A new study from the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute has ranked the regulatory climate for small businesses in California the worst out of all 50 states — and the Bay Area is a prime example of why.
A California lawmaker has proposed a new label for food irrigated with what he calls “fracking water.”
“It’s conceivable that they might do gas rationing or travel limitations…those are conceivable results,” said Citrus Heights Mayor Sue Frost in an interview. “At the end of the day, the damage goes to the consumer.”
Pavely said she isn’t worried that her bill will die, however. The messaging from opponents is “easy to refute,” she said. The real challenge, she said, is to educate lawmakers on the state’s broader goals on climate change so that laws written after she is termed out continue to advance the program.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed rules aimed at cutting methane emissions from oil and gas production by requiring energy companies to install new technologies at future wells.
On Aug. 11, a federal judge in the Northern District of California shot down a rule proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that would have allowed the wind industry to legally kill bald eagles and golden eagles for up to three decades.
Legislators weighed in early and often this year with bills dictating where the growing fund could be spent. According to an analysis by the California Taxpayers Association, legislators have floated 23 bills that would allocate a whopping total of $4.8 billion.
Business groups opposed the bill, arguing that it would force a company to keep its predecessor’s employees and adhere to contracts that the new owner did not negotiate. The California Chamber of Commerce labeled the measure, AB 359, a “job killer.”
Without writing its formal obituary, Brown and other politicians, plus the state’s education establishment, have strangled the test-based accountability system that California adopted in the late 1990s.
Another Washington-like tendency is passing sweeping legislation but leaving the sticky, all-important, details to unelected bureaucrats, such as the Air Resources Board’s multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” fees to curb greenhouse gases.
These are questions worth keeping in mind as our energy policy sorts itself out in this climate-change era. As it strives to end reliance on fossil fuel, will California help turn the rest of the West green? Or will the Golden State end up being dusted with coal ash?
The contradiction of modern climate liberals is that they promise lower energy bills and a wind-and-solar jobs boom, with zero trade-offs. But then they demand more redistribution to mitigate the economic and human damage that are the real outcome of their policies. Instead of offering to weatherize the homes of the least fortunate, how about trying to increase prosperity?
A study released Monday by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA found that smog-forming chemicals making their way across the Pacific Ocean from China are undermining the progress California has made in reducing ozone, the most caustic component in L.A. smog.
These policies – and their predecessors over the years – are at the heart of rising housing and electricity costs, which are plaguing California’s massive population of struggling households. As a recent Manhattan Institute paper reveals, over 1 million Californians already face “energy poverty,” paying upward of 10 percent of their incomes to keep their lights on. The most hard-hit areas, the study found, were in inland communities, particularly the Central Valley, where the climate tends far more to extremes than in the more affluent coastal regions.
But never mind: If every car in America were electric and recharged using only renewables, the impact would be less than 2% of global emissions. Even the new Obama power-plant rules, which would be far more consequential, would prevent only 0.03 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 (and then only if climate models predicting substantial warming are right).