bbachracWPHow Controversial Legislation Actually Gets Written
California AB 32:
How a Landmark Climate Law Was Actually Made
Signed September 27, 2006
Written by ChatGPT in Collaboration and Review by Robert Bachrach
Prologue
The story actually begins several years before this narrative,
and that is being prepared and will be added at a later date.
Chapter 1 — Introduction: How Controversial Legislation Actually Gets Written
The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, usually known simply as AB 32, is often summarized in a few sentences. Assemblymember Fran Pavley and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez authored the legislation; the California Legislature passed it; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed it on September 27, 2006; and California thereby committed itself to reducing statewide greenhouse-gas emissions to their 1990 level by 2020.
All of that is correct, but it does not explain how AB 32 was actually created.
Major legislation is rarely the intellectual product of the names printed at the top of a bill. A controversial statute emerges from an extended process involving elected officials, legislative staffs, executive-branch officials, regulatory agencies, lawyers, scientists, economists, businesses, labor organizations, environmental organizations and other advocacy groups. Language is proposed, rejected, rewritten, negotiated and sometimes deliberately left ambiguous because agreement on the objective is possible when agreement on the precise mechanism is not.
AB 32 is an unusually good example.
The distinction between authorship of a bill and writing a law is therefore fundamental to its history. Pavley and Núñez were its legislative authors. They supplied political leadership, exercised legislative authority and ultimately accepted responsibility for the statutory language. But important substantive ideas and language came through a much larger policy network. The Schwarzenegger administration also became deeply involved, particularly over whether market mechanisms such as emissions trading would be available. Environmental organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, were deeply engaged in developing and advocating the policy. Business organizations sought changes protecting economic flexibility. Environmental-justice organizations sought protection against allowing greenhouse-gas trading to perpetuate localized pollution.
The result was not the victory of a single faction. It was a negotiated institutional framework.
Understanding AB 32 therefore requires reconstructing the process rather than simply identifying the names attached to the enacted statute.
Chapter 2 — The Policy Argument Before AB 32
The political debate surrounding AB 32 grew from a much older economic argument about how society should control pollution.
One approach is direct regulation. Government determines what sources may emit and establishes standards, technologies or performance requirements.
A second approach is a carbon tax: place a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels or greenhouse-gas emissions and allow businesses and consumers to decide how to respond.
A third approach is cap-and-trade. Government establishes an overall emissions ceiling, creates allowances corresponding to permitted emissions, and allows regulated entities to buy and sell those allowances. The cap establishes the environmental constraint; trading is intended to discover lower-cost ways of meeting it.
These approaches were not merely technical alternatives. They reflected different philosophies of environmental regulation, different economic interests and different judgments about political feasibility.
Environmental economists had long argued for carbon pricing because conventional regulation does not necessarily cause reductions to occur where they are least expensive. Market-oriented policymakers were attracted to emissions trading partly because of the experience of the federal sulfur-dioxide trading system established to address acid rain.
But environmental advocates were divided. Some regarded market mechanisms as a powerful way of establishing an economy-wide carbon constraint. Others, particularly environmental-justice advocates, worried that trading could permit facilities in heavily polluted communities to purchase allowances rather than reduce emissions locally.
A carbon tax posed another problem in California. A tax was politically difficult and implicated California’s constitutional rules governing taxation. CARB’s later analysis explicitly recognized that taxes and regulatory fees occupy different legal positions in California and that, when AB 32 was enacted, a tax required a two-thirds legislative vote.
Thus the argument was never simply “tax versus cap-and-trade.” It also involved direct regulation, sector-specific programs, renewable-energy requirements, energy efficiency, automobile standards and combinations of all of them.
AB 32 eventually embodied that pluralistic approach.
Chapter 3 — California Before AB 32
AB 32 did not arise in a policy vacuum.
California already had an unusually long history of using state authority to control air pollution and vehicle emissions. One particularly important predecessor was Fran Pavley’s AB 1493 of 2002, which directed CARB to adopt regulations achieving feasible and cost-effective reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions from passenger vehicles. CARB approved the regulations in 2004 and finalized them in 2005.
California was also developing renewable-electricity requirements, aggressive utility energy-efficiency programs and greenhouse-gas reporting systems.
Governor Schwarzenegger added another important element on June 1, 2005, with Executive Order S-3-05. His administration established statewide greenhouse-gas objectives including returning emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and reaching 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Contemporary NRDC material described those targets and called for the Legislature to enact AB 32 to give the program statutory force.
