California vote: Hope for clean energy

The fossil-fuel industry might continue to have a tight grip on US politics, but its hold isn’t complete, as this week’s defeat of California Proposition 23 proves. And that should give clean-energy advocates reason for hope, even in the face of what’s likely to be two years of future gridlock in the nation’s capital.

Frustration over high unemployment and a stagnant economy inspired many US voters — in particular, anti-government Tea Party supporters — to oust a number of Democratic incumbents at the state and national level in this week’s mid-term elections. But even the ascent of climate change-denying, environmental regulation-opposing candidates like Rand Paul, apparently, won’t squelch many citizens’ support for clean energy.

In California, Texas-based refineries Valero and Tesoro — along with Koch Industries, a chemical firm led by libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch — threw millions into supporting Proposition 23, which would have suspended the state’s aggressive legislation aimed at fighting climate change. The Koch brothers, in fact, have been linked to long and extensive funding of climate change denial.

In the end, however, California’s voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 23 by a 21 per cent margin.

While California voters also proved their progressive tendencies by re-electing Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and choosing former Democratic governor Jerry Brown to succeed outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it undoubtedly helped that Proposition 23’s opponents also had deep pockets. Tom Steyer, founder of the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, personally donated $10 million to defeat the measure. Others that helped finance the fight against the proposition included:

• The National Resources Defense Council ($3-plus million);
• The National Wildlife Federation ($3 million);
• L. John Doerr, who is a partner — along with former vice president Al Gore — in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers ($2 million);
• Ann Doerr, wife of L. John Doerr ($2 million)
• Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, also a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers ($1-plus million);
• Robert J. Fisher, director of GAP Inc. ($1 million);
• Director, producer and screenwriter James Cameron (“The Terminator,” “Titanic,” “Avatar”)  ($1 million);
• The Environmental Defense Action Fund ($1 million); and
• Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel.

Other organisations that urged voters to defeat Proposition 23 included eBay, Nike, Warner Brothers, Virgin America and the lobbying group TechNet, whose members include Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Intel, Microsoft andYahoo.