No on Prop 10 – Stop T. Boone’s Pickpocket Initiative (It's about greed, not green)

Better hang onto your wallet. Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is spending a fortune promoting Proposition 10 on the November ballot. His initiative would cost California taxpayers $10 billion.  

Prop 10 is textbook case of a wealthy special interest abusing the initiative process. Mr. Pickens’ Clean Energy Fuel Corporation wrote Prop 10 and spent $3 million to place it on the ballot.  They’re spending millions more on a TV ad blitz.

The biggest bonanza under Prop 10 goes to – you guessed it – Mr. Pickens’ Clean Energy Fuel Corp. This company dominates the natural gas fueling business.  Prop 10 earmarks billions in tax giveaways to manipulate the market to favor natural gas powered vehicles and to disadvantage cleaner energy technologies.  

Prop 10 would provide $2.9 billion in rebates to purchasers of “clean” vehicles. $2.5 billion is allocated for so-called “clean” truck purchases.  

State bonds fund these handouts. The cost to taxpayers is $335 million a year for 30 years to pay off the bonds.  Vehicles subsidized by Prop 10 will be rusting away in junkyards long before our grandchildren have finished paying for Prop 10.

We’re already struggling with a $15 billion state budget deficit. Adding another $335 million a year to pay for Mr. Pickens’ bonds means more cuts to schools, public safety and health programs.

If you want cleaner air, you’ll be disappointed by Prop 10. The initiative does nothing to ratchet up existing clean air requirements.  Remarkably, Prop 10 defines “clean alternative” vehicles to exclude hybrids and to include natural gas powered vehicles, provided their emissions are no worse than the maximum pollution levels already required for gasoline or diesel powered vehicles. That’s a neat trick: re-label the status quo as clean and you qualify for a big tax handout – provided, of course, you fill up at Mr. Pickens’ natural gas stations.

Prop 10 requires the state to issue $50,000 per truck on a first come – first served basis. There is no requirement that the truck remains in our state. A trucking company gets the $50,000 “clean” truck rebate even if it is not replacing a “dirty” truck. Interstate trucking companies could collect California tax handouts to subsidize their fleet purchases, relocate the trucks out of state, and sell their used “dirty” trucks to California truckers who will keep on belching fumes on our roads.

Prop 10’s corporate authors could have written language to guarantee clean air improvements. In fact, such a program is already up and running.

California’s Goods Movement Program administered by the Air Resources Board also provides subsidies of up to $50,000 to replace an old dirty truck with a new clean truck.  Unlike Prop 10’s first come - first served payouts, the Goods Movement Program has a competitive application process.  Applications are ranked based on the amount of pollution reduction achieved. The trucks with the highest emissions are replaced first and their owners get funding priority.  Unlike Prop 10, these dirty trucks are crushed, permanently removing them from our roads. To get a rebate under the Goods Movement Program, the trucker must accept a GPS device to track the clean new truck’s movements. If the truck leaves the state, the trucker pays a penalty. 

Prop 10 could have included these accountability measures, but it doesn’t. The initiative’s real agenda is to gin up a 500% increase in California natural gas vehicles sales. Business will boom at Mr. Pickens’ gas stations.

The initiative’s corporate authors aren’t dummies. They threw in some funding for alternative energy research. Proponents will tell you the initiative gives equal rebates to natural gas, electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This window dressing may help sell the measure, but it’s lipstick on a pig. Rebates will be long gone, spent on natural gas vehicles, before affordable hydrogen or electric vehicles are on the market.

Natural gas burns a bit cleaner than gasoline, but it’s a fossil fuel and dead end technology. Hybrids hold greater promise as a transition to all-electric zero emissions vehicles.  But Prop 10’s definitions exclude hybrids as “clean” even though the hybrid Prius and the natural gas Honda Civic have identical California clean vehicle ratings.   

Why load the deck to give one competing technology more favorable tax rebates? Simple: T Boone Pickens makes a killing when more natural gas vehicles fuel up at his gas stations.

Prop 10 is the worst kind of corporate raid on the public coffers. We simply cannot afford to cut our schools, our health services and our public safety programs further to enrich a Texas billionaire. Vote No on Prop 10.