So far the battle has entailed more words than action, with the tax's
supporters trading charged public comments with representatives of the tech companies such as Weinberg's Bay Area Council Economic Institute and the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, which represents Salesforce, Google, Pinterest, Twilio, and others.
This argument is especially galling to EPA's
supporters, because under President George W. Bush's administration, when Holmstead himself was an EPA official in
charge of air pollution programs, the agency tried to regulate mercury pollution using a similarly flexible system of pollution allowance
trading.