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Beyond US President Donald Trump’s decision in June to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a more profound challenge to the global climate pact is emerging. No major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges to control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change.

Wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality. Countries in the European Union are struggling to increase energy efficiency and renewable power to the levels that they claimed they would. Japan promised cuts in emissions to match those of its peers, but meeting the goals will cost more than the country is willing to pay. Even without Trump’s attempts to roll back federal climate policy, the United States is shifting its economy to clean energy too slowly.

. . . Most pledges are almost silent on the range of policies being used, making it difficult to discern which are actually effective. The EU, for example, submitted little information about the complex pledge-implementation process that is already under way. The gap between promise and action is especially large for the strategies that governments are using to boost energy efficiency, for which the real costs are often opaque. Equipment prices can be easily assessed but these are frequently only a fraction of the total deployment costs.

The pledges are impenetrable in other ways. Even the Obama administration, which vowed to set a high standard for openness, did not disclose the assumptions it used to model future emissions. More information is needed to evaluate the plausibility of carbon sequestration by forests, projected outcomes of climate policy and business-as-usual market trends — especially in light of the change in US leadership.

Climate change is often misunderstood as a package deal: If global warming is “real,” both sides of the debate seem to assume, the climate lobby’s policy agenda follows inexorably.

Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana. 

Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.

Under the law, passed late in the Barack Obama presidency but now enforced by Donald Trump’s regime, the state is supposed to tell Washington how it will spend $2.5 billion in federal funds to improve outcomes for poor kids who make up the majority of California’s six-plus million public school students. The plan being readied for adoption by the school board would give the feds minimal information, basically just filling in the blanks as required but offering little detail. State officials say they are wary of giving more specifics because they don’t know yet how Trump’s Department of Education will enforce the new law. . . . It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the underlying issue. Roughly 60 percent of California’s K-12 public school students are considered at risk, and it goes as high as 100 percent in some districts. Those 3.5-plus million kids are our future and if they are not adequately educated we all will pay the price in crime, social dislocation and economic stagnation. Brown and those he appoints seem unwilling to make sure that the extra money he championed is actually spent on those kids, and in a manner that does improve their academic outcomes. Therefore, it falls on the education reform and civil rights organizations to stand up for them.

Lu Fang, secretary general of the photovoltaics decision in the China Renewable Energy Society, wrote in an article circulating on mainland social media this month that the country’s cumulative capacity of retired panels would reach up to 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2034.

That is three times the scale of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project, by power production.

By 2050 these waste panels would add up to 20 million tonnes, or 2,000 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, according to Lu.

. . . A panel’s lifespan ranges from 20 to 30 years, depending on the environment in which they are used, according to the US Department of Energy. High temperatures can accelerate the ageing process for solar cells, while other negative factors – such as the weight of snow or dust storms – could cause material fatigue on the surface and internal electric circuits, gradually reducing the panel’s power output.

A constant tenet of Marin County’s guiding ethos is resistance to growth, manifesting itself in a kind of environmental apartheid. Under the guise of preserving a serene environment, Marin County’s residents and politicians use every means possible to avoid building new housing that would allow more population growth, particularly low- or moderate-income dwellings. They’ve been remarkably successful. Between 1969 and 2015, while California’s population was doubling, Marin County’s grew by just 28.4 percent. . . . When California’s housing shortfall became acute and the state government started getting serious about the housing quotas it had been assigning to communities, Marin County’s assemblyman, Democrat Marc Levine, carried a 2014 bill to exempt it from quotas until 2023, arguing that Marin needed more time to get it right. However, without waiting for a scheduled report on the county’s progress on meeting its housing quotas, Levine persuaded legislative leaders last month to insert into a budget “trailer bill” (Senate Bill 106) a brief passage that extends Marin County’s exemption from quotas for an additional five years, until 2028.

A developer wants to build 4,400 new homes there — one of the largest projects recently proposed in one of the country’s most unaffordable regions. The development would overlook a railway that drops riders into the heart of San Francisco in 15 minutes, reducing the need for cars and cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that come from them. State and regional leaders have endorsed the project. But its fate rests with Brisbane, a city of 4,700 people that annexed the property 55 years ago. And no one, not even the developer, thinks Brisbane’s residents will approve all 4,400 homes.

he Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions designed to expand insurance coverage that also alter the tie between employment and health insurance. In this paper, we exploit variation across geographic areas in the potential impact of the ACA to estimate its effect on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes in the first two years after the implementation of its main features. Our measures of potential ACA impact come from pre- existing population shares of uninsured individuals within income groups that were targeted by Medicaid expansions and federal subsidies for private health insurance, interacted with each state’s Medicaid expansion status. Our findings indicate that the majority of the increase in health insurance coverage since 2013 is due to the ACA and that areas in which the potential Medicaid and exchange enrollments were higher saw substantially larger increases in coverage. While labor market outcomes in the aggregate were not significantly affected, our results indicate that labor force participation reductions in areas with higher potential exchange enrollment were offset by increases in labor force participation in areas with higher potential Medicaid enrollment

