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By inching below the 1,075ft threshold, the lake’s historic low provoked a Level 1 Water Shortage declaration, signaling the start of potential water cuts to Arizona and Nevada. If Lake Mead sinks to 1,025ft (312m), the Department of Interior will seize control of its management and water allocation, and if it falls to 900ft (274m) it will be considered “deadpool,” meaning that water is no longer passing through the turbines. Falling water levels are the result of a drought in the Colorado River Basin that has dragged on for 16 years and counting.

One victim is Gov. Jerry Brown’s $3.1 billion plan to spend auction proceeds, now on indefinite hold. It not only affects a $500 million allocation for Brown’s bullet train project, but another $500 million for “low carbon transportation and fuels.”

A growing number of Bay Area residents — besieged by home prices, worsening traffic, high taxes and a generally more expensive cost of living — believe life would be better just about anywhere else but here.

First, the good news: This winter, much of the Sierra had a near-average snowpack. Now, the bad news: It has melted early.

When California’s “cap-and-trade” auction of carbon emission allowances imploded a month ago, it clobbered ambitious plans by Capitol politicians to spend many billions of dollars.

Part of the reason unemployment declined may be that for the first time in years, the state labor force shrank last month. About 9,000 Californians dropped out of the job market in May. 

Our jobless rate ranks 34th in the nation, better than neighboring Arizona and Nevada, but worse than other big states such as Florida, New York and Texas. While the lowest in nine years, the rate was 5.2 percent in May, with nearly 1 million Californians actively looking for work but unable to find it.

The consumer-price index, which measures what Americans pay for everything from car repairs to potatoes, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in May from the prior month, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the third straight monthly rise in overall prices as the damping effects of low oil prices and a strong dollar faded.

California had 51 companies on this year’s list, down from 53 last year. But 51 was enough to climb into a tie with Texas for the No. 2 position. New York led the list with 55.

But as LAO researchers also pointed out, the global GDP numbers that suggest California’s economy as sixth largest in the world don’t take into account something of huge importance: The cost of living. . . .Once that’s factored in, the IMF data finds California drops from sixth to eleventh in the global size of its gross domestic product.

Pork barrel politics is colliding head on with starry-eyed green policymaking in California, and the result isn’t pretty. The fact that this latest quarterly auction generated such dismal revenues is only the beginning of the state’s cap-and-trade problems.

The linchpin of California’s climate change agenda, a program known as cap and trade, has become mired in legal, financial and political troubles that threaten to derail the state’s plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The BEA pegged the state’s economic output last year at $2.46 trillion and with several of its international rivals, particularly Brazil and France, experiencing slumps, that would place California at sixth place, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Both California and Oregon’s economies expanded at a 4.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate, leading the nation. Texas was next at 3.8%, suggesting much of the state’s economy had diversified enough to shrug off the collapse in oil prices.

The report by The Campaign for College Opportunity said California ranks near the bottom nationally in the rate of bachelor and associate degrees in those subjects at a time that it has far more STEM entry-level jobs than any other state.