Initiative became law in September, creating $2.9 billion of incentives for Californians to equip houses with solar power. The idea was to stimulate innovation, create jobs, and get 3,000 megawatts of solar up and running in ten years—enough to replace six coal-fired power plants.
In 2006 we took our boldest policy leap: landmark legislation on climate change, one of the most divisive issues in modern American politics. The California Global Warming Solutions Act committed California to cap and then drastically reduce carbon emissions in the next fifteen years: 30 percent by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. It was the first such legislation in the nation, and political and environmental leaders predicted it would have ramifications worldwide. British prime minister Tony Blair, who’d helped sell the Democrats on cap and trade, attended the signing ceremony via satellite hookup. He was from the Labor Party, and he convinced Fabian and other Democrats that cap and trade was okay. We received a formal commendation from Japan.
For California to meet such aggressive goals, we would have to attack greenhouse gases from every angle. The law would affect not only dozens of industries but also our cars, homes, freeways, cities, and farms. As the
The global warming act was news not only because California was America’s second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after Texas but also because we were taking such a radically different course than the Congress and President Bush. California and Washington, DC, had been at odds over climate change well before I came to Sacramento. Gray Davis had signed a law requiring automakers who wanted to sell cars in California to reduce passenger car emissions by nearly a third by 2016, and boost average fuel efficiency from twenty-seven miles per gallon to thirty-five miles per gallon. Passenger car emissions accounted for 40 percent of the greenhouse gases in our state. But the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush blocked us from enforcing this so-called tailpipe law. The auto companies were fighting our environmental vision so hard that they banded together and sued California—and me! They went all out to try to stop our progress, but in the end we won. When President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, he basically adopted California’s standard, and the automaker coalition agreed to a compromise that would require them to build cars for the entire nation that improved fuel efficiency to thirty-five miles per gallon by 2016, a 40 percent improvement over today’s twenty-five-miles-per-gallon standard.
I’d never made a secret of my impatience with President Bush’s foot-dragging on climate change, and we had talked directly about it. He was a Texan who thought he was a great environmentalist for setting aside acres of forests and sea. But even though his administration proposed ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, his EPA administrator tried to derail our efforts at every turn. For me, action meant bringing in people and making them part of the movement. A lot of environmentalists who talk about global warming want only to expose the problems. That’s a good way to make people feel guilty and hopeless—and nobody likes to feel like that. Besides, it’s hard to relate to a polar bear on an ice floe when you’re out of a job, or worried about your health insurance or about educating your kids. I promoted the California Global Warming Solutions Act as good for business—not only large and established businesses but also entrepreneurial businesses. In fact we wanted to create a whole new clean- tech industry that would create jobs, develop cutting-edge technology, and become a model for the rest of the country and the world.
Building a consensus was very hard, and the Global Warming Act was far from perfect. There were fierce disagreements internally and with legislators and interest groups. But we dealt with those disagreements by listening to one another and debating the merits. We talked to leading activists and top academics. We talked to carmakers, energy giants, utilities, growers, and transportation companies. While we were working on the climate change act, I went to the heads of Chevron, Occidental, and BP because I wanted to assure them that this was not an attack on them. This was an attack on a problem we never foresaw one hundred years ago, when the industrialized world shifted to oil and gas.
I wanted
I worked hard to convince the members of my own party too. There is no contradiction in being both a Republican and an environmentalist. After all, it was Teddy Roosevelt who established the national parks, and Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and championed the Clean Air Act. Ronald Reagan signed environmental laws both as governor and as president, including the historic Montreal Protocol to protect the earth’s ozone layer. And the first president Bush put in place a pioneering cap-and-trade system to curb acid rain. We were continuing that tradition.
We were so focused on the California Global Warming Act and other big changes that there was scarcely any time to campaign for reelection in the usual way. It didn’t matter. Making real progress on major issues that both Democrats and Republicans cared about was more effective than any slogan or campaign ad—that was a big part of our reelection strategy.
I had formed a reelection committee as early as 2005 for a simple reason: the people who supported my agenda wanted to make sure they weren’t wasting their money or time on someone who wouldn’t stick around. They were asking, “Why should I invest in Arnold if he leaves next year and a Democrat comes in and punishes me?” Eunice sent me $23,600, the most her household could contribute under the law. In her note, she said, “Please don’t tell Teddy. I’ve never given him this much even when he ran for president.”
Not everyone in my family was delighted by my decision to seek a second term. Maria again had to read about it in the papers, and she was upset. And with her biting sense of humor, she found a way to get her message across: she sent me a lovely framed photograph of her, with a handwritten question at the bottom. “Why would you run again when you can come home to this?” Having watched American politics up close, she was a big believer in how it could destroy relationships. She was thinking, “He’s gotten a taste of power—it’s typical, he’s hooked. Maybe he’ll run for Senate next.” I smiled when I got the picture, but I wanted to finish what I had started. My original plan was to go for one term, fix the problems, and walk away. But by now I had realized that you can’t do that in three years.
Luckily, I benefited from having a weak opponent. To run against me, the Democrats nominated Phil Angelides, the state controller. He was a very smart man and a caring public servant, but he was a poor candidate. He ran on the single-minded notion of raising taxes. That set me up for my best ad-lib in our one televised debate: “I can tell from the joy I see in your eyes when you talk about taxes, you just love to increase taxes. Look out there to the audience right now and just say, ‘I love increasing your taxes.’ ” It left him speechless, just as he reacted when I asked him in the same debate what had been the most fun moment in the campaign so far.
Of course, ad libbing can backfire when you’re running for governor. I got in trouble by referring to my friend Bonnie Garcia, a Latina legislator from near Indio, as “very hot” because of her “Black and Latino blood.” I said it during a two-hour private yack session with my staff which ended up on the internet—unedited. We were brainstorming in preparation for a big speech and the speechwriter was taping so he wouldn’t miss any pearls of wisdom. Bonnie is a Latina who can be passionate and blunt when she locks in on an issue, like me. I declared that this passion was genetic. “Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot,” I said. She reminded me of Sergio Oliva, the Cuban weight-lifting champion I battled for the Mr. Olympia title back in the 1970s. He was a fierce competitor, a hot-blooded, passionate guy.
Adam, my communications director, was used to hearing me say wild things. But this time his shop accidentally put the unedited transcript on the server that held our public press releases. It didn’t take long for Phil Angelides’s people to find it and release the politically incorrect part to the
My campaign staff scrambled to do damage control. They found Bonnie, who was not only gracious and helpful but also really funny in accepting my apology. (The papers reported her wisecracking later, “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”) I called every Latino and Black leader I knew, starting with Fabian Nunez and Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, both of whom dismissed my comments as Arnold being Arnold and not the least bit offensive. Rather than let Angelides leak out sections at a time to keep the negative stories going, Adam simply released the entire two hours of unedited transcript to the public. In the end the media credited us with handling “Tapegate” very effectively, and we went back to campaigning.
To my mind Angelides was too negative. He criticized me, but never offered a clear alternative vision of what
