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Taxing fossils, to educate for renewables
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CA Assemblymember Torrico, author of AB 656.
In response to the California state budget crisis, and, to global warming urgencies, California's 20th District Assemblymember Alberto Torrico has proposed Assembly Bill 656, a tax "for the privilege of severing oil or gas from the earth or water in this state," to fund higher education, especially renewable energy education, to train a generation capable of helping California make a transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy.
California is the third largest producer of crude oil and the tenth largest producer of natural gas in the U.S., and, the only state that does not collect an oil and gas severance tax. Were it a nation, it would be the only nation.
California State Senator George Runner, founder of the Desert Christian Schools, calls AB656, "The Hugo Chavez Empowerment Act," implying that the bill is tantamount to Calfiornians laying claim to their own oil and gas reserves.
But, Runner is exaggerating, hugely.
Torrico has indeed pointed out that "it's our oil and gas," and his bill says that "the tax . . . shall not be passed through to consumers by way of higher prices for oil, natural gas, gasoline, diesel, or other oil or gas consumable byproducts, such as propane and heating oil," but, he has not suggested that Californians form a corporation to extract their own oil and gas, only that the oil and gas industry pay an oil and gas severenace tax to educate for California's transition to renewable energy.
Torrico's bill doesn't contain a word about the world's disinherited indigenous peoples, whose cause Hugo Chavez so often champions, nor does it contain mention of Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America, Five Centures of the Pillage of a Continent," the book that Hugo Chavez gave to Barack Obama.
However, Torrico does point out that:
1) Forty percent of California's students nearing college age are Latino,
2) Only 12% of them are on track to get a bachelor's degree,
3) Wages and salaries for those without college degrees will decline as the labor pool at this educational level grows, and wages and salaries for those with college degrees wil increase as that labor pool shrinks, and,
4) That this will unfairly disadvantage Latino and other minority youth.
I'd like to add that military recruiters target predominantly Black and Latino schools, that the military recruiting budget in predominantly Latino schools has been reported to be six times that of the college recruiting budget, and, that one of the first soldiers to die under the U.S. flag in Iraq was an orphaned Guatemalan fighting for a Green Card and veteran's benefits, in hopes of someday completing an engineering degree.
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