The bills are part of a greater movement among states to stop contracting out in cases when the work is seen as better suited for public employees — an effort largely organized by the nation’s largest public services employees union, AFSCME.
Experts have estimated that electricity from giant solar projects will cost at least twice as much as electricity from conventional sources. But neither the utilities that have contracted to buy the power nor state regulators have disclosed what the price will be, only that it will be passed on to electricity customers.
The changes needed to slash emissions enough to reach the mid-century target will be so great that the state should set an interim goal for about 2030, the California Air Resources Board said in a report released Monday.
Los Angeles workers would receive $7.6 billion more a year in pay with a $15 minimum wage.
On Friday, amid California’s driest year on record, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency in the state. As days pass without snow or rain, dairymen, farmers and other livestock producers are finding themselves in the same predicament as Imhof. Without water to irrigate, produce growers fear they will have to leave some fields fallow.
Democrats in California needed to pass cap and trade to find out what’s in it. At least that’s the take-away from state Senate president Darrell Steinberg’s epiphany in the Los Angeles Times this week.
The number of permits requested to make porn films in Los Angeles County has declined by an estimated 95% since the law took effect, according to Film LA, a private nonprofit that issues the licenses. The number of applications fell from about 480 in 2012 to just 24 through the first nine months of 2013.
The EU’s reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking — jeopardizing Germany’s touted energy revolution in the process.
California energy regulators have proposed a set of sweeping changes to the way most of the state’s residents pay for power. The current system, in which electricity prices are based on the amount used, would be fundamentally altered by 2018, under the proposal issued this week by the California Public Utilities Commission.
In their first legislative hearing for the year, the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment struck down a bill that would have allowed employers to negotiate a weekly schedule with non-exempt employees to work 10 hours in a day for four days without overtime pay.
Spain has good reason for wanting to take action. It is facing a growing deficit — about $40 billion now — because it has never passed on the true cost of producing energy to its consumers, a problem that has ballooned with the economic crisis. If it does not do something, that deficit will only grow, experts say.
Ecologists warn that economic growth is strangling the natural systems on which life depends, creating not just wealth, but filth on a planetary scale. Carbon pollution is changing the climate. Water shortages, deforestation, tens of millions of acres of land too polluted to plant, and other global environmental ills are increasingly viewed as strategic risks by governments and corporations around the world.
SBE Council has published the state Index for 18 years, which ranks the 50 states according to 47 different policy measures, including a wide array of tax, regulatory and government spending measurements. – See more at: http://www.sbecouncil.org/2013/12/12/sbe-council-ranks-the-50-states-in-small-business-policy-index-2013/#sthash.aygbaj8z.dpuf
The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council annually ranks the 50 states based on policy measures and costs impacting small businesses. For the second year in a row, California ranked No. 50.
But, one wonders, if streamlining CEQA’s provisions for projects that meet some standard of political correctness – or political pull – is justified, why shouldn’t it apply to more traditional forms of development, especially those that create badly needed new jobs?
Confining CEQA “reform” to certain kinds of politically favored projects – such as a new basketball palace in Sacramento or a football stadium in Los Angeles – is just another form of crony capitalism.
