By David J. Sanders
Arkansas is at risk of falling prey to cookie-cutter environmental policy recommendations pushed by an out-of-state “advisory” group, which besides being funded by global warming alarmists, wants the state to raise taxes and utility rates and to spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars all in the name of curbing Arkansas’ carbon dioxide emissions.
Lawmakers beware. Soon a fellow legislator, or a representative from some interested party, will ask you to support a new set of practical and unique solutions – common sense policies – developed by a diverse group of Arkansans to tackle the problem of global warming. They’ll claim the time for debate is over and that action is required. After all, this will be the Natural State’s moment to lead on the most important issue facing the state, nation, and world.
Thanks to the Arkansas Governor’s Commission on Global Warming (GCGW), what lawmakers will be asked to support is neither unique nor based on common sense. When the group was formed in the 2007 legislative session, it was largely viewed as Gov. Mike Beebe’s tip of the hat to a growing group of leftwing Democrats in the Arkansas General Assembly.
If enacted into law, there is little evidence that the group’s 54 policies would have any appreciable affect on global warming, but instead would drain money from the state budget and stifle much needed economic growth by making Arkansas one of the only states in the region to adopt a new set of punitive and confiscatory environmental policies.
So where did this come from?
The GCGW’s founding documents stipulate that the commission would work with the nonprofit Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) to “assist” with its “examination and evaluation of the ‘… issues related to global warming on the state, its citizens, its natural resources, and its economy.’”
But, in fact, CCS sought Arkansas out, just like it has with more than 20 other states, and not the other way around. From the beginning CCS has driven the commission’s formation, processes and recommendations. By clicking through some of other states listed on the group’s Web site (climatestrategies.us) it’s revealed that GCGW’s “stake holder,” “consensus” approach is nothing more than a template.
CCS isn’t trying hard to hide its approach. From state to state, the policy recommendations vary little — even GCGW’s Web site (arclimatechange.us) is nearly identical to the other state commissions’ Web sites.
CCS has an agenda.
Paul Chesser, director of Climate Strategies Watch, a nonprofit group that follows CCS activities across the U.S., pointed out that this so-called “advisory” group is, in fact, an “advocacy” group. It’s funded by known leftwing environmental champions like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and CNN founder Ted Turner — even the ACLU.
In Arkansas, CCS/GCGW’s 54 policy recommendations carry a price tag of $3.7 billion over 15 years. But, peer-reviewed studies of CCS’s similar recommendations in North Carolina and South Carolina demonstrated that the costs both in terms of dollars from the state budgets and lost revenue, and economic consequences in terms of lost jobs and lost economic development, were “dramatically underestimated.”
In Arkansas, the two groups call on the Legislature to adopt a carbon tax (incidentally, neither CCS nor the GCGW quantified the economic impact or cost of a carbon tax in any of its reports. But by any estimation such a tax would represent a major new cost of doing business in Arkansas) an “energy-saving sales tax” and new mandates on Arkansas utilities to supply energy from more expensive alternative-energy sources.
Why Arkansas? Why now?
Tom Peterson, CCS’s executive director, admitted that their designs are to use states to put bottom-up pressure on the federal government to adopt sweeping policies cutting greenhouse gases. Lawmakers would be wise to protect Arkansas taxpayers and from becoming pawns in such an expensive scheme.
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David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is a host of the Arkansas Education Television Network’s “Unconventional Wisdom.” His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
All the hot air Sanders releases is probably to cause of global warming.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:08 pm
David Sanders has succeeded in reprinting a cookie-cutter hit piece we’ve seen before in other places under Paul Chesser’s byline. Alas. Chesser is well-known as the misinformation guru of state climate policy whose entire mission in life is to attack earnest efforts on both sides of the aisle to grapple with energy and climate realities. It’s a socio-pathic obsession and shame on Sanders for carrying his dirty water. He and Sanders knows that in cyberspace, you repeat lies over and over and you can make them have the appearance of truth.
Two examples of many here. The AP erroneously reported that CCS receives funding from the ACLU, and issued an immediate correction. But here Sanders repeats the claim in order to buttress his false case with a lie. He needs to because the truth does not lend itself to his writerly crime.
He also cites “peer-reviewed studies of CCS’s similar recommendations in North Carolina and South Carolina,” but they don’t really exist. He’s referring to biased reports written by the Beacon Hill Institute, paid for the by the John Locke Foundation and which claim to be “peer-reviewed.” But they are not and have been thoroughly repudiated in North Carolina and Florida and everywhere else they trotted out the template critique which has no merit.
This is the coward’s way. They are too chicken to directly attack the governors, both Republican and Democratic, who have ordered these planning processes; and too chicken to participate directly in public processes. They’d rather deal in innuendo — smear, attack, lie, cheat — anything! — as long as they can make a mess of anything to do with wise stewardship of the earth, responsible government and alert and aware citizenship.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Are you freaking kidding me?
Somebody actually tries to bring AR out of the dark ages by proposing we protect our clean air and you choose to spread fear and anger over it?
Nearly all the scientists in the world agree that climate change is real. The only ones who don’t are paid by conservative think-tanks similar to the ones that must be funding your salary. How is this type of misinformation possibly good reporting? How did you get your job, by threatening your bosses or by paying them?
What is being proposed by the ARGWC are real initiatives that will help protect citizen’s health, economy, and environment. These are proven tactics that have already been proven in other areas. This is not an attempt to take your money or anybody else’s. This is an attempt to preserve Arkansans quality of life now and into the future.
You must not have kids, for if you did, these would seem to be common sense actions.
Face it, you are now in the minority and your rage about other people trying to improve our state shows it.