April Fool’s Day is just a week away. Wouldn’t it be a great practical joke if the State of California were to force 6,000 gas service stations to shut their doors on that day? Just think – millions of drivers (maybe you?) running on empty, with no place to fill up their tanks… Actually, it doesn’t sound very funny at all – and, guess what? It’s hardly a joke – it’s actually for real.
As FR readers know, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on a multi-year jihad against carbon emissions – you know, so we can make some sort of “political statement” about global warming, since the actual impact of California government over-regulating its businesses and citizens will be nominal in terms of reducing man-made carbon emissions on Planet Earth.
Much of the draconian regulation that is taking place is coursing through the un-elected California Air Resources Board. One of the vast array of regulations that they have issued in the name of reducing carbon emissions has placed an unachievable hurdle on gas stations in California. Specifically, small station owners have to install new “enhanced vapor recovery nozzles” that will capture 98% of vapor emissions instead of the current 95%.
With the deadline for compliance just a week away, only around 20% of stations have been able to run through all of the hurdles (financial and regulatory) to make these mandated upgrades.
“Global Warmists” would tell you that the $4300 to $7300 per pump cost for this “upgrade” is just the cost of being responsible to our environment. They probably don’t want to be bothered with some inconvenient information, starting with the fact that years ago the big oil companies sold off most of their service stations, and most are now small businesses – family owned in many, many cases. Another inconvenient truth (pardon the pun) is that the recession and nationwide credit crunch makes it very difficult right now for small businesses to get the kinds of loans they would need for this kind of expense, and if they can get it, the interest rates would be much higher than they would have been. And if you think that these kinds of costs can be “absorbed” without passing them along to the consumers (in the form of higher prices for gas), well then I have a hydrogen powered Hummer to sell you.
Attached is a letter that has been signed by a plethora of legislators, Democrats and Republicans, urging Governor Schwarzenegger to delay the pending deadline for this regulation.
We here at the FlashReport would go one further – and urge the Governor and the California Air Resources Board to scrap this regulation all together. The relatively minor (make that tiny) impact that this rule would have on global man-made carbon emissions is nominal. But the negative impact on the thousands of owners of the stations, and the tens of millions of California drivers that visit them, will be significant.
FR readers who feel compelled to voice their feelings on this matter to the Governor can do so here.
Want more information on this matter, check out a pretty straight-forward column that my Assemblyman, Jeff Miller, had published in Capitol Weekly. Get even more facts here.
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