Thursday, October 28, 2010

Opposition says proposition could kill green economy, jobs.

By Elizabeth Hsing-Huei Chou, EGP Staff Writer

For minorities who worry about both their health and their job security, Proposition 23 seems to set up an impossible choice.

Voters will be deciding on Nov. 2 if they want to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), California’s landmark air pollution control bill signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, until the state is able to sustain a 5.5 percent unemployment rate for a full year. Right now the unemployment rate in California is 12.4 percent.

Proponents warn jobs will be lost because businesses would not be able to afford the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions according to the standards set in AB 32.

Opponents say Prop 23 is an attempt by big, out-of-state oil companies to avoid spending money to clean up its act when people’s lungs and lives are at stake.

And yet minorities, especially Latinos who are disproportionately affected by both job insecurity and health issues such as asthma and lack of access to health care, are divided on this ballot initiative, according to the latest polls.

One voter that EGP interviewed, Commerce resident Rene Moreno, could go back and forth on the issue many times and not come to a satisfying answer. “You need to have a job in order to survive, and again if you don’t have your health, you won’t be able to work…” he said.

A survey done by the Public Policy Institute of California earlier this month shows 44 percent of Latinos plan to vote “yes” on Proposition 23, while 42 percent of Latinos plan to vote “no.” The survey focused on Latinos because they make up a third of California’s adult population and are the fastest growing voter group.

PPIC researcher Dean Bonner says the latest numbers actually show a 10 percent drop in support for Prop 23 among Latinos since September. This drop in support is also seen in the wider population, with 48 percent opposing it and 32 percent supporting it. Fifteen percent of likely voters are undecided.

Another PPIC poll in July indicated that Latinos support AB 32 as a concept in large numbers, about 80 percent. Meanwhile, in October, the poll showed Latinos are more concerned about job loss than whites. Of likely Latino voters, 36 percent are very concerned about job loss, and 21 percent are somewhat concerned. Among whites, 24 percent are very concerned and 17 percent somewhat concerned.

Latinos however are less likely than whites to believe that doing something about global warming will result in fewer jobs. The September survey showed 19 percent of all Latinos, and 25 percent of likely Latino voters say measures to prevent global warming will result in fewer jobs. Among whites, 23 percent overall think this, as do 27 percent of likely voters.

The importance of Prop 23 has also grown for Latinos in the last month, Bonner said. In September, 43 percent of Latinos said the outcome on this initiative was important to them. This month shows the percentage of Latinos who feel this way growing to 63 percent.

Jobs and health are not necessarily in opposition to each other, according to speakers at a “green salon” held Oct. 21 by clean air and lung health advocate BREATHE LA. They argued that Prop. 23 sets up a “false choice” between jobs and clean air.

The panelists made a case for voters to put their faith in the future of the green economy. The idea that AB 32 “flies in the face of job creation” is misleading, and actually, the opposite is true, said Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar).

One panelist argued that it is necessary to look for another way to handle the growth of global trade.

With the majority of trade going through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports “we are in fact carrying on our shoulders the effects of globalization,” said Luis Cabrales, a Deputy with the Coalition for Clean Air. “The fact that people in Ohio, in Nebraska, you name it, can pay $60 for a DVD player is thanks to the lungs of Southern Californians… did you ever think about it that way?”

Physician Rishi Manchanda says some people think pollution has improved because the air seems clearer, but there is still pollution that cannot be seen causing serious harm to people’s health. “While smog has improved in Los Angeles, we still… have an incredible burden in our society of all these microscopic particles,” he said.

These particulate matters are each a fifth the size of the average human hair and made up of a “combination of dust, soot, diesel exhaust particles, and wood smoke and sulfate aerosols” that “get lodged in our lungs,” he said.

BREATHE LA Director of Program and Advocacy Neal Richman said not only is there a health cost to 2 million adults and 800,000 children in California who have asthma, there is an economic cost, as well.

Hospitalization due to asthma costs California $750 million annually. Asthma also results in 14 million lost school days for children nation wide, and among adults, 12 million lost workdays, he said.

Of all the children in Los Angeles who suffer from asthma, nearly 60 percent are Latinos, Richman said.

“Latinos in Los Angeles County are more likely than any other ethnic groups to live in neighborhoods adjacent to plants that are the top emitters of toxic pollutants,” he said.

The local green jobs movement started as early as 2005, according to panelist Graciela Geyer, who says her organization, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education or SCOPE, was formed to address economic development in low-income communities.

Recent booms in the economy, such as in the computer technology industry, “really left communities, like in South Los Angeles behind, and it left a lot of folks in low-income communities behind,” she said.

But in 2005, seeing the potential for creating a “more sustainable economy,” SCOPE brought together “allies from low-income communities around the city” to make local policy that would include low-income communities in a promising economy, Geyer said.

