IN SEPTEMBER 2006, California’s governor signed a landmark piece of legislation intended to reduce the state’s vulnerability to global warming and climate changes. Arnold Schwarzenegger intended to take California back to 1990 levels of carbon production. California has long been considered a trailblazer for the nation. The first tuition-free public colleges and universities were in California, as were the first significant tax revolts. California has the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy, with 36 million citizens.
The 1960s, which witnessed such social and economic changes in California, were also nearly the peak of California smog. Geographically, the state is divided into a cool and wet northern area and a hot and dry southern one. The southern part, especially around Los Angeles, became home to the nation’s worst smog in the 1970s. There were times when athletes, playing on sunny California shores, could not see the San Bernardino Mountains because of the air pollution. With its intricate network of freeways, some of them boasting 16 lanes of traffic, the Golden State had a new, foggy horizon, and some people wondered if it was still the last refuge for Americans wanting a freer way of life.
Southern California’s troubles with smog and air pollution improved considerably during the 1980s with greater use of unleaded gasoline and prohibitions against carbon emissions, but the state was simultaneously beginning another social change. Millions of immigrants, some legal and some illegal, were crossing the Mexican border with California. The state in 1962 had surpassed New York as the most populous of the 50 American states. Around 1999 California population reached 34 million, and it was considered the first true minority-majority state, meaning that people of Anglo-Saxon descent had become a social minority.
The fact that California had more people than any other state, as well as more cars, led to increased emissions from automobiles. Though the smog and air pollution had been contained, there were an increasing number of natural disasters that alarmed Californians. The 1994 Northridge Earthquake was followed by mudslides; the summers of 1995 and 1997 brought serious forest fires; and autumn 2007 saw one of the most destructive firestorms of all, carried by the notorious Santa Ana Winds. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Californians were acutely aware of the dangers posed to their coastal cities. A comparable typhoon or hurricane, both of which are rare on America’s West Coast, would have wreaked extensive damage. In the summer of 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger pushed for a new law to require California and its people to reduce carbon emissions.
The timing was fortuitous. Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, debuted at the box office in the summer of 2006, making the painful facts about global warming more apparent than ever. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, citizens and legislators alike felt a pressing need to address the problems of global warming, and on September 26, 2006, Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill No. 32, which was designed to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, set mandatory caps in 2012, and reduce emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2050. All these were to be implemented by the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
Critics emerged from the right and the left. Conservatives lamented the amount of power given to the state regulation board, and declared that global warming was a scientific hoax, put over on an unsuspecting population, while liberals (at least with respect to an environmental point of view) said that the levels of 1990 were anything but healthy: that it was insufficient to use as a benchmark. The bill went into law just the same, marking the boldest step implemented by a single state to that date.
