Gone With The Wind

IBD Editorials ^ | November 7, 2008

[Kaslin]

Environment: From California to Missouri, four of five environmental initiatives lost at the ballot box. Voters are clearly still not ready for exorbitant costs and excessive regulation without clear benefits.

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President-elect Obama may have felt "a righteous wind" at his back during the campaign, but it did not translate into environmental victories at the ballot box, where one green initiative after another failed for a variety of reasons.

California voters shot down both clean-energy propositions on the ballot. Proposition 7 would have required utilities to generate 40% of their power from renewable energy by 2020 and 50% by 2025. It lost 65% to 35%.

Proposition 10 would have created $5 billion in general obligation bonds to help consumers and others purchase certain high-fuel-economy or alternative-fuel vehicles, and to fund research into alternative fuel technology. It failed 60% to 40%.

Even in San Francisco, the capital of liberalism and greenie fervor, voters rejected Proposition H, which would have mandated a rapid increase in the city's use of clean energy to achieve its goal of being 100% renewable by 2040. It would also have meant taking over the city's private electric company.

Obama took the former red state of Colorado, which also elected environmentalist Senate candidate Mark Udall over oil executive Bob Shaffer. Yet Coloradans struck down a measure to pay for conservation and clean energy by increasing taxes on oil companies.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

“a righteous wind” = ‘fartin’ in a fruit jar’

[goldstategop]

Americans will vote in liberals and then turn around and vote conservative with their pocketbooks!

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[pepperdog]

I find it kind of comical that California thinks they will have anything to say about the draconian environmental laws that will likely be implemented by an Obama administration. And I'll admit to taking a bit of satisfaction in their discomfort all the while cursing my own. We will all suffer heat, cold, high utility bills, shortages of heating oil and gasoline before this is over, if it is ever over. Somebody stand up and tell me how wrong I am and why, please.