How Trump’s Air Quality Policies Will Impact California | Susan Shelley

In California, we have had the privilege to set up our own emission standards. As a result of it, the smog is gone from the 70s, but the state is getting stricter and stricter. So we wanna have zero emission cars by 2035 and zero emission trucks by 2045. As a result of it, the economy of California has been impacted. With the new administration in office at the federal government, all of this may change. My guest today is Susan Shelley, who's been studying the impact of all these policies over the last few years. Today, she's gonna tell us how the emission standards work in California because they're so confusing and hard to understand, and how the Trump administration potentially could impact and change this ruling. I'm Siamak Khorrami, welcome to California Insider. Susan, it's great to have you back on, welcome back. Thank you, Siamak, great to be with you. Cost of living is a lot higher in California, especially cost of gas, transportation. Trump administration is now in, and California has had an organization called California Air Resources Board that has been able to set emission standards. And things may change with Trump administration. Well, the California Air Resources Board is charged with managing and monitoring and regulating air quality and emissions that affect air quality. But they have expanded into the global warming space because of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger. And that put CARB in charge of figuring out how to reduce greenhouse gases. So one of the things they came up with is a cap-and-trade program, which, by the way, has been proposed nationally, but Congress has never passed it. But we have it in California. What does it do? It essentially charges refineries and utilities for emitting greenhouse gases in the course of producing transportation fuels and electricity and other things, natural gas, manufacturing. If you emit greenhouse gases, you must buy a permit on this market that they created by essentially banning everything and then allowing people to buy permits to do it. So it builds into the price of gasoline. It builds into the price of natural gas and electricity. It's adding to the cost of everything that's made or moved in California. This is the cap-and-trade permit that these refineries and utilities must buy in order to operate. And so that extra cost is raising the cost of living in California all the way down the line. When these permits are bought, where does the money go? That's a very good question. The money goes to the state treasury. But they say it's going to the special fund in the state treasury, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And supposedly, this will fund projects that are going to reduce greenhouse gases. And this all gets back to trying to comply with the 2006 law and the various laws that tightened the standards even more for reducing greenhouse gases. This is all coming from the legislature. This is in the law. And this is how they're trying to enforce the law. We're gonna reduce greenhouse gases by charging more for gasoline and charging more for electricity and charging more for everything and then putting the money in this fund and spending it on projects that reduce greenhouse gases. What projects? The bullet train. 25% of the money that goes into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is going to the California High-Speed Rail Authority to make the nonsense stuff that they're doing, you know, their animated videos of what the train is gonna look like when it's finished, which it's never going to be. It's paying for construction work on a segment that's never gonna be completed of a train that was supposed to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and it's going from Merced to Bakersfield and they can't even finish that. They have no timeline. There's insufficient funds. Now they're probably gonna lose the federal funds. But you're still paying at the gas pump and on your electricity bill, you're still paying to build the bullet train. You're kind of paying it indirectly, right? Indirectly. So what happens is that the producers of the energy and the gas, they have to pay a tax, essentially, to carb. Yes, and that's a very interesting thing that you raise there by calling it a tax. The California Chamber of Commerce, when this passed, said this is a tax and it didn't get a two-thirds vote and it's not legal. And they went to court and the appellate court in California said it's not a tax. Why is it not a tax? Because it's not mandatory. Why is it not mandatory? Because if you don't want to pay it, you can go out of business. And that is how they got around the fact that it's a tax. They said it's voluntary. It's not voluntary if you're a refinery. You can't just go out of business without having a huge effect on the state of California, but that's what the court said. So the cap-and-trade program stands. And there's another one called the low-carbon fuel standard, which is essentially a credit-trading program imposed by CARB, and they adjust it from time to time. They're trying to make fossil fuels like gasoline more expensive. And I'm going to call them crackpot fuels because I'm a cynic, but other types of energy that are not fossil-fuel-based, it makes those transportation fuels less expensive because they're generating