Californians Vote Up or Down on Saving the Climate

[Editor's note: Vancouver-based documentary film maker Dan McKinney recently completed, with Joe Rubin, an in-depth report on California's anti-climate change policies initiative, Proposition 23. Their report, which aired on Al Jazeera English, lays out the huge stakes when voters go to the polls today. We asked McKinney for a reporter's notebook to accompany his video report, and it follows here.]

It has all the makings of a blockbuster movie -- Arnold Schwarzenegger battles alien powers while planet Earth's future hangs in the balance. But what sounds like Hollywood boilerplate is actually the story reaching its climax today in California.

And how people vote in that state will be felt soon enough here in British Columbia. Because the success or failure of Proposition 23 is going to have a major effect on whether the climate policies set in motion by Premier Gordon Campbell will gain momentum or lose a key regional partner.

Arnold's fight

I moved to Vancouver two years ago from California's Bay Area where I watched the movie star muscleman become Governator in '03 and then go on to re-election in 2006. Ever since he signed the Global Warming Solution Act in 2006, Schwarzenegger has become a phenomenon on the issue of climate change. He's an unorthodox Republican who's found an unusual niche in this unorthodox state and commands this issue like few others on either side of the isle.

What he's fighting is Proposition 23. Prop 23 is a proposal on California's ballot that would suspend what many are calling the nation's most progressive climate legislation until California's unemployment drops below 5.5 per cent for four consecutive quarters. Since California has only hit those numbers three times in the last 40 years, it would effectively put the environmental legislation on ice with little hope of revival.

And this would have big implications for B.C.'s climate policy. With California's cap-and-trade system on hold, the province would be nearly going it alone, as one of the only remaining participants in the Western Climate Initiative. It would leave the climate treaty Gordon Campbell's signed with Schwarzenegger all but deactivated.

And the twist that makes this political drama even more startling is the out-of-state millions that have come pouring in from Texas oil companies to bankroll the Prop 23 campaign. In this political equation, the billions of dollars to be made refining Alberta oil sands are a big factor, as The Tyee has reported.

Two visions duking it out

As a relative newcomer to the issue -- I only got the assignment to cover the ballot initiative know as Proposition 23 a few weeks ago -- I assumed I would be knee deep in wonky, regulatory legislation, struggling to peel back the layers of inscrutable stats, Byzantine state politics and fuzzy economic projections. But, as it turns out, few battles in this November election are as colorful, or stark, as this one. High-tech companies want to kick-start a green revolution that would create millions of jobs. And at Tea Party rallies, participants complain that the economy is hemorrhaging jobs as a result of government's regulatory stranglehold.

Probably the most revealing interview we did while preparing our report was with an older Latina woman in Fresno who had three sons out of work for the first time in their lives. If you wonder why people would buy big oil's message about climate reform hurting the economy, her support of Prop 23 provides a lot of insight. The message that climate reform will hurt California's already struggling economy is easy to digest. So people are believing it. We explained to her that oil money was pouring in from out of state to back the initiative and that they had much to gain. She told us that was all news to her, but it didn't change her mind about the issue. She was still worried about her boys finding work and, in her view, elite liberal causes like climate reform weren't going to help them get jobs any sooner.

Two versions of the future seem to be facing off here. On the one side you have the new money pioneers, the Googles and Teslas of the world, embracing the emerging opportunity of an energy revolution that could transform the economic landscape. On the other are more conservative players representing the old money interests of oil.

So today's vote is shaping up to not only be a referendum on Obama's first two years. In California, it's taking measure of just how ready Americans might be to re-imagine their future even in stark economic times.