It appears that most of your animus regarding AB 32 stems from two places: Basic ideology (you don't like it) and CARB's report.

Yes and no. A political and policy matter, I think the state's global warming law is going to be a disaster and it will not achieve the goals that either the Legislature or the governor promise. It's actually more than that; but for the purposes of a 1,200-word opinion piece, I can see how that might be the impression left on some readers. I should mention that the genesis of the article was a much longer paper on regulation in California, which will appear as a chapter in a book that the Claremont Institute is publishing in a couple of months.

Since CARB is the lead agency designated by AB 32 with creating the regulations implementing the law, the agency has conducted all sorts of studies. It had to. It was compelled by law to do so. There have also been a number of independent reports, including a Harvard University study that's a couple of years old now that concluded the benefits promised by the state were "too good to be true."

After having seen Who Killed the Electric Car? I have an enormous problem with taking anything emanating from CARB as a non-political, purely objective document. It's clear they're driven by their own ideology, and one that's hardly congruent with California's stereotypical eco-weenie dome-living hippie thang. In fact they seem as motivated by big business, big profits, and pocket-lining as any lump of bureaucracy in America.

You're partly right. The nature of regulation is such that the regulators are almost always in bed with the regulated. Industries accept regulations for a variety of reasons, usually because they can pass costs onto consumers or can limit competition. In the case of AB 32, certain industries have reason to favor more regulation rather than less. Certain energy companies, for example, are keenly interested in the tax breaks and subsidies that the state is dangling to spur development of renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal. The state needs to do this because none of those technologies are economically viable or efficient without subsidies.

So if CARB says somewhere in their report that AB 32 will kill California's economy, I'm inclined to think it didn't slip out accidentally.

They hedged their language, certainly, in the early draft. And most traces of gloom and doom has been purged from the latest draft, which came out last month. Even so, as I made clear in the piece (I think), CARB doesn't think killing the economy is such a big deal, either. They think that they can collect $143 billion in carbon credits over eight years from the industries that stick around to pay, and then redistribute the money to the people who get thrown out of work as a result.

Further -- and I don't think I need to go into great detail on this -- need I point out that, in the event of global warming's destruction of human civilization, California's economy will hardly be a worry. Your argument might work for the "Global Warming is a Myth" choir, but it's not convincing for potential parishioners on the street. If one truly believes that Earth's ecosystem is in trouble -- and I'm not saying I do but if -- dithering because you're worried California's manufacturing sector might shed a few jobs is ridiculous, like straightening pictures on the wall while your house burns down around you.

To the extent I've commented at all about global warming or climate change or whatever we're calling it next week, I've avoided the science and focused on the policy prescriptions. The point is, the policies that California proposes wouldn't make a lick of difference in altering whatever changes the climate may or may not be undergoing but almost certainly would diminish our quality of life no matter what happens. It isn't just a matter of shedding "a few jobs," Chris. It's about the freedom and economic well-being of millions of people in this state, and the power that the state would claim for itself on the basis of the flimsiest of hopes.