For people in low-income communities, the economy and health are still the bottom-line, she says. “Our communities worry about jobs… the unemployment that we’re seeing now nationally is something our community’s been living with in much higher rates,” she said.

Fuentes called AB 32 a “perfect intersection of control and market forces.” The bill aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. While some methods to reach this goal have been devised, the California Air Resources Board, charged with enforcing the bill, is still in the process of coming up with “different methods to realize this 2020 goal… the work is continuing… but there is now opposition to all that sort of work,” he said.

Cabrales stressed the importance of AB 32. “It is setting a worldwide standard… The Clean Air Act of the United States says California is the only state in the nation allowed to set air quality standards stronger than the federal government…” he said.

“When California sets those guidelines, other states are allowed to follow California’s footsteps, allowed to implement or adopt steps that California implemented. So you see where we’re going with this,” he said.

He says Texas oil companies like Valero and Tesoro, which made significant contributions into the Prop 23 campaign, want to “continue to do business as usual.”

However, members of the business community who support Prop 23 say cap and trade, one of the “market force” methods already in place to achieve AB 32’s goals, could by definition lead to higher energy costs.

“Twenty percent of the emission reductions [to be achieved through AB 32] are coming from cap and trade… If we impose that cost on our economy and other states don’t, there will be out-migration of manufacturing. If we’re pushing manufacturing out, if we’re producing somewhere else, the emissions are occurring somewhere else, the globe is impacted and we’ve lost the jobs.” said Dorothy Rothrock, Senior Vice President Government Affairs of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, during a debate held by public radio station KPCC and the Los Angeles Times.

Rothrock, a co-chair of the AB 32 Implementation Group, said Prop 23, is really only applicable to the cap and trade method of reducing emissions, one of the methods that will go into effect next year. Meanwhile, the method is currently off the table at the federal level because there is a worry of “leakage” of existing practices to other places, rather than actual technology improvement.

It turns out the business community is also split on Prop 23, according to a Los Angeles Business Journal article on the initiative. The line seems to be drawn between groups associated with manufacturers coming out in support of Prop 23 because of the high-energy costs expected to come out of AB 32, and the clean technology sector.

In the Oct. 4 article, reporter Howard Fine writes “major manufacturers,” including oil refineries and cement plants, are “especially hard hit” by AB 32 because they use large amounts of energy.

Meanwhile companies more invested in clean technology are against Prop. 23 because they could lose out on the benefits of AB 32. Oracio Gonzales, a senior analyst at Craton Equity Partners, said at the BREATHE LA panel that large companies, including Shell and Walmart, are already investing in the green economy, but Prop. 23 could derail future investments, he said.

“The one thing AB 32 gives us is regulatory certainty… we just have a responsibility to not play in markets that don’t have that regulatory certainty,” he said.

Large companies “really see [green investment] as a competitive advantage,” he says, but if Prop 23 passes, Gonzeles said he “would have to go back to the partnership and immediately recommend that we pull the plug” and go overseas to invest in the green economy in Europe or China.

Gonzales pointed to 97,000 new jobs in manufacturing and 67,000 in construction that were created because of the green economy, and says we will look back and realize that was a “minuscule amount” compared to the number of jobs that would be created in the future.

Cabrales says it is not advocates like himself, but rather the businesses that are “not changing their mindset to ensure their own growth.” There is not much he can do about that, he said.

Today’s environmentalists no longer fit the old stereotypes, he said. “We are not tree-hugging environmentalists… we do not oppose growth. There’s no way we’re going to be able to stop growth at the ports… we are trying to make sure the growth that takes place is sustainable growth,” he said.

He acknowledges that the environmental movement and business interests can seem opposed to each other in the wider discussion. “Unfortunately, I think in the process of this debate we’re not seeing eye to eye, and so it’s been very difficult to be able to come… and sit at the table with a company and be able to expose all these problems without them looking at the bottom line, which is their… immediate financial benefit,” he said.

But according to Rothrock, the focus on the clean technology future ignores “the ninety-seven percent of the economy that is not in the energy sector” that are uncertain about the “big multi-million dollar cost [of AB 32’s cap and trade method] that’s going to be landing on manufacturers and consumers and local governments and everybody else that pays an electric bill.”

While those against Prop 23 say both health protections and jobs could be achieved through AB 32’s support of clean technology, Rothrock describes the debate as more of a fight between different types of businesses.

“Let’s be clear that we’re talking about business against business and who’s going to win,” Rothrock said.

Voters next week will have to consider the cases made on either side of Prop 23 – by those supporting Prop 23 who are worried about existing businesses that today employ most workers, and those who are against Prop 23 and are putting their faith in businesses of the future that they hope will also result in cleaner air as well as new jobs.