Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
transition. A couple of Texas oil companies, Valero and Tesoro, and a number of other
fossil-fuelindustryplayershadplacedthepropositionontheballotinanefforttoprevent
regulations that they thought would be harmful to their businesses. Prop 23 asked voters
to delay implementation of AB 32 by popular vote. This was a classic example of Dirty
Energy beating up on the clean-energy industry and public health to protect its own in-
terests.
The oil companies' lead antagonist was an investor named Tom Steyer. He's a man
who has made it. He runs a hedge fund called Farallon and was tapped by some as a po-
tential candidate for treasury secretary when Obama was elected in 2008 (yet he wears
the same tartan tie every day and drives a 1990s Honda Civic). A tireless advocate for
clean energyand the advanced-energyeconomy,Tom co-chaired the Noon23campaign
with George Shultz—the former secretary of state under Reagan—to crush the proposi-
tion. In this unlikely but dynamic duo, we had a couple of out-of-the-box solar champi-
ons signing up for the fight to save our economy.
It's important for the world to know that the folks fighting the good fight range from
hedge fund managers to Republican secretaries of state and that the fight surrounding
solar energy is what binds a lot of us together. In this campaign California venture capit-
alists, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and community organizations rep-
resenting people of color (who wanted to stop the erection of polluting gas-fired power
plants in their neighborhoods) up and down the state joined forces under Steyer and
Schultz's leadership to defeat the dirty-oil proposition by convincing the electorate that
what's good for the planet is good for jobs.
The victory against Prop 23 may go down in history as the moment when the populist
supportwasproven.Certainlythejobs-versus-environmentdebatewasalmostputtobed.
Therateofgrowthinclean-energybusinessessince1995is10timesmorethanthestate's
average job growth rate. People know this intuitively. Nearly two-thirds of the popula-
tion voted against the proposition. The victory party in San Francisco saw some strange
bedfellows fist-bumping, backslapping, and celebrating the rise of clean energy despite
the best efforts of some of King CONG's handmaidens to stymie it.
AnothersignificanttakeawayfromtheProp23defeatofwhichTomandallthegrass-
rootsactivistswhofoughtitshouldbeproudisthatitdemonstratedtheelectoralpowerof
theclean-energycause.Nopolitical analyst worthhisorherstripes couldmissthesignal
that the defeat of Prop 23 sent: clean energy had crossed over to become a mainstream
movementwithbroadsupportfromavastmajorityofvoters.Howmanyotherbigissues
do diehard Republicans and diehard Democrats agree on these days? Moreover, the No
on 23 campaign shows that these issues can draw out the big guns from across the polit-
ical spectrum to fund a well-organized ass-whooping, which is what they gave the other
