Green Arnold?
Bob Morris @ Sep 3rd 2006 07:06 - Category: Climate change ;
From reader Anne Garrison in the comments to our previous post.
Governor Schwarzenegger looked at the polls that said two-thirds of California wanted that legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, passed and knew he had to sign or lose the next election, assuming it’s an honest election. He did not want to sign and the money in back of Schwarzenegger is all about not signing, but both he and the money saw that he had no choice but to sign.
On August 2nd, Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair got together for some photo ops and blathered about how they’d have to take the lead on global warming because Bush was refusing to act.
Schwarzenegger’s solution was clean coal, as in Peabody Coal, which is owned by Lehman Brothers, whose execs and ex-execs surround Schwarzenegger. Clean coal power piped from the Southwestern reservations to California, just like all the dirty coal power piped from the Mojave Desert (coal-fired power) Generation Plant for 40 years.
Tony Blair’s solution was nuclear power.
Ten days later, on August 12th, George Bush handed Peabody Coal a gift of $19.7 million for the technological innovation at the Mustang “clean coal†power plant in New Mexico. These two Republicans really didn’t seem so far apart.
But then polls of California voters made it clear that Schwarzenegger had to sign or go back to Hollywood. It had to be clear he had to sign, even to his own party and to Lehman Brothers (which owns Peabody Coal) execs. So he signed. And now the whole world outside Callifornia seems to think he’s the Jolly Green Giant.
But they might not be that far off. General Mills, creator of the original Jolly Green Giant, managed to create a federal Superfund site in Minneapolis, where they began researching food, but then, in 1947, began researching chemicals instead.
