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California’s high housing costs are driving poor and middle income people out of their housing like never before. While some are fleeing coastal areas for cheaper living inland, others are leaving the state altogether.

Homelessness is on the rise. California is home to 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 22 percent of its homeless people. Cities that have seen dramatic rent increases, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, attribute their spikes in homelessness directly to a state housing shortage that has led to an unprecedented affordability crisis.

Housing experts trace the problem back to the 1970s. Backlash began to arise – in coastal communities, in particular – from neighbors who opposed new housing in their neighborhoods.

A controversial California climate program got a shot of good news this month when a study suggested it is successfully reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and providing other environmental benefits on the side. The study, conducted by a trio of Stanford University researchers, concerns a California “carbon offset” program, which allows companies to pay to preserve carbon-storing forests instead of reducing their own emissions. According to the researchers’ findings, that program is protecting imperiled forests and preventing the carbon they store from being released into the atmosphere.

Half the state’s households struggle to afford the roof over their heads. Homeownership—once a staple of the California dream—is at its lowest rate since World War II. Nearly 70 percent of poor Californians see the majority of their paychecks go immediately to escalating rents.

This month, state lawmakers are debating a long-delayed housing package. Here’s what you need to know about one of California’s most vexing issues.

The regional cost of renting has surged at double the pace of overall inflation so far this century. Renters in Los Angeles and Orange counties give more of their paychecks to the landlord than any other metro in the nation. And perhaps three-quarters of Southern California’s renters claim they are ready to bolt. An exaggerated upswing in Southern California rent is frequently blamed on an economic mismatch: solid employment growth outstripping the developers’ ability to build enough apartments to meet demand, especially for those not seeking luxury digs. Rising home prices also nix ownership for many. So, a growing flock of renters is chasing too few vacant units, and that supply shortfall pushes up rent prices.

Pot shops are sprouting across California after voters last year legalized marijuana for recreational use. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sowed fears on the left that the feds will try to nip California’s pot industry in the bud. The bigger threat may be parasitic lawyers.

Plaintiff firms have filed some 800 complaints against marijuana businesses alleging violations of the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (Prop. 65). The 1986 law requires businesses to post warnings if their products contain one of the more than 900 chemicals that state regulators have deemed hazardous or carcinogenic.

. . . Plaintiff attorneys eye a business opportunity in pot legalization, which is expected to grow California’s cannabis market by $5 billion. They are now raiding mom-and-pop pot shops, vaping cartridge manufacturers, edible producers and co-ops. One plaintiff has filed more than 600 Prop. 65 violation notices.

Overall, we find that increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers. Our estimates suggest that an increase of the minimum wage by $1 (based on 2015 dollars) decreases the share of lowskilled automatable jobs by 0.43 percentage point (an elasticity of −0.11). However, these average effects mask significant heterogeneity by industry and by demographic group. In particular, there are large effects on the shares of automatable employment in manufacturing, where we estimate that a $1 increase in the minimum wage decreases the share of automatable employment among low-skilled workers by 0.99 percentage point (elasticity of −0.17). Within manufacturing, the share of older workers in automatable employment declines most sharply, and the share of workers in automatable employment also declines sharply for women and blacks.

Nuclear plants in New York will continue to receive payments collected from all in-state load serving entities (LSE) in recognition of their clean energy contributions. Those payments, which might be as high as $8 billion over a ten year period, may also be as low as zero during years in which the average wholesale price of electricity rises to a level at which selling power becomes profitable for the qualifying plants. In a decision filed July 25, Judge Valerie Caproni dismissed the motions filed by various electrical generators and trade groups of electrical generators that challenged the constitutionality of the New York Public Service Commission’s decision to create a Zero Emission Credit program.

“The traditional view has been that the license is just a barrier to entry,” said Clemson University economist Peter Blair, who co-authored the paper with Clemson graduate student Bobby Chung. But, he said in an interview, licenses also provide potential employers with information about the workers who have them: Many require special training or bar people with criminal records.

