Nearly 100,000 fires are burning, setting up what looks to be the worst fire year in the region since 2006. The carbon emissions from the blazes have now surpassed those of the entire United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases — on 26 out of 44 days since September, according to a report by the World Resources Institute.
In a world in which malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives each year, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral.
An initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 has enough signatures to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, according to a press release from SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, which is sponsoring the measure.
Dreams that solar manufacturing might take root in San Diego have faded as French solar company Soitec shuttered its Rancho Bernardo assembly line and seeks to sell off related assets, including permits for two local solar farms that never came to fruition.
On Wednesday, Wal-Mart stunned Wall Street by forecasting that its earnings would decline by as much as 12 percent in its next fiscal year to January 2017 as it struggles to offset rising costs from increases in the wages of its hourly-paid staff, improvements in its stores, and investments to grow online sales. This at a time when it faces relentless price competition from Amazon.com Inc , dollar stores and regional supermarket chains. Keeping the prices it pays suppliers as low as it can is essential if it is to start to claw back some of this cost hit to its margins.
The nation’s biggest employer blames its recently released lower forecast on a plan it unveiled in February to hike minimum hourly compensation to $10, up from $7.25 at the federal level.
So we’ve raised standards and lost such jobs. In effect, we’ve decided such jobs aren’t worth keeping.
Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage risks job losses, it is still the right thing to do.
In other words, the regulations under which EPA and CARB are prosecuting truckers are based on dubious science. But when the cause is green virtue, such details don’t matter.
Wal-Mart’s second profit warning in two months should be a wake-up call for the political left. If America’s largest private employer is struggling with its own pay increases, how will other businesses cope with even larger minimum-wage hikes?
CEQA is meant to allow opponents to push for project changes that lessen its impact on the environment. But no public announcements were made about environmental wins, compromises with developers or killed projects within the settlements. . . The nonprofits won $17.2 million in settlements from the suits, a number revealed in separate lawsuits filed as part of a dispute between the two groups. Most of the proceeds – roughly $9 million – was to go to the nonprofits and the attorney representing them, according to the lawsuits.
Among the steps not taken are requirements that all ships slow as they approach the port and shut down their diesel engines and plug in to onshore electricity when docked to reduce harmful emissions. Also not met were mandates that trucks and yard tractors be fueled by less-polluting natural gas and other alternative fuels.
After the dust settled Sunday on the final day of the year’s regular legislative session, business groups were quick to claim victory over a torrent of labor-backed bills.
Wringing enough pollution out of trucks and other cargo-moving vehicles to get Southern California’s ozone levels down to 70 ppb will require a “paradigm shift” to battery-electric and fuel cell technology, said Scott Samuelsen, an engineering professor who directs the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine. The key question, he said, “is how to make an economically viable transition of a freight industry that’s evolved with diesel engines.”
The 2006 standards helped to create a sharp drop in the number of air conditioning shipments. The agency anticipated a slight drop of 130,000 shipments. Instead, shipments declined by more than 1.55 million, according to agency and industry estimates. Thus, the energy required for residential cooling use likely didn’t decline as expected between 2007 and 2010; it increased.
The Bay Area guidelines would expand the traditional scope of the law — assessing an impact a project would have on the environment — to include existing environmental conditions that would affect project workers and residents. Those conditions could include the dangers of wildfires, floods and earthquakes in addition to polluted air.