Soon I'll be asking my Advanced Comp students to track a couple of online news sources as they cover the 2006 US elections. They can look at national races, state races, local races, and ballot initiatives in any state.

I've been watching too much of the boob tube lately, so I've been bombarded by ads about California's Proposition 87. In the spirit of "do what you teach," I'm going to start looking at this issue on my blog.

First, I need to just get a handle on this issue itself, then I'll start unpacking the rhetoric and figuring out who the stakeholders are and how their positions are (or are not) being represented.

This post, then, is a summary of my first steps into the murky waters of Prop 87.

I'll start with the State of California Voter Guide . They give the basic outline of the Proposition as follows:
* a tax on oil drilling and production in California
* a stipulation that the tax cannot be passed on to consumers in the form of higher gas prices
* a new agency that would oversee the spending of the revenue from this tax
* the revenue has to be spent on several things, like: education about alternative transportation energy, research on alternative energy, infrastructure that would support alternative energy, and administrative costs.
* the tax revenue could not be put into the state's General Fund, but would have to be used for the earmarked research and development of alternative transportation energy.
*the possibility of new jobs being created in California for the new R&D
*the possibility that gas stations would buy their oil from outside of California

I have not yet delved into the pro and con sites (although the Voter Guide has a pro and con section), but I'll put out an initial reaction.

This sounds good, as I have an article from the Sacramento News and Review lurking in my mind about how much we rely on oil (WAY too much) and how desperately we need to find ways to cut back on oil consumption/dependence. Prop 87 estimates that the research produced could lead to reducing oil consumption by 25%.

This prop sounds like it could help the electric car rise from its ashes (or its "smashes," I should say, as Chris Paine documents in "Who Killed the Electric Car." ) I know that it might be used to explore ethanol (the only alternative transportation energy source mentioned by name in the Voter Guide), or perhaps hydrogen fuel cells (the part about building new infrastructure makes me think that the money could be used to build hydrogen fueling stations). I'm pretty convinced that hydrogen fuel cells are a crock of you-know-what (based mostly on my viewing of the Electric Car movie, so I will have to do more research). What I'd really like to see some of this money used on is public transportation!!!! I'm unclear as to whether the money could go for that or not.

Thus far in my investigation, I'm pro-87.

Items for future posts:
Who are the stakeholders?
What positive results could come out of the research and development?
What kind of rhetoric is getting used in this debate?