Be sure to vote on Tuesday, November 2, Election Day, too much is at stake not to. If you live in California, the results of races for Governor (vote for Jerry), the U.S. Senate (Boxer), and the U.S. House of Representatives, plus several state propositions, will have a collectively enormous impact on California’s environment, economy, quality of life, and future prospects.
In California, it’s critically important that you vote No on Proposition 23.
Prop 23 is an attempt by Texas oil refinery companies Valero and Tesoro, as well as the extremist right-wing Koch brothers, to change the State of California's future by undoing our seminal Global Warming Solutions Act, better known as AB 32. This legislation, approved in 2006 and signed into law by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, will have a profoundly positive impact by significantly reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG’s) and other air pollutants, creating new jobs and spurring innovation in clean technology, renewable energy, and energy efficiency, and improving residents’ quality of life through better air quality and more sensible transportation and housing policies. Prop 23 would unravel these advances.
California’s AB 32 also is extremely important in the national debate over what to do about global climate change, especially given that reactionary conservatives to date have successfully stifled action on the climate change crisis primarily at the behest of oil, coal and electric utility companies. AB 32 will help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, reduce the nation’s irresponsible emissions of GHG’s, and provide invaluable impetus to the urgent economic and environmental necessity of shifting this nation’s energy dependence to clean technologies and renewable energy.
Everywhere across the country, elected officials and numerous other stakeholders are looking to California and AB 32 as an indicator of where the nation is going. Unless, of course, somehow AB 32 was made to go away. Proposition 23 would effectively kill AB 32, although its dishonest purveyors claim that the proposition would merely “suspend” the global warming law. Indeed, the language in the proposition does say “suspend,” but the conditions attached to this so-called suspension in reality would make it permanent.
