CARB: An Agency Out of Control

The following was given as a speech by local businessman Bryan Bloom at Saturday’s Tea Party rally in San Diego (read organizer Dawn Wildman’s account of the rally here).  Mr. Bloom provided his remarks to San Diego Rostra.  Links to relevant documents are included…

Guest Column
by Bryan Bloom

My name is Bryan Bloom and I own Priority Moving, Inc, a San Diego company. I am actively involved in the Suspend AB32 initiative and in getting the word out about CARB – also known as the California Air Resources Board. My background includes a degree with a minor in Biochemistry from UCSD and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

AB 32 – the Global Warming Solutions Act – was passed in 2006 when unemployment was 4.8%, but now it is at 12.5% and climbing. It is a job killing bill. We are the only state to have such a law.

A study commissioned by the Governor’s office estimates it will cost each household $4,000 per year to comply with the act and small businesses $50,000 per year to comply. with a total implementation costs in the $60 billion range. It took legal action to get the study released to the public, even though you paid for it.

AB 32 costs jobs and money – your jobs and your money, no one will be untouched, everything will cost more, California will be worse off economically period.

Everyone here should support www.Suspendab32.org to get a suspension on the ballet. It would suspend this job killing bill until unemployment gets back to 5.5%.

Jerry Brown is renaming the initiative so it reads as if you are voting for polluters, not saving jobs.

CARB stands for the California Air Resources Board – they have an annual budget of almost $800 million of our tax dollars and 1,300 employees. They essentially pass regulations to keep the air clean. At one point when we had dirty air, this made sense, but now California is the 4th healthiest state in age adjusted mortality. This organization is not needed anymore and we could hire 7,000 teachers with this money.

CARB is an agency out of control. They are allowed to pass laws that affect and kill jobs and entire industries, have no oversight except from the Governor, have no real accountability, have the ability to fine companies sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then keep those fines. It is truly the inmates running the asylum. This is the same agency that wanted to make it criminal to have underinflated tires. No joke!

For any of you John and Ken fans, you already know about CARB as they have exposed some of the most egregious and outlandish things going on there.

The one that should get you the most angry is Trangate. Imagine the following. CARB wants to pass the only and most draconian diesel truck rules in the nation. These rules will cause hundreds of businesses to close their doors, cost the state thousands of existing jobs and further reduce the tax base while increasing the need for public services.

However, before they can pass this rule, they need a scientific study. This study is supposed to “Estimate Premature Deaths from Exposure to PM2.5”. What is PM2.5? Fine particulate matter is anything that is smaller than 2.5 microns. So this includes road dust, diesel exhaust, matter from natural fires, fireplaces, waste disposal, on and on. Theoretically PM2.5 can affect your health if you are exposed for long periods of time.

What they don’t tell you at CARB is that the greatest PM2.5 contributors are not controllable. Natural fires and road dust produce 10 times more PM2.5 than diesel trucks. Only about 3% comes from diesel trucks and that is what CARB wants to reduce. So even if they can reduce this, the real effect will be marginal. But the costs to the economy will be devastating. Once again, no other state has such a rule. I guess the air in California knows not to cross the state line.

So the CARB Board passes the rule and now all existing pre-2011 diesel trucks in California must be thrown out over time and replaced with new trucks – something business cannot afford to do.

But it gets even better. As it turns out, the project coordinator and lead author of the study relied upon to support this rule, Hein Tran, turns out to have a fake Ph.D. and is outed. He claimed his degree was from UC Davis but later simply buys a mail order Ph.D. from a UPS store mail box University in New York for $1,000. He is found guilty of fraud, dishonesty and other failure of good behavior (CARB’s words). But he isn’t fired and gets to keep his 97K a year job.

This was all known before this draconian rule was voted on but the chairman of CARB and several members kept this information from the other board members. At a subsequent board meeting this information is presented to the board by the public and some of the board members are mad – they call for an investigation into this fraud and even propose suspending the rule.

One of those honest board members is Supervisor Ron Roberts. I encourage every one of you here to assist him in his re-election campaign as he is a true patriot.

We are the only state where this science is accepted, most other states are moving away from all of this as they don’t want to devastate their economy, but CARB and the Governor’s office want to continue. This administration isn’t trying to make jobs, they are killing existing ones.

Fifty-two California legislators on both sides of the aisle write a letter begging CARB to suspend the diesel rules. No go, not even the legislature has any say in this – CARB is a rogue agency.

Green Jobs – we are all promised that all this overregulation will bring loads of new green jobs. As if fact isn’t stranger than fiction, you will love this example. A California company called MiaSole is going to hire 1,000 people and build a 500,000 square foot facility to make solar panels for the California market. Guess what City is the lucky recipient of these green jobs and economic prosperity? Atlanta, Georgia. What? Yes indeed, they didn’t locate in California, even though they are a California company making products for the California market, because of the 49th least business friendly state in the nation with the worst regulatory environment.

What can you do? Get involved with suspending AB32 and stopping CARB.  Please help put this agency back in line with reality.

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Bryan Bloom, President of Priority Moving, Inc. a San Diego moving and storage company.  He is an advocate for California industries fighting crippling CARB regulations, addressing the effort to repeal AB32, California’s Cap & Trade measure that is robbing this state of thousands of jobs every month.