credits. Like hydrogen and- Yes, exactly. There are different biomass and whatever else. So those things generate credits, and the credits are purchased by the oil companies that make gasoline. So gasoline becomes more expensive and these other things become more profitable because of this credit-trading scheme. This is the low-carbon fuel standard. It's imposed by CARB, and they adjust it. Every few years, they adjust it to tighten everything down and make life even harder for everybody. The most recent adjustment was in November. They voted to raise, essentially to raise the cost of gasoline by about 65 cents a gallon. Now, they didn't vote for that, but that's the effect of what they voted for. And then recently, it was put on hold for some administrative reason, but it could still, it could be restarted again, and it will raise the price of gasoline in California only. And this is not the oil companies gouging. This is the state of California regulating. And why? To reduce greenhouse gases. And how much does that help? Not at all. It doesn't do anything. But CARB disorganization, the fact that they have been active in California has had a really good impact on the air quality. Well, certainly the emissions have been cleaned up since the 70s, no question about it. The question now is, what are we doing about greenhouse gases and global warming on the authority that CARB had to clean up pollution? You know, in the 1960s, when the Clean Air Act was passed, I think it was 1967, the Federal Clean Air Act, California already had some emissions standards. So California got a waiver to have tougher emissions standards than the rest of the country. And other states are allowed to follow California if they choose to, but they can't go any tougher than California. California has this special federal waiver. But they used it for greenhouse gas emissions instead of just pollution. They defined carbon dioxide, essentially, as pollution, and they decided they're gonna regulate greenhouse gases. Well, this affects the whole economy, because now they're doing things like trying to mandate electric cars or electric trucks and different sorts of things that they have tried, some they've abandoned and some they're still working toward to try and reduce greenhouse gases. This affects the auto industry nationally. This affects the oil companies nationally. This affects the economy nationally, that they are doing these different things to reduce greenhouse gases. Well, now the Trump administration is talking about removing that waiver. So that California will not be able to have its own standards. It will have to stick to the federal standards, and it can't go tougher than the federal standards, so that there's one standard for the whole country. If that happens, then a lot of these laws in California that CARB is enforcing, with these programs that make everything more expensive, may go away. Because they're only allowed because California has a waiver from the Clean Air Act. Now, what kind of laws could go away? What kind of regulations could go away? Well, for instance, this low carbon fuel standard might go away, and the cap and trade program might go away, and some of the other regulations that CARB is enforcing, they're enforcing on all different kinds of things, on warehouses, on vehicles, on trucking. You have all these different local air districts, and you have the California Air Resources Board, and they have different jurisdictions, but it all ties together, and it's all aimed, all these policies are aimed, even at places like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. They're trying to go to 100% so-called clean energy, which is very expensive, and why are they doing it? To reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So this whole idea of trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, no matter what it costs, is crazy in California. And it's hitting critical mass right now. I think people can't pay their electric bills all over the state. It's very, very tough, the way they're raising those rates. And why are they raising the rates? To meet these standards. And what do these standards accomplish? All of California is 1% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. The whole state, 1% globally. Maybe not even that much. If you shut down the state, if you clipped it off from North America, and let it sink into the ocean, it would not affect the global climate. It's 1%. So these little marginal changes that we're making, where we won't build housing because the distances are too far to work, and that'll be bad for the climate. And we have to have bike lanes because cars are bad for the climate. So you have to pay to build bike lanes. And you have to have higher prices for gasoline, and higher prices for electricity, and pressure everybody not to use power. What is that accomplishing? Except burdening the people of the state of California, lowering the standard of living in this state, increasing the poverty rate, bothering everybody all the time. What is it accomplishing? We are honored to be sponsored by Shen Yun. Shen Yun Performing Arts is reviving 5,000 years of lost Chinese traditional culture. 