Posts tagged Environmentalism
Melting Mirrors – Only in Crazifornia?
Jan 26th
This story reminds me of the old conundrum: What do you do when the endangered snake is eating the endangered bird? Or, in this case, what do you do when the energy efficient windows are eating the energy efficient car? And yes, it happened in a fairly crazy part of Crazifornia – Studio City.
STUDIO CITY (CBS) — A SoCal woman says the energy efficient window installed in a neighbor’s condominium is melting the plastic components on cars parked in her carport.
Heather Patron if Studio City was dealing with a mystery regarding her Toyota Prius. …
Patron then observed a powerful beam of light that was reflecting off the window of a next door condominium, casting a concentrated beam over her carport.
CBS2’s Randy Paige placed a thermometer in the pathway of the beam on a partially cloudy day. The temperature registered over 120 degrees in less than five minutes.
Read the entire story on the CBS LA-Channel 2 website. It’s pretty hilarious. But what’s even more amazing than a melting Prius is this: The City of LA investigated and said there are no code violations involved. Really? With all the inventive ways LA has come up with to control everyone and charge fees for everything, you’d think they’d be able to come up with at least one decent code to fling around.
Hat-tip to @LAPearce.
Regulating the Rocket’s Red Glare
Oct 25th
The Daily Caller picked up my latest opinion piece, Regulating the Rocket’s Red Glare, about California’s war against fireworks shows. I’ve written a lot about this phenomenon, and it’s recently taken a turn for the worse with a decision in San Diego that could have statewide ramifications. Here’s the lead:
It should come as no surprise that the leftist legislators and authoritarian bureaucrats who run California are vehemently opposed to fireworks shows. After all, the shows are always fun and usually patriotic.
And against them they are. The California Coastal Commission has led the charge with a multi-year assault on the Sea World theme park in San Diego, which blasts fireworks over Mission Bay every night. That effort shipwrecked on the rocks of Sea World’s considerable political clout and even more considerable legal budget, so the Commission looked for a more vulnerable, less wealthy target.
It found that in the Fourth of July fireworks show put on by local business owners in the tiny, picturesque hamlet of Gualala on the northern California coast.
Please click through to read the entire piece here.
CalWatchdog on Crazifornia’s Regulatory Reform Charade
Oct 24th
CalWatchdog recently picked up my column on the charade of regulatory reform in California, which points out how recent efforts to reform the California Environmental Quality Act are limited, complicated and indicative of just how crazily over-regulated California has become. Here’s the lead:
California Gov. Jerry Brown may try to make political hay out of his recent signing of three “regulatory reform” bills into law. But the bills (AB 900, SB 292 and SB 226) really serve best to illustrate just how grossly over-regulated California has become.
Take AB 900, for example. Please. It specifies certain types of projects that can qualify for expedited processing under the onerous, labyrinthine California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). But — no surprise — it’s really more complicated than that. It’s more like it designates projects that can attempt to get through CEQA easily, but the reforms themselves are complicated and, worse, they’re untested by California’s green-leaning courts.
Among projects eligible for supposedly expedited processing under AB 900 are infill projects that are highly energy efficient. Never mind that vacant hulks of these sorts of projects clog the California cityscape, unrented and unloved. The California dream remains a suburban one of back yards and cars. And despite what urban planners and environmental activists preach, we’re not yet ready to emulate New Yorkers and Inside-the-Beltway folks and live in cramped high-rises by train stations. Does AB 900 make it easier to process suburban subdivisions? Oh, please. Do you have to ask?
Read the rest of the post – and some very interesting comments about the effect of over-regulation on California’s dairy farmers – here
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Crazifornia Scores Big at Daily Caller
Oct 24th
My recent op/ed on California’s passage of the nation’s first state-run cap-and-tax program proved very popular with readers at The Daily Caller – to date, 76 readers have recommended it, 41 have tweeted it, 5 have shared it on Linked In and 44 have posted comments. As expected with the Daily Caller’s audience, most of the comments are favorable, informed and even witty, like this one that starts with a quote pulled from the op/ed:
“AB 32, the state’s crusade to save the planet from the scourge of greenhouse gases”
Should read: “The scourge of unicorns and leprechauns” as there’s as much science behind it.
