COOL DOWN, ARNOLD, ON WARMING.

Byline: JILL STEWART 

MAYBE it's because California has sweltered through a bake-oven summer, but global warming has shot up on the public's list of crucial election issues, even as a new poll shows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trusted on the environment.

The poll by the Public Policy Institute of California also shows Schwarzenegger well ahead of state Treasurer Phil Angelides to win in November, but Arnold shouldn't get a big head. It's fine to see him making a pact with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on global warming, but he shouldn't rush on an issue that requires a careful, multidisciplinary, reasoned response.

Among other things, the governor wants to take some of the power from the Air Resources Board and give it to a panel focused solely on the gases and emissions linked to global warming.

I am always leery of new layers of government. We have an extensive Environmental Protection Agency at the state level, and our activist Air Resources Board has dragged California out of the polluting 1970s. We've added millions of residents over 30 years, yet smog is way down. Smoggy Seattle and Denver steal California's ideas -- after ridiculing us for years.

Moreover, the California Chamber of Commerce and big business were proved dead wrong in their 1970s predictions that our massive air cleanup would cripple business. Instead, the war on smog spawned high-paying jobs for engineers, scientists and others who design, build, install or sell green technologies.

My concern is that in his desire to maximize his polling advantage, Arnold will forget how easy it is to muck things up by messing with a large bureaucracy.

On May 31, he unveiled his global warming plan at the U.N. World Environmental Day Conference. He's proposing a rollback in emissions of gases believed linked to global warming to 2000 levels by 2010, followed by additional rollbacks.

Which brings us to his proposed ``Climate Action Board,'' which would oversee a ``comprehensive emission reduction system'' affecting buildings, landfills, agriculture, the energy sector and many other areas.

BreAnda Northcutt, of the California EPA, tells me, ``The Air Resources Board has made it clear they don't have the expertise or manpower to operate a comprehensive emissions management system.''

The new board would not merely push through environmental regulations. It would have power to stop regulations that curbed greenhouse gases -- if those rules hurt the economy. It would decide upon ``cap and trade'' provisions that give monetary incentives to low polluters (a great idea), but allow some polluters to pay to avoid sanctions (a necessity until we figure out how to make industries cleaner).

Arnold wants Assembly Speaker Fabian NuIllegal 'X-value' for character STYLs voided here ez, a Los Angeles Democrat, to amend Assembly Bill 32 to create his Climate Action Board. But some environmentalists are queasy, seeing the governor's idea as a possible end-run around the Air Resources Board.

Do we want the governor to control this powerful new bureaucracy via an appointed body? It's true that the governor also appoints the Air Resources Board, and it also serves at will. But the ARB has a long and steady history of doing its job. We know its work. Yet we don't even know who the governor will be in six months. What if Schwarzenegger creates this powerful new body, and it immediately comes under control of ``Gov. Phil Angelides''?

I certainly don't want Angelides choosing the nine people who make global warming decisions for California. He's clueless. Since Schwarzenegger has a vision for how this board should operate, shouldn't he wait until he knows whether he is the governor before he creates it?

Nobody knows how to address global warming. Nobody knows if we are on a short trajectory to climatological disaster, or, as some believe, if we are overreacting to an eons-long process that will begin a vast self-correction and cool down without us. Or something in between.

Schwarzenegger should move slowly here. In California, it is rare to see an agency that does its job and helps society, as does the successful California Air Resources Board. The more common outcome, by far, is the Law of Unintended Consequences.