This distinction matters. An executive order establishes executive policy; legislation creates statutory authority that survives an individual governor.
The eventual AB 32 therefore joined two political streams: an environmental-policy movement within the Legislature and advocacy community, and a Republican governor who had decided that climate policy could become a defining element of his administration.
Their agreement on the destination did not mean agreement on the route.
Chapter 4 — AB 32 Begins as a Different Bill, 2004–2005
The legislative archaeology of AB 32 is revealing because the bill carrying the number “AB 32” did not begin life as the comprehensive Global Warming Solutions Act that was eventually signed.
It was introduced in the 2005–2006 legislative session and went through substantial amendment. Early versions dealt heavily with greenhouse-gas reporting and the California Climate Action Registry. The March 31, 2005 version, for example, contains detailed provisions governing reporting, certification, emissions baselines and registry procedures rather than the mature statewide regulatory architecture of the final law.
This is a common legislative technique. A bill can become the vehicle for a substantially transformed policy as it moves through the Legislature.
Consequently, asking “Who wrote AB 32?” requires another question: Which AB 32?
The answer changes depending upon whether one means the original legislative vehicle, the emerging statewide emissions-control proposal, one of the intermediate drafts, the late-August compromise or the final enrolled statute.
The bill number remained constant. The policy embodied by that number did not.
Chapter 5 — The April 2006 Transformation
By the spring of 2006 the legislation was being transformed into something much closer to the law now associated with AB 32.
The April 18 Senate-amended version demonstrates how extensively the measure was being rewritten. Over the following months the architecture of a comprehensive statewide greenhouse-gas program emerged.
The essential idea was powerful precisely because it did not prescribe every implementation detail: California would establish an enforceable statewide emissions limit corresponding to the state’s 1990 greenhouse-gas emissions and reach that level by 2020.
This changed the character of California climate policy. Instead of relying only upon separate programs governing automobiles, electricity, efficiency or particular pollutants, the state would establish an economy-wide objective and create an institutional mechanism for achieving it.
By June the evolving bill was already discussing allowances and flexible compliance mechanisms. A later California Court of Appeal decision, reconstructing the legislative history, noted that the June 22 version defined emissions allowances and contemplated banking, borrowing and other market mechanisms. Legislative analysis at the time recognized that this language could provide a foundation for emissions trading.
The question was no longer whether California would regulate greenhouse gases.
The fight increasingly concerned how it would do so.
Chapter 6 — Who Was Actually Making the Bill?
At this stage the inadequacy of conventional authorship labels becomes especially apparent.
Pavley brought substantial climate-policy experience, including AB 1493. Núñez, as Assembly Speaker, supplied institutional and political power necessary for moving legislation of this magnitude. Legislative committee staffs and counsel translated policy concepts into statutory language.
Environmental organizations contributed technical analysis, policy proposals, advocacy and political coalition building. NRDC and Environmental Defense were prominent participants. Business groups sought flexibility and protection against economic disruption. Environmental-justice organizations sought safeguards against concentrating pollution burdens in disadvantaged communities.
The governor’s office was simultaneously attempting to shape the legislation from the executive side.
One especially revealing retrospective account comes from Linda Adams, Schwarzenegger’s Secretary for Environmental Protection and a principal administration negotiator. Adams recalled discovering that the version she initially examined did not provide the market-based approach the governor wanted. That discovery precipitated intensive negotiations over the bill’s design.
Mary Nichols, who subsequently chaired CARB and implemented AB 32, similarly recalled that Schwarzenegger strongly wanted cap-and-trade while the Democratic Legislature was considerably less enthusiastic. The compromise eventually gave CARB authority to employ a market-based system without compelling it to do so.
Thus there was no single drafting room and no single authorial hand.
AB 32 was being made through an institutional network.
Chapter 7 — The Summer 2006 Political Struggle
During the summer of 2006 the underlying conflict became sharper.
The governor wanted a market-oriented mechanism. Legislative Democrats and environmental constituencies wanted an enforceable emissions limit but were unwilling simply to turn implementation over to a trading system.
Business interests feared that rigid regulation could impose large costs on refineries, utilities, cement producers and other industries. Environmental advocates feared that excessive flexibility could weaken the environmental objective. Environmental-justice organizations raised another concern: greenhouse gases are global pollutants, but the facilities emitting them frequently also emit conventional pollutants with intensely local health consequences. A trading system could theoretically reduce statewide greenhouse gases while allowing some facilities in disadvantaged communities to continue operating at high emission levels.
