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I read the whole thing - very interesting analysis.

IMHO the overriding, and most troubling, theme repeated in Arnold's proposal is the idea that government mandates can generate demand and essentially create consumer markets for hydrogen and other "environmentally friendly" products. As you stated quite well, the development of any market involves a long and quite complicated supply chain, but this is particularly true of automotive markets. It's quite likely auto makers would rather forgo CA sales than reconfigure a portion of their supply chain in an endeavor that will surely generate losses. 85% of the previous market with a 2% margin is better than that 85% plus the additional 15% at a 5% loss (not actual numbers, but representative).

I won't get into the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the absurdity of proposing hydrogen as a viable fuel source, because that seems to be common knowledge. But rest assured such grandstanding is infuriating.

Incidentally, can you provide sources regarding the emissions of plants/trees versus factories (essentially stating that plants may produce more particulates than factories are allowed by law)? I found that fascinating and would love to bookmark the source for future use.

IMHO the overriding, and most troubling, theme repeated in Arnold's proposal is the idea that government mandates can generate demand and essentially create consumer markets for hydrogen and other "environmentally friendly" products.

"I'm the government and I'm here to help you."

And Schwarzenegger has been quite clear about shutting down the development of inexpensive offshore oil. He intends to create artificial scarcity, thus driving up the cost of traditional petroleum-derived fuels compared to these undeveloped infant-market alternative fuels. Expensive energy is one of the most critical problems in California now.

This is an improvement on Gray Davis?

This is exactly the kind of "fiscal conservatism" that anyone with a brain and set of eyes could see that Schwarzenegger is all about.

Agreed about the hubris of contrived markets.

Incidentally, can you provide sources regarding the emissions of plants/trees versus factories (essentially stating that plants may produce more particulates than factories are allowed by law)? I found that fascinating and would love to bookmark the source for future use.

I've ran across a few references over the years, but don't keep specific track of that one. It's common knowledge in the emissions treatment business that a medium sized pine tree produces about 8# per day of VOC, mostly terpenes (terpentine). It smells good. :-) By contrast, it stands to reason that concrete doesn't outgas very much.

Believe it or not, regulators are getting after the use of wood in construction because of the outgassing of terpenes and their effects on indoor air quality. Particle board is a real offender there.

When I was in the business (about five years ago), the BAAQMD MACT threshold was 1#/day of VOC, regardless of the size of the process. It's insane. It didn't matter if the waste stream was 100,000 cfm of almost entirely water saturated air at room temperature, if it had that one pound in it, we had to raise the destruction temperature to 1,300° in an RTO. We ran equipment that was so big that the error in the VOC assay test was larger than the threshold by a factor of six.

So I did a little googling for you and found out that the hip term for tree breath these days is "phytogenic VOC" (note: commit hip term to memory in order to sound more scientific in the fuuuuture). Here's one that you might like Phytogenic volatile organic compounds emission by russian forests. I don't have time to read it right now, but it looked promising (warning: it's a pdf file).

Here's a quote for you (bold emphasis mine):

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) are emitted into the lower troposphere from natural sources in marine and terrestrial environment. The emissions of isoprene by vegetation provide the dominant input of reactive non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) to the atmosphere. Surface fluxes of BVOCs are of interest because of their role in tropospheric chemistry (ozone and aerosol formation). However, the emissions of these compounds remain still very uncertain. In a way to improve the existing BVOC inventories and so refine our understanding on the chemical processes in the atmosphere, it is particularly relevant to test, and possibily improve, the emissions algorithms. A quantification of the errors in the emission estimates using appropriate flux measurements are necessary for that purpose. Oh, they use "biogenic." Lol! Looks like a good paper, I might read that one.

I'm pinging snopercod because I sent him some similar stuff a while ago and then he went looking for more.