Over the last couple of weeks there has been an intense escalation of the debate over global warming policy and California's environmental leadership. As many have likely already heard and read elsewhere the Big Oil companies are targeting California's landmark global warming legislation, also known as AB 32. This is the story of a group of citizens who are standing up to Big Oil and the teabaggers that are working hand in hand with those same companies.
First, a little background. In August of 2006 the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 32. This bill, according the the California Air Resources Board "aim at reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 - a reduction of approximately 30 percent, and then an 80 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050." Here is a link to the actual bill itself.
Of course, businesses that heavily pollute attempted to derail the passage of the bill in the first place. To their dismay California became the first state in the US to tackle global warming policy. Since that time they have been working on two basic fronts. CARB was put in charge of implementing this new global warming policy and the polluters sent their legions of lobbyists to the scoping plan meetings to call for being as slow as possible. The other front has been looking at ways they can dismantle or ignore the law all together. It seems they have found their solution.
California's ballot process makes it easy for big spenders to get their pet projects on the vote, circumventing the legislative process entirely. They can pay people money to get signatures (in this case only needing something in the 400,000 range). Then because there are no spending limits on ballot initiatives they can dump money into a massive campaign to push their initiative through. This is where Big Oil has stepped in here in California in 2010.
I won't rehash the who and what of this current initiative to suspend AB 32 since there are a couple of good diaries already posted last week about it,here, and here.
This is where the whole thing gets good. Several environmental groups decided to hold a protest outside of a Valero station here in Sacramento and told the media about it. We had several media outlets show up and cover the event Here are some pictures that I took:
Last night we found out that the oil companies were planning their own protest at the same Valero station. We had no idea what they could be protesting, so we decided to show up with our signs again. As we arrived this morning a dozen people in red "Tea Party" t-shirts rolled up and pulled out their signs. The signs read "Thank You Valero" We decided to take the sidewalk in front of the Valero ourselves relegating the Teabaggers to a spot up the street. Only one media outlet showed up, the Capitol Weekly. When they asked the teabaggers what we were doing here the only answer they could come up with was that we were jobless hippies. Of course, this is the furthest thing from the truth and everyone who was there showed up to this event before work.
One of the ladies from the tea party walked by I asked her why she was supporting Big Oil. She responded that she was there in support of jobs and fiscal responsibility. I asked her why her signs said "Thank You Valero" since that seemed to be supportive of Big Oil, she retorted that I couldn't read. I think thanking the Big Oil companies for funding a campaign against public health legislation is clear enough, thank you very much! These people are representative of the worst kind of politics. They tear people down around them and throw insults without understanding what they are actually in support of.
I cannot get the pictures I took off of my friend's camera right now, but there will be more photos up soon. It seems that the teabaggers are good at calling their friends, but not anyone else since the only media we saw showing up was the one guy mentioned above.