California voters will decide in November whether to give cities and counties new freedom to expand the use of rent control after an initiative backed by tenant groups earned a spot Friday on this fall’s ballot. The initiative would repeal a decades-old state law that prevents local governments from passing most new rent control laws. […]
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organization subsidiary mired in controversy, picked Dr. Elisabete Weiderpass as its new director on May 17th. Critics hoped IARC would mend unscientific practices used under former director Chris Wild by filling the vacancy with an outsider, but Weiderpass will likely champion its status quo. […]
The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment proposed Friday to exempt coffee from a state regulation that require businesses to warn consumers about carcinogens in their products. “OEHHA has determined that exposures to Proposition 65-listed chemicals in coffee that are produced as part of and inherent in the processes of roasting coffee beans and […]
There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the DFA disproportionately reduced the incentives for all banks to make very modest loans and reduced the viability of small banks, whose small-business share of C&I […]
Possibly the biggest reason for the Obama administration’s failure to reignite normal economic growth following the Financial Crisis was the Dodd-Frank law. It not only didn’t make the financial system safer, it all but killed small business growth. A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the quasi-private think tank that […]
Two landlords filed a lawsuit Thursday against the city of Los Angeles, saying a key element of its new commercial trash pickup system is an illegal tax under state law. Malcolm Bennett and Frederick Leeds, both owners of rental properties, contend in a lawsuit that the city’s RecycLA program violates Proposition 218, which prohibits local […]
California and eight other states rolled out a plan pressuring car companies and others to meet ambitious goals for sales of electric vehicles and other environmentally friendly automobiles—part of an effort to maintain tough local regulations while the Trump administration moves to relax nationwide standards for tailpipe emissions. The plan among the nine states, covering […]
Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same […]
Carbon Engineering is a company co-founded by Harvard physicist David Keith and funded, among others, by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Since 2015, the firm has been running a CO2 extraction plant in Canada, testing out a technology that was until recently rejected as too costly. Keith and his collaborators, who wrote the paper, have used […]
The speculative fever for electric-car metals is pushing to nearly four-year highs prices for nickel—a key ingredient in stainless steel. Nickel is the top industrial metal and among the best-performing assets of 2018, with futures contracts on the London Metal Exchange up 21%, as battery manufacturers, mostly in China, and investors across the world hoard […]
Global spending on renewable energy is outpacing investment in electricity from coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants, driven by falling costs of producing wind and solar power. More than half of the power-generating capacity added around the world in recent years has been in renewable sources such as wind and solar, according to the […]
In Michigan the roads are so bad they’re a joke on social media. “BREAKING NEWS: lost city of atlantis found in detroit pothole,” local YouTube star Demetrius Harmon quipped on Twitter in February, garnering thousands of likes. “I don’t always dodge potholes,” another Michigan meme says, “but when I do, I hit four more.” So […]
Tesla plans to cut 9 percent of its workforce, Electrek reported on Tuesday, in what CEO Elon Musk called a “difficult, but necessary reorg” that will impact salaried employees but spare the production line at its Fremont factory. The Palo Alto-based car maker began layoffs on Monday, Electrek said, citing sources familiar with the matter. […]
The only large-scale car manufacturer in California argues that doing business in the state is hard enough without a fast-developing labor regulation backed by organizations that want to unionize its Fremont plant. Elon Musk’s Tesla is fighting a rule under development by two state agencies that would require it to be certified as a “fair […]
Escalating electricity prices are regressive—poorer people pay a higher proportion of their incomes heating and cooling their houses than do richer people. Low-income folks also tend to live in draftier dwellings and retain older, less energy-efficient appliances and climate-control systems. Consequently, anything that raises the price of power will impose bigger relative costs on the […]