Looks like the State of California is in for some interesting legal proceedings - from the Los Angeles Times:
The immediate threat to California's climate-change fight isn't Trump, it's this
With President Trump in the Oval Office, California officials are bracing for the possibility that the new administration will undermine the state’s landmark policies on climate change. But the more immediate threat isn’t coming from Washington; it lies in a lawsuit that has been slowly winding its way through state courts.
The 4-year-old legal challenge pursued by the California Chamber of Commerce and a collection of business interests argues that the cap-and-trade program represents an unconstitutional tax. The system, intended to create a financial incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, requires companies to purchase permits to pollute.
The problem?
The result was cap and trade, which auctioned off its first permits in 2012. Revenue from the auctions, which has ranged from hundreds of millions of dollars to nearly $2 billion a year, is then spent by lawmakers on initiatives intended to further reduce emissions. One of those projects is the $68-billion bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
All of this activity, state officials argue, falls within the government’s authority to regulate industry.
Opponents disagree, noting that the state is collecting revenue through a program that wasn’t created with a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature, the threshold needed to approve taxes.
Should be interesting to see the outcome. Doing some simple math, they would need to run the cap and trade scam for 34 years to pay for just the budgeted price of the bullet train. This is especially interesting in that without an inch of track being laid, the initial run is already $3.6 Billion over-budget and seven years behind schedule. No wonder businesses and people are fleeing the state.
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