The identity of the implementing institution also mattered.
Pavley later recalled that the administration sought a stronger commitment to market mechanisms while she insisted that CARB may, rather than shall, adopt such mechanisms. She also recalled disagreement over whether implementation authority should reside principally in CARB or in the governor’s Climate Action Team.
Even a single verb therefore carried substantial policy significance.
“Shall” would have instructed CARB to create a market mechanism.
“May” preserved CARB’s discretion.
The final law said may.
Chapter 8 — Legislative Archaeology: Nine Versions of AB 32
One of the most useful ways to understand AB 32 is not to read the final statute first, but to read the successive versions in chronological order.
The legislative record contains a succession of bill texts showing concepts appearing, disappearing and changing form. That documentary trail is effectively an archaeological record of negotiation.
Early versions emphasize reporting and registry mechanisms. Later versions construct a statewide greenhouse-gas regulatory system. By June, allowances and flexible compliance mechanisms appear. In August, governance and implementation structures continue to change. The August 23 version, for example, still proposed a separate California Greenhouse Gas Reduction Council.
That structure did not survive into the enrolled bill.
The final legislation instead placed central responsibility in the California Air Resources Board.
Likewise, detailed concepts involving allowances and flexible mechanisms evolved into broader statutory authorization for “market-based compliance mechanisms.”
The final enrolled legislation required CARB to establish the 1990-equivalent statewide limit, develop regulations and reporting systems, prepare a scoping plan, identify early actions, and achieve maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective reductions. But it merely authorized CARB to adopt qualifying market-based compliance mechanisms.
The evolution of those provisions shows why the versions matter. They reveal which ideas were politically stable, which were negotiable, and which could survive only by being left to subsequent regulatory decisions.
Chapter 9 — The Extraordinary Final Week: August 23–30, 2006
The final week illustrates how landmark legislation can be created under extraordinary political compression.
As late as August 23, the bill contained institutional arrangements that would not appear in the final statute. Negotiations continued among legislative leaders and the governor’s administration while outside constituencies continued applying pressure.
The core disagreement remained recognizable: the Legislature wanted an enforceable statewide cap and strong regulatory authority; Schwarzenegger wanted assurance that market mechanisms remained available and that the program contained safeguards against severe economic disruption.
A compromise emerged at the end of August.
The 2020 statewide limit remained.
CARB received primary implementation responsibility.
Market mechanisms were permitted but not mandated.
The governor received limited authority to suspend regulations temporarily under specified extraordinary circumstances involving significant economic harm.
The resulting structure was politically ingenious. It settled the question that California would reduce statewide greenhouse-gas emissions while postponing some of the most divisive questions concerning exactly how those reductions would be obtained.
On August 30 Schwarzenegger announced that an agreement had been reached. Environmental Defense contemporaneously quoted his statement that California could now move toward developing a market-based system.
The compromise was therefore not a definitive legislative choice of cap-and-trade over direct regulation or a carbon tax.
It was an agreement to create an enforceable emissions objective and an administrative process capable of choosing among—and combining—policy instruments.
Chapter 10 — Passage and Signing
Once the compromise was reached, legislative action came quickly.
The Senate approved the legislation on August 30. The Assembly concurred in the Senate amendments on August 31. The official Assembly roll call records a 47–32 vote.
Governor Schwarzenegger signed AB 32 on September 27, 2006.
The enacted measure became Chapter 488 of the Statutes of 2006 and took effect January 1, 2007.
The enrolled bill required CARB to determine California’s 1990 greenhouse-gas emissions and establish that quantity as the statewide limit to be achieved by 2020. It created mandatory emissions reporting, required a Scoping Plan, authorized regulations and enforcement, provided for early-action measures and authorized market-based compliance mechanisms meeting statutory requirements.
This last point is critical to the subsequent history.
California did not enact an operating cap-and-trade system in September 2006.
It enacted the statutory authority from which one could later be constructed.
Chapter 11 — Who “Wrote” AB 32?
There are several simultaneously correct answers.
Fran Pavley and Fabian Núñez were the legislative authors. That is the formal and legally meaningful answer.
But legislative authorship is not equivalent to saying that two legislators personally composed every substantive provision.
