Today, thousands of gas station owners around California will hit a hard deadline passed by the California Air Resources Board to "upgrade" their pumps to make an extremely minor reduction in fumes released. Yes, this is yet another manifestation of that happens when the liberals in the legislature, teaming up with Governor "Green" — set board direction to regulatory boards to reduce carbon emissions. Editorial Boards across the state have and continue to praise and support the idea of using government regulation to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions — this despite the opinion of a great many leading scientists that global warming is not caused by people.
I wrote about this extensively here, and we also have carried a column from Assemblyman Jeff Miller on this subject here.
Unfortunately I don’t think I am going to have much luck stopped the global warmism jihad against the freedom and liberty of the American people today, in this blog post.
But the tragic situation facing gas station owners is very real, and is happening now. My local Shell Station has been closed three days in a row now, with work being done to "upgrade" the pumps. My friend, John, who owns an Orange County service station is very depressed about the $60k+ it is costing to change his pumps around (not including the cost of having his station out-of-service during the work — and he is one of the "lucky ones" to be able to get someone to his station to do the work. I asked him how he was going to pay for these changes. I asked if he would raise his gas prices. He said he didn’t think he could raise gas prices because people would get their gas somewhere else. He didn’t know how he was going to afford it, but knew that he did not want to be harassed by regulators and hit with late penalties for non-compliance. John is one of the FEW station owners who are getting this work done right now — most can’t get the work done anytime soon.
The bottom line is that CARB has set out a draconian regulation, which for practical purposes, cannot be reasonably complied with anytime soon.
The Governor has, despite an advocate for the emissions standards that "birthed" this regulation, asked CARB to grant an extension. Hopefully they will meet today and do this ASAP. Then, with a little more time, perhaps they can look at whether the economic costs of this regulation balance at all with the impact to carbon emissions — especially during a recession.
Care to read comments, or make your own about today’s Daily Commentary?
Just click here to go to the FR Weblog, where this Commentary has its own blog post, and where you can read and make comments.