Platform: Steve Poizner

Poizner advocates a waiver of the Endangered Species Act as part of a proposed solution to California’s water crisis. On his campaign Web site, Poizner “calls on each of California’s representatives in the U.S. Congress to support legislation to ensure that the ESA does not unduly restrict the supply of water during times of drought emergency.” Other short-term and long-term solutions listed on his Web site include utilizing the governor’s executive power; building the “two gates” project; increasing surface and groundwater storage; building a new conveyance system, promoting conservation and efficiency with plumbing retrofits, improved water auditing, and high efficiency appliances, and promoting water recycling and desalination by local agencies.

Poizner was recently quoted saying: “Now I care about the environment. I have solar cells on my roof. We’re going to protect the environment here in California, but the rules are so extreme here, all that it ends up doing is to kill jobs and pushes manufacturing to the Midwest.

In an interview with the Sacramento Bee earlier in 2009, Poizner elaborated on this point: “Right now, because of our tax and regulatory structure, we've chased the manufacturing structure and a lot of other jobs out of the state. And by the way, we haven't cleaned up the environment at all… I think we should continue to take the lead on cleaning up the environment. I think some of those environmental rules also link up nicely with national security issues. … We need to rapidly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. However, we need to implement this leadership vision in a very careful way and not completely drive the economic engine out of this state… Let's use Google as an example. Their server farms are not in California. Why is that? Well, electricity costs 30 percent higher … because we can't build power plants in California. We import 30 percent of our electricity from dirty, coal-burning plants in the Midwest."

Poizner has called it “misguided and a big mistake to have extreme environmental policies that end up just driving businesses out of the state” but in an email to a reporter, his campaign staff said Poizner has not called for a suspension of AB 32, California's landmark 2006 initiative against global warming