Pavley contributed policy expertise, legislative strategy and decisive judgments about final language. Núñez contributed the authority and negotiating power of the Assembly speakership. Legislative counsel and staff converted agreements into statutory language. Schwarzenegger and his administration materially shaped the final compromise, particularly the preservation of market mechanisms and an emergency suspension provision. Environmental organizations developed policy proposals, supplied technical expertise and mobilized support. Business organizations negotiated over economic consequences and flexibility. Environmental-justice organizations influenced safeguards and implementation requirements.
The successive versions establish something more important than a contest over credit: AB 32 was collectively produced.
That does not diminish the role of the legislators whose names are attached to it. It explains what legislative authorship actually means in complex policymaking.
The better historical question is therefore not “Who wrote AB 32?” as though a statute had an author analogous to a book.
It is:
Who contributed which ideas, language, political authority, technical knowledge and compromises at each stage by which AB 32 became law?
That question produces a much richer history.
Chapter 12 — Devra Bachrach Wang and NRDC
Devra Wang’s role illustrates precisely why the distinction between legislative authorship and substantive policy participation matters.
At the time, Wang directed the California Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Contemporary NRDC material shows her publicly advocating passage of AB 32 before enactment and, immediately after Schwarzenegger signed it, describing NRDC as having worked with both legislators and the administration to deliver the law.
Independent institutional biographies are unusually explicit about her role. The National Academies and the Heising-Simons Foundation describe her as having been instrumental in securing AB 32.
The subsequent legislative record reinforces that conclusion. A 2007 California Senate hearing biography identified Wang as coordinating NRDC’s AB 32 implementation activities and stated that she had been instrumental in enactment. In March 2008, the California Legislature’s joint AB 32 implementation hearing listed her as NRDC’s California Energy Program director and included both her hearing letter and detailed AB 32 status recommendations.
Those documents also show that her involvement continued well beyond passage. NRDC submitted detailed recommendations concerning energy efficiency, renewable energy, transportation and the possible use of cap-and-trade as a supplement to other policies.
The documentary evidence therefore supports a strong conclusion: Wang was a significant substantive participant in the policy coalition that secured AB 32 and subsequently shaped its implementation.
The public documentary record examined here does not, however, establish a defensible line-by-line attribution of the statute showing that Wang personally drafted specified sections, nor does it justify describing any single outside participant as the sole writer of AB 32. Such drafting commonly occurs collaboratively and leaves an incomplete public documentary trail.
That limitation itself is historically interesting.
The names appearing on legislation identify political and legal authorship. They do not necessarily preserve the much larger network of people who supplied the analysis, proposals, negotiations and language from which legislation was constructed.
AB 32 is a particularly clear case of that difference.
Chapter 13 — What AB 32 Actually Decided—and What It Left for Later
AB 32 decisively answered several questions.
California would regulate greenhouse gases on an economy-wide basis.
The state would determine its 1990 emissions and return statewide emissions to that level by 2020.
CARB would be the central implementing agency.
Large emission sources would be subject to mandatory measurement and reporting.
CARB would develop a Scoping Plan explaining how the target would be reached.
The agency would adopt enforceable regulations and could employ market-based mechanisms.
But the statute intentionally left major questions unanswered.
It did not establish the detailed architecture of an operating carbon market.
It did not determine the final allocation of allowances.
It did not establish the ultimate auction design.
It did not determine the complete role of offsets.
It did not decide the detailed relationship between cap-and-trade and direct sectoral regulation.
It did not settle every environmental-justice question.
And it did not select a carbon tax.
Those decisions moved from the Legislature into an administrative rulemaking process involving CARB, other agencies and years of stakeholder participation.
This was not simply procrastination. It was part of the political architecture that made enactment possible.
The Legislature fixed the objective and delegated much of the engineering.
Chapter 14 — Conclusion: The Political Genealogy of a Statute
AB 32 is therefore best understood as a political genealogy rather than as a single legislative event.
Its intellectual ancestors included California air-quality regulation, vehicle-emissions policy, energy efficiency, renewable-energy programs, greenhouse-gas inventories, climate science, environmental economics and earlier emissions-trading experiments.
Its political parents included legislators, the governor and his administration, environmental organizations, businesses, environmental-justice advocates, regulatory agencies and professional legislative staffs.
Its DNA changed repeatedly during the legislative process.
And the enacted statute was not the finished climate-policy system. It was a framework from which a much larger regulatory structure subsequently evolved.
This helps explain why reconstructing the successive bill versions is more informative than simply reading the chaptered statute.
