A conservative economist at a state college who was paid $54,000 to write a false report on California’s global warming cap and trade bill has backed off his claims after Stanford University economists criticized the business-funded study as “very, very defective.”
An industry group, falsely naming itself “AB32 Implementation Group” AB32IG.com paid Sanjay Varshney of Cal State Sacramento Business School, for the economic scaremongering used by the campaign. In fact the AB32 Implementation Group is not about implementing AB32. Not at all. It is all about opposing its being implemented.
All of the industry sponsored attacks on the global warming law depend entirely on the study the group commissioned from Cal State, but now Varshney won’t even defend his “very, very defective study”.
With the Cal State author wimping out, the dirty industry group has been dealt a second blow. The first was when Attorney General Jerry Brown accurately renamed their deceptively titled ballot measure aimed at killing the prospective law.
A la Bush era “Blue Skies Initiatives” their ballot measure had claimed to be a “California Jobs Initiative”. In fact, as current Attorney General Jerry brown saw clearly, the ballot measure actually “Suspends Air Pollution Control Laws Requiring Major Polluters to Report and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions That Cause Global Warming Until Unemployment Drops Below Specified Level for Full Year.”
That’s what he named it; to help voters understand its true intent. That is part of the job of a good Attorney General (and especially one that is running for Governor, as Jerry Brown is).
Anyone who wants to get that ballot measure on the ballot now sees an accurate title. With that moniker, its not as easy to get anyone to sign up for it, so it only has the support of the very few dirty industries in the state. And even they are now backing off.
The consensus is that putting off implementing AB32 will not help the economy. On the contrary. You don’t even need to be a Stanford economist to realize that the green economy is very good for California. Anyone in the green job market sees that it is only the green jobs that are growing here.
Stanford University professor Jim Sweeney called the report’s conclusions ‘highly biased’ and ‘based on poor logic and unsound economic analysis.’ Studies by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that it would not make a major economic impact either way.
California led the nation in 2009 with $8.8 billion in clean venture capital investments, including $1.2 billion invested in 74 clean-tech deals, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Green jobs have grown three times as fast as the regular job market, according to a report released in December by the nonpartisan groups Next 10 and Collaborative Economics. Between 1995 and 2008, total jobs in the state grew only 13 percent, while green jobs grew a whopping 36 percent, from 117,000 to 159,000.
With the passage of AB32, California’s economy will skew even greener. It certainly won’t kill jobs in the state.
Source: Majority Report
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