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Researchers looked at three key California climate and clean energy policies: 1) cap and trade, which established a market designed to reduce carbon emissions from major polluters; 2) the renewables portfolio standard (RPS), which calls for California to get 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, growing to 50 percent by 2030; and 3) energy efficiency programs run by investor-owned utilities and overseen by the Public Utilities Commission.

Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency cast doubt on whether California should continue to have power to impose its own emission rules for cars and trucks, an authority the state has enjoyed for decades that is also the cornerstone of its efforts to fight global warming.

Politicians who represent the region in the Capitol have also been skeptical of state regulations, and it’s unclear whether they’ll be swayed by some of the report, which analyzed the cap-and-trade program, renewable energy standards and energy efficiency initiatives. According to the study, there has been $13.4 billion in economic benefits, primarily from the construction of solar generation facilities.

This multi-topic publication highlights the state’s most pressing long-term policy challenges in several key areas.

“The drought that the storms may have ended has been the hydrological equivalent of a severe economic recession, and proved once again that California has not provided enough water storage to sustain its nearly 40 million residents and its economy when precipitation is scant. Moreover, were predictions of climate change to prove true, it would mean California could depend even less on the natural reservoir of mountain snowpacks because it would receive more of its precipitation as rain, and thus would logically need more man-made storage to close the gap.”

Western states run by Democrats are aiming to use government responses to climate change as the basis for a new economic pitch to show voters the party can manage a transitioning economy.

The prominent German economist Heiner Flassbeck has challenged fundamental assumptions of the Energiewende at his blog site makroskop.eu. According to Flassbeck, the former Director of Macroeconomics and Development at the UNCTAD in Geneva and a former State Secretary of Finance, a recent period of extremely low solar and wind power generation shows that Germany will never be able to rely on renewable energy, regardless of  how much new capacity will be built.

The Palo Alto-based company began “mass production” of its lithium-ion battery cells Wednesday at its plant outside Reno, Nevada. The company has already partnered with Panasonic Corp. to build the batteries, which will be used in Tesla’s energy-storage products and in its Model 3 sedan, the company said in a blog post.

By the numbers, China looks like it’s on the way to dominating the global electric car industry. But subsidies and inferior technology threaten to leave it behind the rest of the world despite the big numbers. Chinese electric passenger car sales rose by 50% in 2016 to more than 300,000 cars, according to China’s state-backed auto manufacturers association, overtaking the U.S. China is targeting more than 4 million electric cars on the road over the next four years. Outside China, about 260,000 electric cars were sold world-wide last year. With electric cars, China is running into a familiar problem. It can put up big numbers but quality is uneven and subsidies spur much of the production. Last year alone, China spent nearly $15 billion on electric cars and charging stations. The production numbers paint a misleading picture of the industry. China has mostly stuck with inferior, indigenous technology, leaving the market dominated by low-cost, low-range electric car models and inconsistent charging-station standards. Anecdotally, consumers complain of flimsy and tiny cars that wouldn’t pass crash tests and batteries quickly going bad. It isn’t surprising that the main buyers of electric vehicles have been taxi fleets and government entities. 

Demand for small and midsize passenger cars has collapsed amid a sustained run of cheap fuel, pushing buyers to gravitate toward sport utilities, crossover wagons and pickups. . . Barclays’s Mr. Johnson estimates a “sedan recession” will have companies scrambling to cut about 2 million units of car production annually to make way for more SUVs and crossovers. This trend extends beyond the domestics—last spring, Toyota Motor Corp. retooled a cars-only assembly line at a plant in Princeton, Ind., to be able to build the Highlander SUV, helping notch its best sales month ever.

Earlier this year, a video explaining Sweden’s efficient trash burning system made the Facebook rounds, touting a shocking statistic: less than one percent of this country’s household waste ends up in a landfill. Instead, much of it is incinerated and converted into usable electricity and heat via waste-to-energy plants. In the U.S., the clip left the social media community scratching its collective head, and asking: Why aren’t Americans burning more of our own garbage?

If you have 10 hourly employees working eight-hour shifts, five days a week and you raise the wages a dollar an hour, that comes out to a nearly $20K increase on the year. In AQ’s best year — a phenomenal year by restaurant standards — that would have been nearly 10% of profits. . . With the introduction of Obamacare, most restaurant workers finally got the coverage they’ve needed for years through the employer mandate, but critics often talk about the strain it puts on small-business owners . . Semmelhack told me that in 2012 they paid $14,400 for health care costs. In 2015, they paid $86,400. That’s an increase of $72K MORE per year than 2012, or 29% of their best year’s profit.

And the printed version of the Federal Register, the daily depository of all things regulatory, has topped off at 97,110 pages, by far an all time record. . . That dwarfs last year’s count of 80,260 pages, and it shatters the 2010 all-time record of 81,405 by 15,705 pages

Minimum wages will increase in 20 states at the start of the year, a shift that will lift pay for millions of individuals and shed light on a long-running debate about whether mandated pay increases at the bottom do more harm or good for workers.

“Lithium is a pretty abundant element naturally,” Jamie Speirs, a fellow in energy analysis and policy at Imperial College London, told CNBC via telephone. But, though worldwide production of the metal is increasing year on year, he detailed that “the current supply chain will not match up with lithium demand by, say, 2040.” . . . “China has a stranglehold on lithium production,” Speirs said. “Well organised and professionally run mining companies” make this enterprise profitable, he added.