Aubrey,
I should be able to do it. How did the hearing in Sacramento go?
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Hi Starchild! Thanks for taking the event on Wednesday--one less thing for me to worry about.
As for the CARB event in Sacramento, boy what a day it was, but in the end, I'm glad I went. Started off with a rally in front of the Capitol at 8:00. Not as well attended as we had hoped, but there were good speakers there nonetheless--mostly trucking folks, also Tim Donnelly, Heather Gass, Debbie Bacigalupi, and an Assemblywoman from the Bakersfield area named Shannon who was very good.
The hearing itself was like Plan Bay Area revisited. There was standing room only in the huge room filled with folks who had come from as far as San Diego and even Idaho. You had to fill out a card if you wanted to give public comment--different colored cards for FOR, AGAINST, or NEUTRAL, and guess which folks got put to the back of the long list (over 100 speakers--I was 109). All the government folks and special interests supporting CARB were right at the top of the list, and some elected official who blew in from the San Joaquin Valley didn't even have to get on the list--she was ushered right in to speak for CARB. The particulars of this hearing were whether the rules should be relaxed to allow more time for truckers to come into compliance with rules forcing them to put expensive filters ($20K or more) on their diesel trucks because air particulate is killing 3,500 people per year. The first part of the public speakers was decidedly in
favor of CARB and their regulations, though it was obvious most in the industry do not care for CARB.
The most sickening thing to watch was truckers who had complied with the regulations came to testify against the truckers who hadn't complied yet. The "Divide and Conquer" tactic has been very effective for CARB. We heard one trucking firm after another urge for no relaxation of the rules since their costs were now higher due to compliance and the noncompliance truckers now being harder to compete with (I sympathize with that, but this only points to the inevitability of what happens when government force is involved--pitting one group against another). Folks who had passionately fought CARB in the past were now firmly urging for more compliance. They had become the "Stockholm Syndrome," one of the 24 types of authoritarians from your cartoon sheet--I've been screwed, so I want to make sure the other guy is screwed too.
Anyway at some point the chair Barbara Nichols decided that there were too many speakers, so it was time to chop us down to 2 minutes rather than 3. Why she waited until we were well up to the 60's or so (when most of the positive testimony had been given) to figure out that time was running out--another shenanigan to limit the opposition. The later speakers complained about the science behind the health claims, and there were many complaints about the maintenance costs of the filters, expensive truck repair bills, fires, and the safety of the filters. One trucker complained bitterly about "faulty devices forced on them" and another said he would be happy to comply and "Can I send the bills to you?" When I spoke, I brought up the tremendous costs to California consumers and is it worth it to force all this cost and misery to get so little in return with the diminishing returns of a perfect environment. I also mentioned the American Cancer
Society which is refusing to release the data on which much of the studies are based. I also wanted to bring up something from their handout that the trajectory of "Business as Usual" (no new regulations) over time shows a downward trend of pollutants anyway as new trucks are replaced with cleaner ones without force and also the cost of this agency alone (over $651million per year with 1,225 employees), which doesn't count the California EPA or other air quality districts, but I ran out of time.
All in all an educational experience watching government gone awry!
Thanks for asking about it!
Aubrey
Aubrey,
I should be able to do it\. How did the hearing in Sacramento go?
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))