(Bloomberg News) Meg Whitman, the former EBay Inc. chief executive officer running to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger as California's governor, said she opposes a ballot measure to block the state's landmark greenhouse-gas law.
The November ballot measure, Proposition 23, which is financed by the oil industry, would suspend a law scheduled to begin regulating carbon emissions in 2012. Opponents of the law, which was sponsored by Schwarzenegger in 2006, say it will force businesses to leave the state.
Proposition 23 would suspend the law until California's unemployment rate, now at 12.4%, drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. That has only happened four times in the past 30 years. Whitman said the law, known as AB 32, instead should be postponed for one year to allow California's economy to rebound.
"While Proposition 23 does address the job-killing aspects of AB 32, it does not offer a sensible balance between our vital need for good jobs and the desire of all Californians to protect our precious environment," Whitman, 54, said in a statement. "It is too simple of a solution for a complex problem."
Whitman, a Republican running against Attorney General Jerry Brown, a former governor, also said she opposes a measure to legalize and tax marijuana and another that would allow budgets in the state to be approved by a simple majority vote of the Legislature instead of the current two-thirds requirement.
Brown, a 72-year-old Democrat who led the state from 1975 to 1983, also opposes Proposition 23 and has made the creation of clean-energy jobs a cornerstone of his campaign.
He and Whitman are tied in a public opinion poll released yesterday. The Field Poll found both were supported by 41% of likely voters surveyed. Whitman has spent a record $119 million of her own money on her campaign.