France’s violent Yellow Vest protests are now about many domestic concerns, but it’s no accident that the trigger was a fuel-tax hike. Nothing reveals the disconnect between ordinary voters and an aloof political class more than carbon taxation. The fault line runs between anti-carbon policies and economic growth, and France is a test for the […]
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego, will introduce legislation to add to state law a stricter “ABC test” for defining employees. The test, adopted unanimously by the California Supreme Court this spring, threw nearly three decades of legal precedent up in the air and generated intense pushback from the business community. The bill would strengthen […]
And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate […]
A married military couple who had to pay thousands of dollars to boot their tenants in order to move back into their Oakland home say the city law requiring the fee violates their rights. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian property-rights firm based in Sacramento, said Wednesday in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of […]
On Wednesday, the California Business & Industrial Alliance (CABIA) representing hundreds of employers filed a complaint in Orange County challenging the Private Attorneys General Act’s (PAGA) constitutionality. The opening synopsis of the complaint asks: Are California business owners who inadvertently make a payroll error equivalent to the worst perpetrators of hate crimes? That’s the twisted […]
California is failing to meet its goals to reduce vehicle travel, imperiling efforts to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to a state report released Monday. The report by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate change regulator, found that carbon emissions per capita from vehicle travel in California were increasing. That’s despite […]
Butte County’s Camp Fire not only claimed a staggering amount of lives and property, it spewed out a whole lot of greenhouse gases – about as much as all of California’s cars and trucks produce in a week, according to new state estimates. This blast of emissions contributes negligibly to the planet’s overall warming, but […]
Angelenos and the City of Los Angeles dodged a potentially fatal bullet on Tuesday, November 6, when 58% of the City’s voters said NO to Charter Amendment B, which, according a Los Angeles Times editorial, was “one of the most ill-conceived, half-baked measures to come out of City Hall in years, and that’s saying something.” […]
A California regulator said late Thursday that it was expanding a probe of PG&E Corp.’s P safety practices to explore the way the company is managed and run, including whether it should be broken up. “I will open a new phase examining the corporate governance, structure, and operation of PG&E, including in light of the […]
Supposedly civic-minded prohibitions on consumer conveniences always have unintended consequences. California’s single-use plastic bag ban, for instance, has led to a surge in E. coli infections, created a swarm of thicker plastics bags that are a greater environmental hazard than the outlawed single-use plastic bags, boosted shoplifting, and been the cause of countless broken eggs […]
The tide of medical-marijuana legalization making its way through American states is leading to a notable uptick in the birth of babies, according to a new paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states and Washington, D.C., allow the once verboten drug to be […]
None of the scenarios in the latest International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook show renewables growing fast enough to meet global climate goals. Under current policies, said the IEA this week, the world would see increasing strains on almost all aspects of energy security and “a major additional rise” in energy-related carbon emissions. And under […]
A new report calls the lie on the grand Paris climate change treaty. None of the promised cuts in CO2 emissions that 200-plus countries made will come close to preventing a climate “catastrophe.” And many of the industrialized nations aren’t even living up to the promises they did make. . . . What did it […]
Efforts to nudge the nation away from burning fossil fuels and toward harnessing renewable source of energy were rejected by voters Tuesday across a swath of resource-rich states in the western United States. Voters in Arizona, one of the nation’s most sun-soaked states, shot down a measure that would have accelerated its shift toward generating […]
This poor city is surrounded by the temples of the new American economy that has, in nearly every way imaginable, passed it by. Just outside the northern city limit, Facebook is expanding the blocks-long headquarters it built seven years ago. Google’s offices sit just outside the southern edge, and just a few miles to the […]