GOING WITH THE FLOW: Analysts say it's an inevitable sea change

09-01) 04:00 PDT Washington -- California's sheer size ensures plenty of fallout from its new initiative on global warming, analysts said, as businesses and politicians alike see an inevitability to the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.
Leading Republican politicians have been slowly drifting into the emissions reduction camp, despite steadfast opposition by the Bush administration. California's legislation is almost sure to goad more businesses into trying to shape regulation rather than fight it, analysts said, and will probably ignite pressure for a uniform national policy as copycat actions, already under way in other states, continue to mount.
"This is historic," said David Sandalow, a former assistant secretary of state for global warming in the Clinton administration. "This is perhaps the most important legislation ever passed within the United States to address this issue, and I think it's going to send a signal here in Washington and around the world, actually."
The California pact between Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-controlled Legislature would impose a 25 percent reduction in state emissions by 2020, the most ambitious goal yet set in the nation.
Still, even environmentalists conceded that White House opposition will make national legislation a slow grind, and opponents argued that there remains strong bipartisan resistance to actions that could impose real costs on Americans.
California's move is "the equivalent of a New Year's Eve resolution -- by 2020 they're going to lose a lot of weight, they're going to lose 20 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions by a date far enough in advance that no politician around today who voted for this is going to have to account for whether they met the goal or not," said Jerry Taylor, head of energy policy for the libertarian Cato Institute. "If there was a real appetite for concrete action to address greenhouse gas emissions, the California Legislature could have passed a carbon tax. It could have gone ahead and set concrete limits on emissions for the next several years. But it hasn't done that. That tells me public support to do something real about global warming is still fairly modest."
Others said the pact sets realistic targets that give businesses time to comply, but also empowers state regulatory agencies to impose biting controls.
Billy Pizer, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank, compared California's deal to the Clean Air Act, the first national air pollution law passed during the Nixon administration that gave legal authority to the Environmental Protection Agency to force emissions reductions.
"It's hard to imagine it won't have some bearing on activities in California," Pizer said. "Whether it's baby teeth or large fangs, I'm not quite sure, but you can't give that kind of authority to a regulatory agency and expect it to stay out of the business world indefinitely. It seems a threshold has been crossed."
Global warming legislation has been gradually attracting more support in the Senate, especially from Republicans, but it still lacks a simple majority, much less the 60 votes routinely needed to pass legislation.
White House opposition poses a real hurdle to moving legislation on such a big and contentious issue, said Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Nonetheless, she said, California's action will have huge repercussions, given the state's large population, extensive industry and love affair with cars. California is a significant global contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, throwing off as much greenhouse gas as Australia, Greenwald said. California also has long served as a kind of policy laboratory, either providing models for other states or, through its size and influence, forcing them to follow.
Several prominent Republicans have begun parting with Bush on global warming. The party's front-runner for the 2008 presidential contest, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, pushed bipartisan global warming legislation last year that failed 38-60. But party stalwarts who are hardly considered mavericks have also joined such efforts: Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, now crusading to reduce U.S. dependence on oil; Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and New York Gov. George Pataki, who is leading an emissions-reduction compact involving seven Northeastern states called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
"A large body of mainstream Republicans is supporting very aggressive measures to address global warming and the Bush administration is increasingly an outlier, marginalized in its own party and certainly (in) the broader public on this," Sandalow said.
Critics, however, said opposition in Congress to carbon dioxide regulation remains strong in high-growth Sun Belt states, where emissions are soaring.
"There's just an awful lot of opposition in Congress to regulating CO{-2}," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. California's move "might give new energy to the forces of darkness, but I really don't see it as the thing that pushes them over the top."
Gasoline prices have topped $7 a gallon in Europe and population growth has stagnated, yet carbon dioxide emissions in the transport sector are still up 24 percent since 1990, Ebell said, citing a report by a European Union environmental agency. Fast-growing states such as Colorado and Texas, not to mention California, are forecasting surging demand for energy, he said, making progress on emissions difficult.
Many environmentalists contend that reductions in emissions will not be as painful as assumed because new regulations will spur technology and encourage greater energy efficiency.
"The story about climate change legislation too often has been about 'take your medicine,' " said David Yarnold, executive vice president at Environmental Defense. "That's old news. This is becoming a story of hope and economic optimism, energy security, economic opportunity and fighting global warming. The take-your-medicine approach doesn't work."
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.