Our View: Raising price of pandering

Despite a state budget up to $20 billion in the hole, despite Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging 10 percent cuts for state departments, and despite revenue lagging behind expectations, the governor plans to add 211 more state employees at a cost of $55.4 million, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross reported last week.

Actually, they reported "no fewer than" 211 of these greenhouse-gas busters will be added at taxpayer expense, drawing up to $102,000 a year, the annual salary for the attorneys among them.

Most of these new jobs are slated for the Air Resources Board, an imperious bureaucracy that intends to enforce the far-reaching, potentially economically devastating and piously named Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, also known as Assembly Bill 32.

The ARB is busily drafting regulations that will touch every aspect of California life as its bureaucrats seek to eliminate human-emitted greenhouse gases. Californians should be leery of the unaccountable ARB's new mission, which calls to mind a combination of Star Chamber proceedings and Orwellian rule enforcement.

Defending these egregious intrusions was a spokesman for Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, who said AB32 is, "probably the most popular bill passed in the last decade."

Sadly, Steven Maviglio, speaking for the speaker, more accurately pegged AB32's significance than he may have realized. Former movie star Gov. Schwarzenegger, ever the crowd pleaser, joined the Democrat majority two years ago pandering to popular sentiment to bring this law into being.

But as scientists increasingly cast doubt on man's contribution to global warming, and science confirms we've experienced nearly a decade of cooling and projects another decade of cooling ahead, AB32's massive economic costs look more and more suspect. And that's if one believes CO2 causes global warming, let alone whether man's tiny contribution of greenhouse gases is even significant.

There's a huge cost to popular pandering, and $55.4 million in new salaries the state can't afford is probably only a small fraction of it.