increased CO2 and warming.
You are attempting to tax and suppress a benefit. Not smart.

To M.A.DeLuca:
My apologies. I read your your post as carbon dioxide. I guess what threw me was the comment that it was naturally occurring. Since any incomplete oxidation of carbon will produce CO, I suppose forest fires produce some CO. But most atmospheric chemists don’t consider CO part of the natural atmosphere.
But now I see your point. What is air pollution? A broad definition might be: anything we humans don’t want in the air. The definition the Clean Air Act uses is things in the air that are harmful to human health and welfare. This leads to some problems. Particulate matter, such as soot from coal fired furnaces has been a known health hazard for years. However, when EPA established particulate matter standards it didn’t specify what kinds particulates. Any particles that got into your lungs were bad. Therefore they set a standard for particles less than 2.5 microns in size. Guess what area will never meet that standard? In Arizona, the county that Phoenix is in is one of the counties that is not in compliance with the standard. Probably never will be, because of blowing desert dust. Is the naturally occurring desert dust a pollutant?
Another example. As I said in my earlier post, the photochemical reaction between NO and hydrocarbons produces ozone. Ozone has also has been shown to be health hazard. Ozone also has a National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). In L.A. Motor vehicles are the primary cause. But photochemical smog also occurs over rural portions of Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Turns out that the pine trees in these areas give off hydrocarbon gases that also form photochemical smog. The Smokey Mountains are so named because of this smog. Are the pine trees polluting the air? They are the reason some areas in the South don’t meet the NAAQS for ozone.
So, I agree with you, it all depends on how you want to define pollution. But in the two examples, the regulated things in the air are known health hazards, whether they are produced naturally or by man.
CO2 is different. It is not a health hazard. It may be harmful to human welfare, IF , not only the IPPC models are correct, but also all the computer studies that assume they are correct and then go on to predict some dire consequence of this warming. That is what the skepticism is about. The models and computer studies don’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny.