Proposition 23: California v. Big Oil

When California voters went to the polls yesterday they were confronted with Proposition 23, which aimed to put California's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (or AB 32) on hold until California's unemployment rate drops to 5.5% for four straight quarters. Supporters of Proposition 23 insisted that enacting AB 32 would raise energy prices and make life even harder for Californians, especially in the current climate of economic hardship. Opponents of Proposition 23 scoffed at these dire predictions and pointed out that an unemployment rate of under 5.5% is a state of affairs so unnatural to California that it has occurred only three times since 1980. In campaign ads such as this one they claimed that big oil companies from outside states like Texas were trying to stifle AB 32 indefinitely at the expense of an environmentally sustainable future for California's citizens.

After months of frenetic campaigning, California voters soundly rejected Proposition 23 yesterday by a margin of 59% to 41%, allowing environmentalists across the country to draw a collective breath of relief.

Proposition 23 may have been just another sideshow in the great tug-of-war that is American environmental politics, but it illustrates the failure of federalism in the face of a national--no, global--problem. Mr. Madison envisioned a sprawling republic which would drown out the insidious influence of factions by the sheer diversity of public opinion. But he could not have imagined that his carefully-balanced system would permit the rise of industrial interest groups which reach across state borders to interfere with the greater good. A large republic works well enough when factions are localized but when they become nationalized it contributes to their power and influence. In the case of Proposition 23, oil interest groups from states as varied as Texas, Louisiana, and Missouri spent a great deal of time and money in an attempt to influence California's policies in their favor. This brings up a difficult question: can the United States follow in the footsteps of other countries to enact environmentally sustainable policies or will those efforts constantly be thwarted by factions which exploit our federalist system?