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We might have reached a point where it might not be worth it. Is that what you're saying? What I'm saying is that they've gotten off the subject of air pollution, and they've gotten onto the subject of global warming. And that is a very different thing. Air pollution and air quality needed to be cleaned up, was cleaned up. Instead of saying congratulations, what they did is they said, well, how are we going to keep our jobs now? Having fixed this, what are we going to do next? And now we have this enormous bureaucracy that is concerned about reducing global warming. But that drive comes from Californians, right? And the legislature and the government, right? It comes from- It comes from laws that the legislature passed on multiple occasions, yes. First one was 2006, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which said, now I'm not going to remember the exact percentage, but we had to go something like 40% below 1990 levels of greenhouse gases, something like that. And then later it was, they tightened it, they made it, we have to get there sooner and we have to get there further, and they just kept tightening it. And now we're on track, according to our laws, I think it was SB 100 a few years back from Kevin DeLeon. I might be wrong, but I think that's what it was. We have to get to 100% clean energy, meaning solar and wind and these other novelty things that are not the big producers of energy. And if you go to CAISO.com, C-A-I-S-O.com, which is the California Independent System Operator, you can see five minute updates day and night of the energy supply in California. Where it comes from, right? Where it comes from. And does it come from solar and wind? Not really. You'll find people saying, oh, we had 75 days in a row where during some point in the day we were 100% renewable. It doesn't matter because at some point during the day isn't enough. When the sun goes down, we're using natural gas, large hydroelectric facilities, nuclear power, and imported electricity. It's a game that they're playing. A lot of people are making money on these other types of energy and on the credit trading schemes and on all of this. Research and development for the newest technology. CARB wants to implement always the newest technology. We have these different programs for building standards and appliance standards, and these are all billed to the rate payers. This was in a report from the California Energy Commission, and there was also a report from the California Public Utilities Commission about why electricity rates are so high. One of the reasons was California has this building standards program, building and appliance standards, and they do all this research and development, and who's paying for this? The rate payers. It's all billed to the rate payers of the utilities. So it's coming into the cost of living, but it comes from a different way. It comes from the producer of the utility or provider of the gasoline or whoever. It comes from another layer, so the consumers don't really see that. They don't see why their rates are going up, but the rates are going up. You mentioned that CARB has been mandated by the legislature, so they're really following what they're told, right, to come up with these standards. The legislature said, you must hit these targets, and CARB came up with the programs on how to hit the targets. So there's plenty of blame to go around. I mean, I suppose the regulators could have said, this is going to be too expensive, and this is going to drive the cost of living, and you should think about this, but they didn't. They said, well, okay, you know, yes, sir, we'll do it, and they came up with these programs, which are very expensive, but as you said, they're indirect, so people don't realize why their costs are so high. They don't realize that the problems they're having are caused by the people they're electing and the policies they're pursuing. Well, there's another side to this because we have been interviewing a lot of the members of Senate and Assembly in California, and they were really concerned about cost of living, cost of utilities, and they're questioning how we can fix that, but they might not know that this is coming from this regulation. I think they are all on board with the climate change agenda of California leading the world on this policy, and they are not recognizing the connection between the policy and the costs. You know, they're concerned about the cost of living, but they're not honestly looking to see what's causing the cost of living. Obviously, there's an inflation problem in the whole country from the last few years, but California's cost of living is a little worse. It's a little higher, and why is that? Is it because grocery stores are gouging Californians and not people in other states? No, it's because food comes to the grocery store on a truck, and the trucking industry has been hit by a lot of regulations and requirements in California that make transportation more expensive, and the same with farming, and the cost of water is burdened by these various policies and regulations. All of these things are in the cost of living, and all of these things are man-made decisions from our government. Now, do you think it must be very hard to understand what's the cost of each policy? Well, the Cap-and-Trade Program, they have some numbers on that. I don't have them at the top of my head, but they are always looking to see how much money the bullet train is going to get, and so they're looking to see what the estimates are for