California's Energy Strategy Holds Lessons for Bush

President Bush could discover something important if he puts down his talking points long enough during his trip to California this weekend. Bush is using the visit to tout his energy policies; but the country would be better served if he took the time to learn from the state's energy strategy, which is emerging as an integrated alternative to the president's incomplete plan.

Piece by piece, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats in the state Legislature are fashioning a comprehensive response to two of America's most pressing problems: the intertwined challenges of global warming and energy independence. Their approach -- call it the California Idea -- challenges both the means and assumptions of Bush's approach to energy.

In his first term, Bush focused almost entirely on promoting more domestic production of oil and gas. This year, he's also proposing more federal research money for solar and wind energy and for futuristic cars that could run on fuel produced from agricultural waste or hydrogen.

But Bush has unwaveringly opposed any mandates that would encourage conservation or accelerate the commercialization of those clean technologies. He's fought requirements for automakers to improve the fuel efficiency of their vehicles; for utilities to generate more electricity from renewable sources; and for the United States to reduce its overall emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas associated with global warming. On each front, Bush's central argument is that mandates would hurt the economy.

California is pursuing the opposite strategy. It is formulating a series of mandates to speed the transformation toward an economy that uses less oil and emits less carbon dioxide. And it is imposing those mandates in the belief that they will bring jobs to the state by spurring technological breakthroughs -- the historic engine of California's growth.

Rejecting Bush's analysis, state leaders are aligning themselves with companies like General Electric that see great opportunity in the evolution to a clean-energy and low-carbon future.

Across each critical choice in the energy debate, California represents the path not taken in Washington.

In last year's federal energy bill, Bush's opposition helped doom a requirement that utilities generate 10% of their electricity from renewable sources such as solar or wind by 2020 -- a mandate that would have substantially reduced carbon emissions. But Schwarzenegger recently implemented a requirement that California utilities generate at least 20% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010; he wants to raise the mandate to 33% by 2020.