The study suggests women are rewarded because a license signals training and job skills, while black men benefit when a license signals they don’t have a felony conviction.

“Licensing may not be the most efficient way to convey this information, but we need to acknowledge that licensing is providing this information,” Mr. Blair said.

The state Supreme Court has decided not to take up an appeal of a lower court ruling that Malibu can’t limit chain stores or force major development projects to be put to a vote of the people. The determination filed late Wednesday appeared to mark the end of the road for the beach city’s Measure R ballot measure limiting development, handing a major victory to developers and for a project that would bring a Whole Foods store to the city.

The drive to replace polluting petrol and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has gathered momentum in recent weeks. But there is an unanswered environmental question at the heart of the electric car movement: what on earth to do with their half-tonne lithium-ion batteries when they wear out?

. . . in the EU as few as 5% (pdf) of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. This has an environmental cost. Not only do the batteries carry a risk of giving off toxic gases if damaged, but core ingredients such as lithium and cobalt are finite and extraction can lead to water pollution and depletion among other environmental consequences.

Widespread adoption of “cool roofs” – typically made of light-colored materials that reflect a large fraction of the sun’s rays – has the potential to increase certain types of air pollution, researchers from the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the University of Southern California reported yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. . . .The widespread adoption of cool roofs will decrease annual average daily high temperature in the basin, the researchers found – a generally positive effect. However, the lower temperature on land is likely to weaken sea breezes and alter the mixing of air from different levels of the atmosphere. In turn, these changes will slightly increase PM2.5 concentrations throughout the basin. . . . they found that widespread installation of cool roofs is likely to increase the concentration of ozone in the South Coast Air Basin. This is because UV rays contribute to the formation of ozone.

There’s a limit on how much renewables will be able to do, going forward. Wind and solar are intermittent by nature, and can’t be relied upon to replace more consistent energy sources like nuclear power or coal en masse. Germany’s reactors would have made a nice foundation on which to build this renewables revolution, but Merkel’s mind seems made up. But however hard she tries to position herself as the virtuous green, the fact remains that German emissions rose last year, while America’s fell three percent (thanks to cheap, abundant shale gas displacing coal). Words matter, but so do numbers, and the data tells us that lately—whatever Trump is trumpeting—the United States is doing more to combat climate change than Germany.

A new analysis by the National Center for Public Policy Research found that Gore’s Tennessee home “guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.” In one month last year, the report found, Gore’s home consumed more electricity than the average family uses in 34 months. The electricity used just to heat Gore’s swimming pool would power six homes for a year. And this is after Gore spent tens of thousands of dollars installing “green” upgrades, which he was embarrassed into doing when his energy-hogging home first came to light a decade ago. In fact, according to the NCPPR report, Gore’s home used more electricity last year than it did in 2007, before he installed all those energy-reducing features.

California’s rent control movement, strongest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is again gaining steam as the state faces an extreme housing shortage that has led to skyrocketing rents and rampant tenant displacement. State officials call it an unprecedented crisis, exacerbated by the erosion of state and federal funding for low-income housing development. Activists are launching new rent control campaigns up and down the state, from Sacramento to Pacific to Glendale.

California’s politicians and civic leaders have portrayed Tesla as the crown jewel of the state’s efforts to build a new economy for the 21st century while dramatically reducing carbon emissions. Gov. Jerry Brown has set a goal of having 1.5 million battery- or hydrogen-powered “zero emission vehicles” or ZEVs on California roads by 2025, roughly five times their current numbers, with ZEVs being 15 percent of all new car sales by then. Toward that end, the state has been an indirect investor in Tesla through corporate tax breaks and direct subsidies to purchasers of its cars. Tesla has also benefited handsomely by selling credits to other automakers in lieu of their meeting state quotas for making and selling ZEVs. If Tesla doesn’t deliver on its ambitious production and sales goals for Model 3 and finally become profitable, it will not only be a huge setback for Musk and other stockholders, but for the politicians who are also betting on its success.