what the Cap-and-Trade Program will produce. It varies because it's this artificial market that they created where people are bidding on the permits and then different things make the permits more or less expensive, but really, it's a fake market. There wouldn't be a market for this at all if you didn't have the requirement that people must buy permits to operate. You wouldn't have a market. They call it a market-based solution, but it's just government force. Now, you mentioned with Trump administration, all of this could change. How much can it change? Well, we'll all find out together because they're gonna go to court over it. If President Trump pulls California's waiver, California will go to court. Does it have to be through Congress or it can be just an executive order? That's a good question. I think he could probably try it as an executive order because it's regulatory, so it might be from the executive branch, but they're gonna go to court and they're gonna argue about all these things, and we'll see where it comes out. One of the things that's been interesting about the Trump administration so far is that President Trump has used a very targeted approach to go after particular legal precedents that have empowered the bureaucracy, and he's going after them. He has intentionally, I think, tried to get himself sued over various things to go after specific decisions that the bureaucracy, that the courts have made that have empowered the bureaucracy. For example, there's a decision from 1935 called Humphrey's Executor versus United States, and essentially what this decision said is the president cannot fire the heads of independent agencies in the executive branch. How can you have agencies in the executive branch that don't answer to the executive? Well, that's what FDR wanted to know, and it's what Franklin Roosevelt wanted to know. Congress had created the Federal Trade Commission, and when Roosevelt beat Hoover in the 1932 election, he did not want Hoover's conservative people overseeing his new policies because he was not gonna be conservative, and he didn't want any conservative regulators, commissioners, people in the administration. He wanted them out. Well, the FTC law, the FTC Act said you can only fire an FTC commissioner for cause. You can only remove him for malfeasance and various things of that type. FDR said no. He said, I want him to resign. He wouldn't resign. He said, all right, I hereby remove you, effective immediately. Sends him a one-sentence letter. I hereby, you are hereby removed as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Well, this was William E. Humphrey, and he filed a lawsuit because he said, I have a case. You know, there's no malfeasance. He's firing me just for policy. He can't do that. So he passes away. He had a different kind of termination, and he passed away. And so the case is Humphrey's executor versus the United States. Humphrey's executor sued the government to get his salary for the rest of his six or seven-year term that he hadn't filled out yet. He wanted the money to the estate. So it goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court rules against Roosevelt and says, nope, this is fine because this is not an executive agency. The FTC is sort of, looks like it, but it's actually quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial. Well, where's that in the Constitution? No place. So from that day to this, the Humphrey's executor case has allowed Congress to create all these very powerful, independent regulatory agencies. And what is Trump doing? He's firing the heads of these agencies very selectively in a way that tees up for the Supreme Court a review of the Humphrey's executor decision. And what that means is these so-called independent agencies, which can go off and pursue their own policies no matter who's president, no matter what the voters think, accountable to nobody, not to Congress, not to the president, accountable to nobody, they will be accountable to the president, which means the voters, when they vote for change, could actually get change. Instead of just getting cosmetic change on the surface, the government would change, the policies would change, the enforcement proceedings would change. And that is very, very powerful stuff. Do you think this is happening in California, too, with some of these agencies that are controlled by different boards? Or do you think California is different? Well, California, I think, is more controlled by the governor because these are mostly appointments. Well, they're appointments from the governor and the legislature, but because it's a one-party state and has been for a while, they're all of the same party. So that is a problem. And once they're appointed, they're an independent agency. And yes, it is a problem. They really answer to no one. And the legislature is finding that right now as they go to try to find out why the Public Utilities Commission and the Energy Commission won't do anything about these different rates. They're finding that these regulators are blowing them off, you know? They don't have to do what the legislature wants. That is a problem because then the voters can't control- Can't get answers because situations change. Maybe 10, 20 years ago, the number one concern for Californians was climate change and global warming. But now the cost of living may be much more important to