TIME magazine got its opening right but then wanders off into a fairytale...
From the debacle of the hacked Climategate e-mails to the bitter disappointment of Copenhagen to the slow death of carbon cap and trade in the Senate, the past year has mostly been one of reversals for the U.S. environmental movement.
Then the article by Bryan Walsh goes on to extol Californians for (hopefully - it was written before the election, though we all knew it would fail) not suspending a somewhat silly law requiring green technology 10 years from now in return for making it easier to get people employed today.
Walsh was talking about Proposition 23, a ballot initiative that would have repealed California's landmark climate-change law. Was it badly written? Sure, though so was AB 32. In its current form, Proposition 23 requires a threshold of unemployment California hasn't had in 30 years (let's be honest, it is not the most business-friendly state since Jerry Brown took office and, hey, now he's back to do it again) but here is something the advocate who writes for TIME does not understand; AB 32 is meaningless anyway. There is no chance, none at all, a state government will legislate carbon levels back to 1990.
Sure, they may say they will, right up until 2020, but it isn't going to happen. So even more ridiculous laws to mandate one sector of energy - which the rest of the nation has already chosen not to do - while the unemployment rate is over 12% right now seems a little silly. You cannot mandate capitalism. The technology to replace fossil fuels is not there and no government is willing to tax fossil fuels 100% to make it work. Not even California.
But that's why I don't write for TIME. "Environmentalists Get Green" he writes in his title, but should have included "but don't get economics".