A powerful California water agency is poised to adopt its own regulations that could protect more of the state’s wetlands from being plowed, paved over or otherwise damaged. Environmental groups are pressuring the State Water Resources Control Board to push back against Trump’s decision and adopt a wetlands policy that’s even stricter than former President Barack Obama’s. “The state board should be adopting a policy that is even more protective of California’s wetlands,” said Rachel Zwillinger, water policy adviser for Defenders of Wildlife. “This (proposed) policy is a critical opportunity for the state to step up and protect its own resources.” A fight over the proposed rules has been brewing for years and is about to come to a head. A year ago, a broad coalition of developers, homebuilders, farmers and other business groups submitted testimony against the regulations, saying they would create more red tape, higher costs and fewer rights for landowners.

Occupational licensing requirements have a widespread and deep reach in California. The Golden State ranks 7th in the nation for licensing burden, with a total of 62 low-income occupations licensed and requiring an average of 549 days of education. These licenses have cast a wide net, with one out of every five Californian’s needing to receive permission to work from the government . By restrict entry into the market occupational licenses also result in lower job growth. Specifically, licensed industries experience up to 20% lower job growth than their unlicensed counterparts. This has prevented the creation of 3 million jobs nationally, according to a study from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Occupational licenses also increase wages at the cost of consumers. While we can cheer hooray for those licensed workers who now enjoy 15% higher wages, the party is ruined for consumers who now fork out an additional $203 billion a year. In fact, the increase in consumer prices in licensed industries ranges from 5% to a whopping 33%.

The measure by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, whose district suffered heavy flood damage in February, would require state agencies to speed up permit processing and approval for certain types of flood-control projects. Current law already allows authorities to exempt or delay permit requirements during emergencies. Yet other high-priority projects still have to go through the normal permitting process. That leads to delays.

Drilling down, the paper found the law drove people to make different choices about work. “Middle-income individuals reduced their labor supply due to the additional tax on earnings while lower income individuals worked more in order to qualify for private insurance,” the authors wrote. “In the aggregate, these countervailing effects approximately balance” in terms of their impact on overall participation rates.

Today almost one-third of Americans need an occupational license to work legally, a number that has increased fivefold since the mid-20th century. Occupations requiring licenses range from practicing physicians to shampooers to fortune tellers. Uncle Sam appears to be taking notice. Maureen Ohlhaussen, acting chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has recently spearheaded an Economic Liberty Taskforce to address many of the issues caused by the current licensing landscape. . . .Because licensing is controlled by the states, requirements for licenses are not uniform or systematic. The Institute for Justice analyzed the occupations that require licenses and highlighted how they vary by state. For instance, a barber’s license requires almost two and a half years of education and training in Nevada, but only 175 days of training in Wyoming. Moreover, a barber from Nevada could not cut hair in any other state, including the less stringent Wyoming. Cities can further complicate matters by spawning unnecessary restrictions, such as New York City’s new ban on pet sitting without a kennel license. Another traditionally teen job is eliminated by the bureaucracy.

Simple arithmetic reveals why permit streamlining is critical. The state says we need 180,000 new units of housing a year, but we’re building only 100,000 now. Closing that 80,000-unit gap would require more than $26 billion a year in additional investment at the average cost of $332,000 per unit for lower-end housing cited in Brown’s budget. Under even the best circumstances, therefore, the state could provide only a tiny fraction of the needed money, so making it easier for private and non-profit money to flow into actual construction is the most vital element of any package. The major pitfall is that faced with the difficult politics, Brown and legislators will settle for a token response – throwing a few billion dollars at the problem that won’t make even a small dent and failing to enact the regulatory reforms. That not only would ignore the most vital issue, but would allow politicians to claim a face-saving, undeserved victory, much as they did for a roadway improvement package that covers only a fraction of the unmet need.

Marin County will continue to limit home building beyond what other regions of California are allowed under affordable housing laws after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Friday afternoon. The measure, Senate Bill 106, lets Marin’s largest cities and incorporated areas maintain extra restrictions on how many homes developers can build. Assemblyman Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) inserted the provision into the bill, which was tied to the state budget and didn’t have to go through the regular committee process.

Transit ridership in the first quarter of 2017 was 3.1 percent less than the same quarter in 2016, according the American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report. The association released the report without a press release, instead issuing a release complaining about the House Appropriations bill reducing funding for transit. . . . In most cases where light-rail ridership grew, it did so at the expense of bus ridership. Los Angeles Metro gained 1.66 million light-rail riders but lost 8.73 million bus riders, or more than five for every new light-rail rider. Between the two modes, Phoenix’s Valley Metro lost 23,100 riders; Charlotte 20,200 lost riders; and Dallas Area Rapid Transit lost 193,100 riders. Similarly, Orlando’s commuter trains gained 22,700 riders but buses lost 98,500.