them than the climate change and global warming because the situation has changed, right? The situation has changed. And, you know, people vote differently or circumstances change, but the government seems to run on autopilot, answerable to nobody. And you have this deep regulatory state in California. It's restricting housing and it's restricting transportation and it's restricting development and job-creating businesses can't operate here. Everybody's regulated to death and they're leaving the state and the jobs are leaving. And that creates a new kind of affordability problem because there's two sides to affordability. What does it cost and how much can you pay? And if you can't find a job and people who are coming out of college, people who are changing careers, they can't find work in California that pays what it costs to live here. And that's a huge issue. And it is because the government's priority is driving businesses out and then trying to create social welfare programs or higher minimum wage laws as a compensation to help people who can't pay their bills. They're probably gonna look at changing the structure of electricity billing so that people who are low income get more breaks and people who are high income get no breaks. That's making it more like a tax and less like a utility rate. Might not even be legal, but they wanna do something for people to make things more affordable, but they don't wanna change what's causing the thing to be expensive and they don't wanna change what's causing the jobs to go away. That's why we're in the situation we're in. Do you think it's clear to people that the root cause of these issues, do you think it's clear? No, I don't. I don't think it's clear at all. People probably wonder why things are so much worse in California than they used to be, why they're so much worse than they are in other states. They probably wonder why that is and they don't know. It's all manmade and it can all be fixed. That's the positive thing. It can all be fixed. These are manmade decisions, manmade priorities and they can be changed and things can get better. And do you think there is a change in people's perception of how things are going in California, especially after the fires? You're in LA, right? You saw the impact of it. You were evacuated yourself. The fires were catastrophic, not for me personally, but for all the people in Pacific Palisades, all the people in the Eaton Fire area, everywhere that there were fires, people had just this catastrophic impact. It wasn't a little impact. It wasn't a small problem. It's catastrophic. And now the government's making it worse by talking about not months to start rebuilding, but years before you can start rebuilding. And everybody seems to be suspicious that there are plans to remake these communities in a more high-density way instead of replacing what was burned and what was lost so the character of the community will change. I think a lot of people are concerned about that from the government. The priorities of the city government in Los Angeles in particular are all wrong. They're not respectful of private property at all. They want to redistribute wealth. The city council and the mayor, they have a mindset that everything should be driven by equity, which they define as no one should have more than anybody else. And yet people do. Some people have worked very hard for what they have, and their families have worked very hard through the years. And they have what they have, and it's theirs. But there's no respect for that private property. It's more like you should be grateful that we're gonna let you rebuild it all is sort of the attitude. And I think it grates on people. Susan, you mentioned that it might take years now to rebuild, but the governor expedited, even the Coastal Commission, the state expedited. What are your thoughts on that? Well, that is interesting. It shows how many regulations we have in this state. As soon as you have a problem, you have to suspend regulations. You have to have a state of emergency and suspend business as usual in California because business as usual in California is strangulating everybody. So we just have a situation recently where the governor declared a state of emergency for wildfire prevention. And what he says in his declaration of emergency is a confession that regulators have prevented the types of fire mitigation procedures that used to be routine. Controlled burns, other types of land management where they're clearing fire breaks one way or another. In urban areas, in rural areas, in forest areas, we have land management practices that prevented wildfires from getting out of control. You're always gonna have wildfires in California, but they didn't get out of control and break records to the point where they couldn't be stopped like they do now, like they have in the last 10 years. Well, this started in about 2000 when the California Air Resources Board, speaking of them, they decided that we should have smoke guidance, smoke management guidance, smoke management regulations. And they decided to make it more difficult to do these prescribed burns that the fire departments used to do to manage the land because now you had to have an air quality plan and you had to have an air quality permit and you had to go through all of this process. And by the time you did that, it was too late or it was too