States Lead the Nation

California's #1! According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, California is the most energy efficient state in the nation. That's no small feat when you consider that California's economy is the eighth largest in the world and our population is larger than many countries. But more importantly, California has been setting the example for the nation on how to tackle the climate crisis, as we passed AB 32 in 2006 pledging to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

For this, we earned our share of flack from Republicans and Big Business who claimed that California's cap-and-trade program was bound to fail because we were stuck going-it-alone. Although the talking point stuck, it was as factually incorrect then as it is now.

As USA Today reports, with the new Republican Congress openly hostile to any attempt to reduce CO2 (largely because the climate deniers have taken over) and the last Congress failing to pass a national program to curb greenhouse gas emissions, states are now taking the lead in the fight against global warming:

Now that 2010 has gone down as one of history's hottest years, many states are choosing not to wait for Congress to tackle global warming and are taking their own steps to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

States are increasingly adopting stricter, energy-saving building codes, spending more money (partly federal) on energy efficiency and prodding big polluters to cut heat-trapping emissions.

We're not talking just one or two states, but 22 that are working together and with territories in Canada to form more comprehensive cap-and-trade programs that work on whole geographical regions. This is widely different (read: opposite) from the claim that Republicans and Big Business have been saying all along about California going-it-alone. That is, unless in their climate-denier world going-it-alone means working with 21 other states and Canada.

As David Kreutzer, an apologist for Big Business, said “Californians maybe have too high an impression of themselves and how important they are...To me it just doesn’t make sense to go it alone.” Well, David, unfortunately it will never make sense to you until you actually know what you're talking about.