The changes expose the negotiations.
The negotiations expose the competing interests.
And the competing interests explain the seemingly peculiar language of the final law—especially the decision that CARB may use market-based compliance mechanisms.
The apparent ambiguity was not defective drafting.
It was the political settlement.
That settlement made possible something more consequential than agreement on a single regulatory instrument: it created a durable institutional mechanism through which California climate policy could continue evolving after the Legislature adjourned.
Chapter 15 — From Legislation to an Operating Carbon Market: The Results and
Consequences of AB 32
The six-year interval between enactment of AB 32 in September 2006 and California’s first allowance auction in November 2012 can appear puzzling if AB 32 is remembered as “the law that created cap-and-trade.”
The history shows why the interval existed.
AB 32 did not contain a finished carbon market waiting to be switched on. California first had to construct the regulatory and informational infrastructure necessary to operate one.
CARB had to establish a reliable greenhouse-gas inventory and determine the 1990 emissions baseline. It had to create mandatory reporting and verification systems. It had to identify early-action measures. It had to evaluate alternative strategies, conduct economic and environmental analyses, develop the Scoping Plan, conduct public workshops and hearings, write regulations, establish compliance rules, determine allowance allocations and auctions, create offset protocols, build market oversight mechanisms and withstand legal challenges.
CARB approved the first Scoping Plan on December 11, 2008. The plan deliberately combined multiple strategies rather than relying exclusively on trading. It included energy efficiency, renewable electricity, clean-vehicle policies, a low-carbon fuel standard and a cap-and-trade system intended to cover most statewide emissions.
This is the policy system that emerged from the compromise embedded in AB 32: regulation plus markets, rather than regulation or markets.
The implementation timetable confirms the deliberate sequence. CARB’s official AB 32 history records mandatory reporting, development of the Scoping Plan, rulemaking through 2009–2011, legally enforceable greenhouse-gas rules beginning in 2012, the first allowance auction on November 14, 2012, and commencement of cap-and-trade compliance on January 1, 2013.
The first auction therefore represented not the beginning of AB 32 but the culmination of approximately six years of institution building under it.
The First Consequence: California Created a Carbon Constraint
The most fundamental consequence of AB 32 was the transformation of a political aspiration into a legally administered emissions constraint.
CARB ultimately calculated the 1990-equivalent 2020 limit as 431 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent under its current accounting methodology.
The state reached that level before the statutory deadline. CARB initially reported that the threshold had been crossed in 2016; subsequent methodological revisions to the inventory indicate that emissions had actually fallen below the 1990-equivalent level in 2014. CARB now reports 2014 emissions at approximately 428.2 MMTCO₂e under the revised methodology.
This does not mean that cap-and-trade alone caused the reduction.
That distinction is essential.
California’s emissions trajectory resulted from a portfolio of policies and external forces: renewable-electricity deployment, energy efficiency, vehicle standards, fuel policies, economic changes, technological change, electricity-sector changes, recession effects and eventually cap-and-trade. AB 32 itself was designed around such a portfolio.
It is therefore reasonable to say that California achieved the statutory AB 32 target. It is not reasonable to attribute the entire reduction to the allowance market.
The Second Consequence: Carbon Acquired a Market Price
Beginning in 2012–2013, greenhouse-gas emissions from covered sources acquired an explicit allowance price.
That changed the economics of emitting carbon.
An allowance became an asset carrying a price. Firms could compare the cost of reducing emissions internally with the cost of obtaining allowances. The declining emissions cap was intended to tighten the aggregate constraint while trading allowed different firms to respond differently according to their costs.
California subsequently linked its system with Québec, creating a cross-border carbon market.
The market proved durable. CARB records eight California-only quarterly auctions beginning in November 2012 before the joint auction system. By May 2026 California and Québec had conducted their 47th joint auction.
Thus a discretionary clause negotiated into AB 32 in August 2006 ultimately became a functioning multinational carbon market.
The Third Consequence: Carbon Policy Became Fiscal Policy
An important consequence was not fully apparent in 2006.
Auctioning state-owned allowances generated substantial public revenue.
Those proceeds created California’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and, through legislative appropriations, the broad collection of programs known as California Climate Investments.
By October 31, 2025, sales of state-owned allowances had generated approximately $36.2 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The funds have supported transportation, housing, clean vehicles, transit, energy efficiency, forestry, wildfire prevention, community projects and other climate-related investments. California reports that by 2025 more than $15.5 billion had actually been implemented through California Climate Investments programs, rather than merely appropriated.
