Is this Mary Nichols' vision for California?
Today, the radical environmentalist and head of the California Air Resources Board is holding a meeting to decide on regulations that are designed to reduce California's Carbon Dioxide emissions and greenhouse gases by 15% by 2035. Sounds reasonable, right? Well not exactly. The folks with the green eye shades and other experts have reported that meeting those goals will require certain measures. If you want to know what those measures are, keep reading. If you live in California or are thinking of moving here, I suggest you keep reading.
Here are the projections. In order to meet that ambitious goal, it is estimated that gas prices would have to be raised to about 9 dollars a gallon. In addition, a proposal has been made to charge drivers for using the freeways. Other charges would be for driving during peak traffic hours. And finally this proposal to limit development in suburban areas.
Here is what this means; the friendly folks at CARB want to get us out of our cars. First, they would make it prohibitive to operate a car, then they would make it hard for new arrivals to find housing outside of metropolitan areas. If you are not familiar with California, many people (like me) prefer to live outside of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco for many reasons, cost of housing being one of them. When we returned to Los Angeles in 1978 after three years in Thailand, our first order of business was buying a home. Keep in mind, my office was in downtown LA. Due to the high cost, we kept moving our search farther and farther south until we found what we wanted for the right price in Orange County. Commuting to LA was a sacrifice I, like many, were willing to make.
Mary Nichols and her friends on the politburo want to take that choice out of our hands. They want to force people to move closer to their jobs in the city. No more open, green, safe suburbs to flee the city to. Therefore, if these proposals become reality, millions of Californians would have a very difficult and expensive choice to make. Newcomers would find it harder and more inconvenient to find housing in the suburbs. New communities? Forget it.
This is what Nichols and her CARB are all about. They are radical environmentalists who now want to engage in social engineering in an attempt to "save the planet". They envision everybody living in high rise apartment buildings in the city and riding public transportaion to work.
Some Republicans in Sacramento have written to CARB suggesting a more modest decrease in greenhouse gases as a goal (3-6%). You know what that means?
Compromise- a figure in the middle, which would still be disastrous.
On November 2, Califrnians go to the polls. One of the ballot measures is Proposition 23, which would suspend implementation of pollution control law AB 32, an insane greenhouse, global warming bill, until unemployment drops below 5.5 % for a full year. (It is now 12.4%.) It is a measure we should all vote YES on.
So if you are thinking about moving to California....
think again.
3 comments:
Although I had to break down and get a car three years ago (a manual transmission Kia Rio that gets up to 41 mpg), due to the deterioration of the local bus system, I have long favored a whopping tax on gas, bringing the price up to at least $5 a gallon, putting the money into social security, and reducing net payroll deductions on the first $20,000 or so of income. In other words, the money doesn't fund more government programs, if you have to drive, you get the money back another way to pay for it, but if you can avoid using your car, you come out ahead.
Siarlys,
In Calif we pay about 40 cents more a gallon for the additives that save the planet. Gas taxes were supposed to build the highways and maintain them. They have gone for everything else.
Yes, that's what gas taxes were implemented for. What I proposed is a gas tax of a different nature, which would be implemented for a different purpose, open and up front, no subterfuge, over and above the highway trust fund. You should pay 40 cents more for those additives. If you don't have those additives, you are passing real costs on to other persons, particularly those who die of respiratory diseases, and all the sources of funding to pay for their treatment before they die.
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