It's fast becoming clear that all the talk about fighting global warming from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and leading Democrats in the state Legislature might be just so much hooey, happy talk to make them look good.
That's the implication of the final item in the Democrats' lengthy list of proposed cuts aimed to help bring this year's state budget into balance and make a start on solving next year's likely problems, an item also among the cuts in Schwarzenegger's newest budget blueprint.
That item: Cut $35 million by eliminating money that now allows counties to run the Williamson Act program to preserve agricultural lands.
You'd think these people would know better. Farmland preserved by the Williamson Act takes more of the world's primary greenhouse gas — carbon dioxide — out of the air than any other program now contemplated.
More than the proposed tailpipe emission changes and carbon trading programs proposed as ways to carry out the landmark 2006 A.B. 32, the most aggressive anti-climate change bill ever passed anywhere. More than scrubbing every smokestack in California. More than all proposals to clean up ship- and truck-caused emissions from all of California's ports put together.
Anybody Looking?
But both the Democrats and the governor apparently figured no one would notice if they listed the Williamson Act deep in their proposals. Schwarzenegger revealed himself as even more of an environmental hypocrite when he pledged to sign a Democratic budget-gap proposal even if it raised taxes without either a two-thirds legislative vote or a statewide vote of the people — so long as the Democrats agreed to change a few laws his campaign donors don't like, such as the 1970s-era California Environmental Quality Act, best known as CEQA.
Why should these people know better than to target the Williamson Act? Because when Schwarzenegger proposed a similar axing of the program in the summer of 2007, he was quickly forced to relent or be exposed as a greenhouse gas phony.
Here's a little background on the Williamson Act: It's a 42-year-old program named for John Williamson, a 1960s-era assemblyman from Kern County, that gives farmers a property tax subsidy if they pledge to keep their land in agriculture for periods of 10 or 20 years. Cost to the state this year was pegged at $35 million to protect 16.4 million acres of farmland from development.
What does this have to do with keeping carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air?
A Purdue University study early in this decade found that every acre of farmland pulls an estimated 0.107 tons of CO2 from the air each year. That's for all types of farmland, including grazing land, orchards, vineyards, rice fields, cotton fields and more. This is a minimum number, of course, because it's based on land in Indiana, where no green leaves or blades of grass are around during the winter to pull CO2 from the atmosphere.
The math works out to a minimum total of 1.754 million tons of carbon absorbed yearly by those 16.4 million Williamson Act acres. Or 3.5 billion pounds.
Value of Williamson
No other program even contemplates eliminating more than a fraction of that tonnage from the air.
And that doesn't even include the CO2 emissions avoided because the land has not been urbanized. Would those acres be turned into housing tracts without the Williamson Act? One late 1990s poll of farmers with land in Williamson Act contracts found one-third of them saying they would have sold to developers by that time if not for the property tax subsidy.
Schwarzenegger had an excuse for not knowing all this when he tried to eliminate the Williamson Act money in 2007. He and his aides said they didn't know about the Purdue study. But he learned of it during a press conference that July, and quickly reinstated the funds. Lawmakers also were informed about all this.
So no one can plead ignorance anymore as an excuse for axing the Williamson Act, whose funding amounts to a pittance in state budgetary terms.
They Don’t Care
Which suggests the only reason the program is on the chopping block right now is that lawmakers really don't care much about climate change. And the governor's repeating his action of two years ago is just one more indication that his very vocal and visible concern about global warming and the environment is really more about self-aggrandizement than anything else.
Mr. Elias is author of the current book "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It," now available in an updated third edition. He may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com