Cap-and-trade consequently evolved into something broader than a mechanism for enforcing an emissions ceiling.
It became a mechanism for transferring part of the economic value associated with carbon allowances into public investment.
The Fourth Consequence: AB 32 Created Institutions That Outlived Its Original Target
Perhaps the most important cumulative effect of AB 32 was institutional.
The 2020 target was finite. The administrative machinery created to reach it was not.
California acquired a comprehensive greenhouse-gas inventory, mandatory reporting systems, a recurring Scoping Plan process, market-monitoring institutions, auction mechanisms, regulatory expertise, stakeholder procedures and a political expectation that statewide greenhouse-gas targets would continue.
That infrastructure made later legislation much easier to implement.
In 2016, SB 32—again associated with Fran Pavley—required emissions to fall to at least 40 percent below the 1990 level by 2030.
In 2017, AB 398 provided further legislative authority and direction for the cap-and-trade program through 2030.
California subsequently adopted still longer-term climate objectives, including net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions no later than 2045.
The institutional system created under AB 32 therefore became the foundation for policies extending far beyond AB 32’s original 2020 horizon.
The Fifth Consequence: California Became a Policy Laboratory
AB 32 also had consequences outside California.
It demonstrated that a large subnational economy could construct an economy-wide greenhouse-gas regulatory system in the absence of a comparable comprehensive federal statute.
Other governments, researchers, businesses and environmental organizations could observe California’s experience with allowance allocation, auctions, offsets, leakage protection, price containment, market oversight and complementary regulation.
Not every observer drew the same conclusions. Supporters pointed to declining emissions, technological investment and the durability of the carbon market. Critics questioned costs, allowance surpluses, offsets, environmental-justice effects and whether direct regulation rather than trading deserved more credit for observed reductions.
Those disagreements are themselves part of AB 32’s legacy. California converted theoretical arguments about carbon pricing into empirical questions that could be studied in an operating economy.
The Cumulative Result
The most recent CARB inventory available for this history reports statewide greenhouse-gas emissions of 360.4 MMTCO₂e in 2023, substantially below the 431 MMTCO₂e 2020 limit. CARB cautions, appropriately, that historical inventories are recalculated as methods and data improve.
Again, that number should not be interpreted as the isolated effect of AB 32’s cap-and-trade component. California climate policy is an interacting system.
That is, in fact, one of the most important conclusions of the entire history.
The political argument of 2006 was often framed as a choice among competing mechanisms: regulation, carbon taxation or emissions trading.
The system that actually evolved was hybrid.
California established a legally binding emissions objective. It used conventional regulations. It imposed sector-specific requirements. It promoted renewable energy and efficiency. It regulated fuels and vehicles. And it overlaid an economy-wide allowance market on much of the system.
What survived the political struggle was therefore not ideological purity but institutional pluralism.
Final Perspective
Seen from twenty years later, the most consequential decision made in AB 32 may not have been the selection of any particular carbon-control mechanism.
It was the decision to establish an enforceable statewide objective while creating an institution capable of learning how to reach it.
That explains both the political success of AB 32 and the six-year interval between enactment and carbon trading.
The Legislature did not attempt to design an entire carbon economy in a statute negotiated during the closing days of a legislative session.
It established the objective, assigned responsibility, created legal authority and left much of the engineering to an expert regulatory agency operating through an extended public process.
The final history therefore returns to the question with which it began: Who wrote AB 32?
Pavley and Núñez authored the legislation.
The Schwarzenegger administration helped negotiate the final political settlement.
Legislative staffs and counsel converted that settlement into statutory language.
NRDC, Environmental Defense and other organizations supplied advocacy, policy development and technical expertise. Devra Wang is specifically documented as having been instrumental in securing enactment and subsequently coordinating NRDC’s implementation work.
Businesses, environmental-justice organizations, regulators and many other participants altered the political constraints within which the final language was possible.
CARB then spent years converting that legislation into an operating regulatory system.
And subsequent Legislatures and governors extended and modified what AB 32 had begun.
That is why the history of AB 32 is more interesting than the conventional story of a bill passing the Legislature and being signed by a governor.
It is a case study in how a controversial idea becomes a statute, how compromise becomes statutory language, how statutory language becomes an administrative system, and how that system can subsequently reshape public policy for decades.