expensive. There were a lot less of these prescribed burns in California. So that happened in 2000 when those regulations went in. You let everything grow for seven years, 10 years, and what's gonna happen? Record-breaking fires. We had, I think, three fires in San Diego broke records and then we had the Paradise, the Camp Fire, breaking record. Every fire is breaking records. The Woolsey Fire, breaking records. Now the Palisades Fire, breaking records. The most number of structures, the most number of acreage. Why are they breaking records like a home run hitter on steroids? It's because everything was allowed to grow without land management practices that used to be routine. So now the governor signs this declaration of emergency and what does it say? They're gonna stop preventing these processes. They're going to force the regulators to let these things go forward in a more expedited way. Well, thanks a lot. That could have prevented a lot of heartache if you'd done it in, whoever was governor in 2001 had done it. But no, we're gonna let the California Air Resources Board do whatever it wants because we all believe that they're on the right side of history. And obviously air pollution is a significant concern, but wildfires cause pollution. Wildfires cause greenhouse gas emissions. The building standards program that I was talking about earlier, the estimate of how much it reduces greenhouse gases was something like, I think it was 40 million tons over 30 years. I think that was the number. And a wildfire, the wildfire season in 2020 alone, one year, I think it was 127 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. One fire will just make- One fire season, one year of fires in California was 127 million, I think was the number. That's three times the savings of 30 years of doing all these things. Of 30 years of doing these appliance regulations. And there is probably a significant cost to doing them. Absolutely there is. And people don't like the new, sometimes the new standards make the appliances worse, or they make the buildings more expensive. But we're doing that because greenhouse gas emissions. So the rate payers are paying for the research and development that goes into those standards. And why are they, by the way, if something, why aren't the investors paying research and development costs? Why is that on the rate payers? So the rate payers are paying for the standards, then you're paying more for the dishwasher, more for the house. And over 40 years, it's making not a dent in greenhouse gas emissions. And then we have these other regulations, which are intended to prevent pollution from prescribed burns, limited fire, to prevent bigger fires. And then we have the bigger fires and we blow out all our goals. How is that rational? Susan, you mentioned that this is fixable. It easily can be fixed. So what's the fix? Well, the fix is to stop worrying about these greenhouse gas targets because they're not useful and they're very expensive. That would be the first fix. Stop the targets, just pause the targets, just pause them until the cost of living is under control. That would be the biggest help to stop all of it because now it's in everything. It's bothering everybody in every industry and particularly it affects housing. I think where it's most crucial is in the housing sector because we have this vehicle miles traveled standard now in CEQA. It's an impact to build housing in a suburban area. So that comes from CARB-2? That comes from CARB-2. It's from these greenhouse gas emission regulations. So you can't build, let's say there's land in an outlying area, it's perfect for housing. Like San Bernardino or like some places where there are more. Right, because of the vehicle miles traveled standard, the housing developer has to mitigate this impact under CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which was never supposed to affect housing at all, but that's another story. Because the vehicle miles traveled standard looks at the likelihood that people will be commuting to a particular location for work and measures the number of miles that they're driving and just declares this to be an impact on the environment, you can't build a housing development. Do they have to pay? They either have to pay more than is reasonable or they have to go build a bike lane in another part of the state that does a mitigation, it's a racket is what it is. You know, they're making everything illegal and then they're shaking people down for permission to do it. But essentially what's happened here, in the essence is they've declared that human life is bad for the planet and they're gonna make it as hard as possible. That's the overarching thing. They might think that they're saving the human, that's what, they're saving humanity because- There's no evidence that they're saving humanity with what California is doing. Where's the evidence that that's saving humanity? It's not even saving California. Supposedly we're helping the planet so we don't have these wildfires and wild climate swings. Has it, is it better? Of course it's not better. This is nonsense. It's all made up. It's a racket and people are making a lot of money off of it. So you mentioned pausing everything. How hard is it for the legislatures that are in charge now to do that? Is that, are Californians open to working with them on that? Or do you think this