via IBD Editorials

Cap-And-Trade: The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?

Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” At the time he said the regional agreement “sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program.”

Since then, the nation has slid into a recession, and the only thing man-made about climate change has been the manipulated and manufactured claims that we are doomed if we don’t act to fight it.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

Arizona joined the climate initiative under its previous governor, Janet Napolitano, now secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

All 50 states agreed to the cap-and-trade pact, but left implementation up to each state. Only California is ready to start its program in 2012.

Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy.

Rumblings of discontent are also being heard in California. Assemblyman Dan Logue is sponsoring an initiative for the November ballot that would halt implementation of the state’s global-warming law, Assembly Bill 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5% from the current 12.4%.

“The state’s greenhouse reduction program is not a freebie,” Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said last month. “Large costs foisted on an unemployment-riddled state economy and increased electricity rates … are not affordable at this time, if ever.”

A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, and commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable found implementation costs for AB32 “could easily exceed $100 billion” and that by 2020 the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household per year.

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