Greening California To Death

California has long been a leader in the environmentalist/global warming movement, often to its own detriment.  While it's true that California has its share of environmental problems (some of America's most polluted cities are in California - I know, I live in one), California's politicians are setting the state up for failure.

Due to California's environmental movement, forests cannot be cleared of underbrush, which regularly results in out-of-control wildfires nearly every summer (which inevitably lead to mudslides nearly every winter).  Due to the environmental movement, pumps that provide the state's agriculture center with badly-needed water have been shut down to protect the Delta smelt, a fish that lives in the Sacramento Delta.  This has cost California hundreds of jobs.  The California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulates the trucking industry, driving up the costs for any companies that rely on trucking to get their products from place to place, which in turn drive prices up for consumers.

The latest travesty in Californian environmental regulations is a plan to adopt a "green" building code, which no doubt will make it more difficult and more expensive for home builders to build houses and businesses to expand.  This is just what California needs: yet another regulation that will hurt businesses and drive up costs for consumers.

In a down economy, in a state that is worse off than most of the rest of the nation, more regulations are just what we need.  This is why liberalism doesn't work (by the way, Arnold may have run as a Republican, but he's never been anything approaching conservative).  It doesn't matter how bad the economy is, the government isn't going to stop spending, taxing and regulating until it's too late to fix the problem - and for California, "too late" is approaching fast.  For California, the only difference between Arnold Schwartzenegger and Gray Davis is how quickly the state goes bankrupt.