By David J. Sanders

In my last column, I pointed out how, either willingly or unwillingly, the Arkansas Governor’s Commission on Global Warming is a front for an out-of-state organization called the Center for Climate Strategies. CCS travels the country convincing state governments to set up working groups so that it can funnel to lawmakers prefab policy reports containing recommendations for punitive and confiscatory environmental regulations costing billions of dollars.

CCS has wealthy donors — global warming alarmists — to please and, by its own admission, uses states to pressure the federal government to adopt sweeping policies related to global warming. Unfortunately CSS acts without regard to the cost in terms of dollars and jobs to states’ economies, governments or their taxpaying citizens.

The global warming commission’s final report contains 54 of CCS’s policy recommendations — implementation costs could top $3.7 billion — nearly half of which lacked cost estimates. Even if Arkansas lawmakers enacted all the commission’s policies, the actual benefit of reducing greenhouse gases would be insignificant.

In May, the Science and Public Policy Institute released a policy paper about the effects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Arkansas. According to the report, “Globally, in 2003, humankind emitted 25,780 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, of which Arkansas accounted for 62.4 mmtCO2, or only 0.24 percent.”

SPPI’s Roy Ferguson illuminated this measurement: “If Arkansas stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, then it would only take 23 days for the rest of the world to replace what was lost.”

My timing couldn’t have been better.

State Rep. Kathy Webb, D-Little Rock, who also co-chairs the commission, said representatives from GCGW met with Gov. Mike Beebe last week in an attempt to iron out the details of what, if any, of the recommendations Beebe will include in his legislative package.

After the column ran, Kevan Inboden, an administrator with Jonesboro’s municipal utility and a commission member, contacted me and said he was appreciative of what I had written.

Despite what he said were commissioners’ good intentions, Inboden said he suspected early on that someone was pushing an agenda.  Without naming names, he said it appeared the commission’s more extremist members — those who advocated “extreme (carbon) mitigation measures” —  had been “working behind the scenes” to steer the group’s work. What about CCS? “They were more than just a facilitator,” he said.

“As a commissioner, when I hear that the commission recommended this or that, it doesn’t tell the whole story. There was a lot of dissension and opposition,” he said.

The commission’s reports show several close votes on controversial policy recommendations that, according to Inboden, if enacted into law would drive up the cost of living and the cost of doing business in Arkansas.

He voted against the carbon tax, energy portfolio mandates for utilities, a proposed moratorium on coal-fired plants and what he called “a regional cap-and-trade system,” or what he said the commission misleadingly labeled “Approaches benefiting from regional application.”

“The number we heard for a carbon tax was $20 to $30 per ton of CO2 or million metric tons of CO2 equivalent,” he explained. “If an industry was paying $.05 per kilowatt hour and you had a $25 carbon tax, then it would add 2 1/2 cents per kilowatt hour to their rate, which would increase their electric bill by 50 percent.”

He explained that the portfolio mandate would drive up the cost of renewable energy, which in turn would hurt Arkansas ratepayers.

Inboden said the commission should have taken a more balanced approach in its deliberations.

“Our approach didn’t work for both sides,” he said. “We let what other states were doing influence what we did as a commission.”

In fact, many of the states held up as examples for Arkansas were states in which CCS had worked.

Getting something for nothing is usually too good to be true, but in this case, getting nothing for something is insanity.

——-
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.