is, Californians already made their mind up that they want the green movement? Well, it seems that way. I don't think they connect the green movement to the cost increases. And until they figure that out, it will be politically impractical because people will truly believe that what California is doing is saving the planet. But it's not. It's not. It's not saving the planet. It's just costing a lot of money. And it hits the people who can afford at least the hardest and it's causing the housing crisis because we're not building enough homes. It's causing the high cost of living. It's causing the high cost of food. It's causing companies to leave the state because the costs are too high. It's why the electricity bills are so high. It's all of this trying to reach these climate goals. And we're at a kind of an inflection point because some of these things are about to get a lot worse. The LADWP is trying to get to this, I think they call it LA 100, where they're trying to get that last 10% to get to 100% renewable. They can get to 90%, but they want to get to 100% clean energy. Well, that last 10% is going to bankrupt people because it raises the costs so much. And we don't really know the impacts because you mentioned California only emits 1% of the whole global emission. And if we even cut that, there is not a significant impact in people's lives. There's no... What California is doing is for show. And also to try and... But the idea was everybody else would follow this, right? If California does it, then Europe will follow it, other states in the US will come. But it's going in the other direction where countries that have tried to get to net zero are going the other way now because it's too expensive. Like Germany and others, they've kind of changed their policies, right? I think in Britain, I think in Germany changed their policies. I think Germany's building coal plants. I think China's building coal plants. Coal is very inexpensive. Natural gas is cleaner. We could be burning natural gas. You know, in California, we have oil and gas in this state. The government doesn't want to extract it. The government wants to bring it in from other sources. So we bring in petroleum on tankers. You bring in oil on tankers from other countries. We import oil. We import electricity on high transmission wires from other states. How do they make it in the other states? We don't ask. They might make it from coal, right? They very well might make it from coal. We don't ask. But you can go to keso.com and see the supply and you'll see that we have imports every night. Imported electricity because the sun went down and solar doesn't work when the sun goes down. Who knew? If these ruling changes and Trump administration comes out, California cannot set its emission standards, would the CARB agency get abolished or would they continue? Well, it's hard to imagine that California would get rid of something called the Air Resources Board. That sounds like it's cleaning up pollution. And we don't want to have pollution. Obviously, we don't want to have polluted air. Nobody wants to go back to what we used to see in the 1970s TV shows. We have this brown haze in the background of these old detective shows that you can see. We don't want to go back to that. But the question is, now that we've cleaned up the air, now that we have all of these cleaner cars and cleaner trucks and cleaner everything, what do we need to do from here to make sure that we don't starve ourselves to death by raising our cost of living in California? So I don't think CARB will go away, but CARB only enforces what the legislature tells them to do. All of the things that CARB is doing, the cap and trade program, the low carbon fuel standard, the various things that it's doing, this is trying to meet targets that the legislature has set. And sometimes that the federal government has set in the Clean Air Act, but the climate stuff is from California. And the legislature is the people we vote for. So we send the people there. So essentially it comes from us at the end of the day. The mandate comes from California. Right, it comes from Californians who have been convinced, wrongly I think, that what California does to reduce greenhouse gases has an effect on the global climate, but it doesn't. And to the extent that people in other states follow California, does that have an effect? Well, they don't want to follow California. You know, they don't want our high electricity costs. They don't want our high food costs. They don't want our high housing costs and all the rest of the things that are the result of the impact of this climate agenda. They don't want that, so they're not doing it. For the legislative body, people that are in the legislature right now, if they come out and talk about this to the public, do you think it will hurt them significantly? Because in the last few years, they've been going this direction. Or do you think it's possible to come and... Well, I'm very cynical. I think they've been well compensated by donors in some of these industries that benefit from these laws to support these laws, and they will continue to do so. This is for the voters to figure out. A lot of people in the state are not familiar with the California Air Resources Board and how it operates. Even people that have been here for many years and have been influential in even the board of politics. How