It would be difficult to use the words "old school" to describe Anthony Rubenstein, a former film producer and entertainment industry executive who now runs a private equity firm that invests in clean technology projects in China.

Yet, when Rubenstein set out several years ago to try to create a "Manhattan Project" for clean energy research and development in California, he stubbornly insisted on taking an old-school approach. Counter to political advice and against his own interests, he insisted that his $4 billion ballot initiative pay for itself.

"I paid my own friggin' way," he says. "I was polling at 67 percent on using general obligation bonds to pay for Proposition 87. I could have jammed it down your throats."

Instead, even after being threatened by oil industry executives that they would "throw the book" at him if he did so, Rubenstein proposed that the clean-energy research and incentives in his initiative be financed through an extraction tax on oil produced from wells in California.

The result? The oil industry spent $150 million on a campaign to defeat the 2006 initiative, and it lost 45 percent to 55 percent.

With the defeat, California lost an opportunity to get a jump on the rest of the world in clean-energy research and it remains the only large oil-producing state that does not levy an extraction tax on oil.

Rubenstein was a panelist Tuesday at a discussion on reforming California's initiative process. It was, he said, the first time he had publicly discussed the "incredibly painful" experience of having organized a $54 million campaign for an initiative that drew praise and participation from Bill Clinton and Al Gore but was ultimately buried by a mountain of petroleum money.

But if he was pained after that, he's really steamed now.

The focus of his wrath is Proposition 10, the Nov. 4 ballot measure that steals the political appeal of his idea but replaces his science-based, technology-neutral approach for developing alternative energy with a specific plan that would have the effect of enriching the man who devised it: Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens, unburdened by the old-fashioned notion of providing a mechanism to pay for what he proposes, is asking Californians to authorize the borrowing of $5 billion to fund this energy scheme.

By the time Californians pay back the principal and interest on those bonds, the total cost to taxpayers will be $10 billion. "I call it Proposition 10 Billion," Rubenstein says.

What would all that money mean for Pickens?

Pickens is the founder of Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a California company that supplies natural gas to fleets of trucks, vans and buses that run on the fuel. A majority of the clean-energy incentives from Proposition 10 would go to companies that buy natural gas-powered trucks, which would then buy their fuel from Clean Energy Fuels.

Given that it costs about $2 million to pay signature-gatherers to qualify an initiative for the California ballot, Rubenstein said Pickens' financial calculus was fairly simple:

"It costs $2 million to get my hands on $2.8 billion that's going into my own pocket? It's a no-brainer."

Rubenstein has helped assemble an incredibly broad coalition of opponents to Proposition 10 — from the state Chamber of Commerce to the Consumer Federation of California — and the measure has been lambasted in newspaper editorials across the state.

Still, it has an appealing ballot title ("Alternative fuel vehicles and renewable energy"), Pickens and his colleagues have several million dollars to promote it, and opponents have no money for paid advertising.

And on top of all that, Proposition 10 would be paid for with what California voters have apparently come to believe is free money — general obligation bonds.

"Voters do not understand that a bond is not a gift from the future," Rubenstein said. "It is a tax hike or a program cut from the future."

Mark Paul, a scholar for the New America Foundation, which sponsored Tuesday's discussion, noted that since 1998 California voters have approved $108 billion in general obligation bonds.

"Californians want, and so they borrow," Paul said. "There is an unwillingness to actually pay for things with taxes or user fees."

Paul proposes that the "something for nothing" mentality be staunched with a requirement that every ballot proposition that involves spending be forced "to pay for itself with either new revenue or offsetting spending cuts."

On this year's ballot, Propositions 1A, 3, 6, 9 and 10 propose borrowing or spending without providing revenues or offsetting reductions in state expenses.

Rubenstein's advice: "Vote no on anything that costs money."

— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star's state bureau. His political blog "95 percent accurate*" is at http://www.TimmHerdt.com.