Jobs. A study by Redefining Progress found that, if properly implemented, the governor’s recommendations and/or AB 32 could create as many as 200,000 jobs in California—enough to lower the state unemployment rate by 15 percent. This is more than twice the estimate—based on only a partial implementation—produced by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA).

Savings. When fully implemented, these initiatives could provide the average California household with net savings greater than $750 per year, the equivalent of a 20 percent cut in the state income tax. Properly directed, these savings would be especially beneficial in assisting low- and moderate-income families, communities and small businesses overcome financial barriers to energy efficiency.

Exhaustive research of climatological data going back millions of years carried out by Lee Gerhard, senior scientist with the Kansas Geological Society, reveals an entirely different picture of the forces driving the myriad changes through which the earth's climate has passed. Gerhard dismisses the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide are a significant driver of climate and refutes the idea that climate change rates and today's slight global warming are unprecedented. "They are not," he flatly states. Instead, Gerhard makes two key points:

* Climate naturally changes constantly, from warmer to cooler and from cooler to warmer, and at many levels of intensity over time at many scales.

* Variation in solar activity closely correlates with global temperature variations, suggesting that the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the earth is a primary climate driver at the time scale of decades to millennia.3

"Overall," Gerhard says, "the earth's climate has been cooling for 60 million years, but that is only an average -- temperature goes up and down constantly."4 Addressing a September 20 Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by the Center for Science and Public Policy, Gerhard, in a power point presentation, showed the highly variable nature of the earth's climate over the past 16,000 years and, in more detail, during the last 2,000 years. "Depending on the period in earth's history that is chosen," he said, "the climate will either be warming or cooling. Choosing whether earth is warming or cooling is simply a matter of picking end points."5

Gerhard, whose research took place under the auspices of the Kansas Geological Survey and was not funded by industry, points out that the geological record shows that rises in greenhouse gases do not precede rises in temperature. Indeed, CO2 levels actually rose prior to the advent of the Little Ice Age (circa 1400).6 Moreover, CO2, the greenhouse gas most prominently cited as contributing to global warming, represents only about 1/4 of 1 percent of the total greenhouse gas effect, "hardly a device to drive the massive energy system of earth's climate," he says.

Gerhard's conclusions are supported by findings released Sept. 29 by CO2 researechers Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso. "[E]arth's mean near-surface air temperature is nowhere near the peak level of what it was a million or so years ago," they write. "Neither is it as high as it was during the mid-Holocene [circe 5,000 years ago], which was itself much cooler than all four of the interglacials that preceded it. In fact, it's not even as warm now as it was a mere 900 years ago, when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was fully 100 ppm (parts per million) less than it is today..."