did you get into studying them? I believe the first time I became aware of what the California Air Resources Board was doing was some people got in touch with me from the trucking industry, and they were talking about how the engines in diesel trucks were made illegal all at once. And everybody had to get new engines or they had to get filters for their engines because every truck was made illegal at the same time, and not just trucks, but construction equipment and anything that has a diesel engine. All of a sudden, CARB just decided not to require that when they are replaced, they're replaced with something else, but immediately, they were illegal. And people were having to sell their equipment for pennies on the dollar. A lot of people reached out to me about that and how outrageous it was, and I started to look into it, and I saw that there's this independent agency that can pass these regulations. They go through a so-called public process, but it's just theater. You can make your public comments, nothing happens because they do what they wanna do anyway. They were just basically raising the cost of trucking, putting independent truckers out of business. They didn't care, they didn't care. And I went to one of the meetings in person, and a bunch of people were bussed in. There were buses outside. They were bussed in, and they were all wearing identical T-shirts, and they were protesters, and they were there to make a lot of noise in favor of this regulation, which was gonna put people out of business and raise the cost of living in California. And they had their scripted talking points. That wasn't exactly scientific evidence. It was like they would say things like, my grandmother had asthma, but we don't know what caused the asthma. We're in a hearing about trucking, and where's the evidence? Didn't need evidence. They were just very emotional and wearing T-shirts and coming on buses, and they were protesters. And that was my first introduction to one of these meetings. That was at the South Coast Air Quality Management District. And I became aware of how much power these independent agencies have, how they can essentially strangle the economy of Southern California and the whole state of California. There's air districts all over the place. They can strangle the economy with these regulatory changes, and they are accountable to nobody. It was stunning to me how much power they had over how much money is coming out of your wallet, and they are accountable to no one, not to the legislature, not to the governor, not to the courts, not to anybody. That was, I think, my introduction to it, and the more I looked into it, the more I saw that this is an out-of-control government. They talk the talk about, oh, we're for clean air. Well, everybody's for clean air, but when you dig a little more, you see that they're for a lot of things that are not directly related to clean air. They're for helping certain new technologies emerge, and gee, I wonder who donated to the various politicians or the nonprofits that some of these commissioners were running on the side, and you just start to look at that and say, something here is just not right. I think that's true of a lot of these boards and commissions in California, that they have a lot of power. No one really knows what they're doing until you try to build something in California and find out how many of them you have to talk to to get their permission in order to build something in California. You don't know how bad it is. Susan, you're mentioning that these agencies are, there is a regulation that's making things cost a lot more. You know, when CARB comes and puts a regulation in cap-and-trade, and then these, a refinery has to buy these credits, and this cost will ultimately go to the customers, the pump, and why don't these industry leaders come forward and talk to the public about it? That's a very good question. I think some of them have. In some cases, they've spoken out, but it's not the speaking that has the impact. What has the impact is backing other candidates, and why don't they do that? Some of these industries could form political action committees, independent expenditure committees, and they could, they have the ability to do what the unions do on the other side, which is to essentially elect people who will pursue the policies that are beneficial. They don't, really. They go very gingerly, and I think one of the reasons is that in this regulatory strangled state, they can hurt you a lot. If you cross the people who are in power, and you make them angry, they can wreck your business. Nice little business you have there, shame if anything should happen to it. Sometimes it looks like that, and of course, no one wants to say so, but I think there's a lot of fear of what the government could do because the government is in everybody's business in so many ways. Susan Shelley, columnist at the Side of California News Group. It was great to have you on California Insider. Thank you so much. Great to be with you, as always. Let us know what you think about us having a privilege to set our own emission standards in California, and should this waiver get taken away or not. You can always email me at ciamacacaliforniansider.com or comment. We always read all of your comments and emails. Remember, this is Ciamac Coramie, and this is California Insider. We'll see you next time.