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nsurance premiums for health plans on Covered California’s small business exchange will rise 5.6 percent in 2018, Covered California announced Thursday. Nearly 36,000 Californians receive health insurance through the small business exchange, where companies with 100 or fewer employees can purchase health plans for their workers. The small business exchange is not as widely used as Covered California’s more well-known exchange for individuals, through which 1.2 million people buy health insurance. Premium rates for the individual exchange are slated to rise 12.5 percent in 2018.

The idea of a universal basic income — monthly cash payments from the government to every individual, working or not, with no strings attached — is gaining traction, thanks in part to endorsements from Silicon Valley celebs. Some see it as a way to compensate for the traditional jobs with benefits that will be wiped out by robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, globalization and the gig economy. Others see it as a way to reduce income inequality or to create a more efficient, less stigmatizing safety net than our current mishmash of welfare benefits.

The state’s emissions in 2015 dropped just 0.3 percent from the prior year, according to data released Wednesday by the California Air Resources Board. The board’s detailed annual greenhouse gas inventories are issued more than a year after the fact. While emissions from electrical plants fell in 2015, driven down partly by the rapid growth of large solar facilities, the amount of greenhouse gases spewed by cars and planes rose. That may be due to low fuel prices and an improving economy, both of which typically entice people to drive more. Transportation accounted for 39 percent of the state’s emissions in 2015, making it California’s largest source of greenhouse gases.

A think tank founded by San Francisco billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer to find solutions for income inequality in California released a sweeping report Thursday outlining the root causes behind the state’s widening wage gap and how Californians should go about closing it.

The report, produced by the Fair Shake Commission on Income Inequality in California, represents largely a collection of long-standing liberal policy positions and talking points. Steyer has previously insisted that creating and chairing the commission was not tied to his exploration of a possible 2018 gubernatorial run. But political strategists said it was difficult to divorce the group’s mission statement — and Steyer’s populist projects on issues like high gasoline prices and climate change — from the looming election.

Real estate brokerage site Redfin released its annual “migration report” on Monday and found that those residing in San Francisco Metro are the most likely to leave. The catalyst for moving – high housing costs – should surprise no one.

Analyzing a sample of 1 million Redfin users, the site found that 19.4 percent of potential homebuyers in San Francisco searched outside of the region for houses.

San Francisco also recorded the highest “”net outflow”” – the number of potential homebuyers looking to move to San Francisco Metro subtracted from the number of those who want to leave. The region’s outflow was double that of New York.

California drivers will pay more to drive in the state under a bill the Legislature passed Thursday to raise $52 billion from new taxes and fees to repair roads and bridges. That bill, SB1, will be sent to Gov. Jerry Brown, who has said he will sign it.

As Hamby’s experience reflects, the frustrations of living in the Bay Area have become so pronounced that confidence in the economy has sunk to its lowest level in four years, according to a survey released Saturday by the Bay Area Council. Housing and traffic concerns have usually topped the list, but they have intensified this year. In 2014, 53 percent of respondents said they felt the economy was doing better than it was in the previous six months. According to the survey, only 31 percent of respondents feel that way today.

But the projected rise in hydropower could force the state to sharply cut back on the amount of power produced from other sources, particularly renewable energy, according to the California Independent System Operator, the organization that manages most of the state’s vast energy system. The system operator forecasts on some days it will have to block between 6,000 and 8,000 megawatts of electricity from the grid as a result of the profusion of hydropower. That’s the equivalent output of six to eight nuclear reactors.

An increasing number of Bay Area residents are planning to move out of the area, or at least considering it, primarily because of housing prices, the rising cost of living and traffic, according to a new poll.

After years of being overrun by new residents drawn by a red-hot economy, the number of people moving out has begun to catch up with the number moving in, new census data show. In fact, in some parts of the Bay Area — including Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties — already more people are leaving than arriving, according to the estimates released Thursday, which cover the period from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016. The same would be true in San Francisco if it weren’t for the high number moving in from abroad.

However, all those perks come with a price and Bay Area cities have become some of the most expensive places to live in the country. Foster thinks many people would like to leave the area in search of a better quality of life, but don’t want to sacrifice potential career opportunities. . . To combat the problem, Zapier, a workflow automation startup that helps users to connect apps, is offering $10,000 to Bay Area residents who accept a position with the company and agree to move away. All of the company’s employees work remotely.

For a small but probably growing number of California’s government workers, the worst-case scenario is here: The failure to adequately fund public pensions is leading to devastating reductions in their promised retirement benefits. If the pension problem were a cloud of carbon monoxide, there would be no more need to wait for a canary to keel over.

Public schools around California are bracing for a crisis driven by skyrocketing worker pension costs that are expected to force districts to divert billions of dollars from classrooms into retirement accounts, education officials said. The depth of the funding gap became clear to district leaders when they returned from the holiday break: What they contribute to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as CalPERS, will likely double within six years, according to state estimates.

The 2013 measure repealed a 10-year-old law that allowed employees with at least five years of service to purchase up to five years of credits before retiring, so that a worker who retired after 20 years would receive a pension based on as much as 25 years of contributions. . . The 2013 measure repealed a 10-year-old law that allowed employees with at least five years of service to purchase up to five years of credits before retiring, so that a worker who retired after 20 years would receive a pension based on as much as 25 years of contributions.

The new monthly charge and interconnection fee kick in whenever the growing amount of rooftop solar power in a utility’s territory reaches a specific threshold, equal to 5 percent of the utility’s peak electricity demand. San Diego Gas and Electric Co. was the first utility to hit that mark, reaching it in June.