Mary Nichols, one of the most dangerous women in America, looked out into the packed California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearing room late Thursday after an eight-hour hearing and declared, “We’ve done something important.”
Nichols is the chair of CARB and therefore the person most responsible for implementing the California Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, the state’s crusade to save the planet from the scourge of greenhouse gases. A former assistant administrator of EPA under President Clinton, Nichols now controls multiple programs designed to penalize conventional energy sources to the benefit of not-yet-competitive alternative sources. She has already forced the toughest diesel engine standards in the country onto California — standards that will cost the state’s battered trucking industry $12 billion — and Thursday she trumped that by ushering in the biggest playing field-leveler yet, the nation’s first state-run carbon cap-and-trade program.
California, in going where no other state or the federal government has dared to tread, certainly has done something important, but just what “important” means is a question for the historians.
Read the rest of the piece here.
Regulatory “reform” shows how in need of reform California is
Oct 12th
Governor Brown may try to make political hay out of signing three “regulatory reform” bills into law, but the bills (AB 900, SB 292 and SB 226) really serve best to illustrate just how grossly over-regulated California has become.
The official CEQA process chart
Take AB 900 for example. Please. It specifies certain types of projects that can qualify for expedited processing under the onerous, labyrinthine California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Actually, it will be more like projects that think they qualify for regulatory relief will be free to attempt to get through CEQA easily, but the reforms themselves are complicated and, worse, they’re untested by California’s green-leaning courts.
Among projects eligible for supposedly expedited processing are infill projects that are highly energy efficient. Never mind that vacant hulks of these sorts of projects clog the California cityscape, unrented and unloved. The California dream remains a suburban one of back yards and cars, and despite what urban planners and environmental activists preach, we’re not yet ready to emulate New Yorkers and live in cramped high-rises by train stations. Does AB 900 make it easier to process suburban subdivisions? Oh, please. Do you have to ask?
The bill also gives a special blessing to wind and solar energy projects that will pump intermittent blips of high-priced power into the grid, but turns a cold shoulder on any sort of energy facility – including carbon-free hydro power – that actually can be counted on to consistently provide affordable energy. Green manufacturing also gets a pass – but California is a state that needs jobs desperately, so why should the Solyndras of the world get a break when old-school manufacturing, which actually turns out products that compete in the marketplace, does not?
SB 292 gives a CEQA break to great big projects, as long as they’re football stadiums in downtown Los Angeles. Because, heck, if we steal the Packers from Green Bay we’ll have new green jobs. At least for guys wearing jerseys.
Finally, and probably worst of all, SB 226 lets you sort-of off the CEQA hook if you’re putting solar energy cells on the roof or over the parking lot of an existing building. Or, put another way, California regulators currently can force you to do a costly, time consuming environmental impact report if you want to do what they’re harping at you to do and install solar.
By relieving solar installations from at least some CEQA grief, the bill is actually telling us that up to now, California has treated the savior of our heated-up world, solar energy, as something so nasty and dirty that it requires careful study, deep analysis and endless public comment before the state’s hyper-regulators would let you do something as potentially damaging to the Earth Mother as actually use it.
If these bills represent the best the legislature can do to streamline regulations in California, the armies of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants (myself included) who make a fine living off of trying to tame the state’s regulatory beast have nothing to worry about.
A hat-tip to three members of that army – lawyers at Allen Matkins – for their review of the three bills.
Smelt Corpses Should be Piling Up Like Debt in DC
May 25th
Something fishy is going on in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Thanks to plentiful run-off from heavy winter snow in the Sierras, the pumps of the State Water Project have been running at levels we haven’t seen in years – yet the Delta smelt refuse to go along with the predictions of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and its environmentalist suitors (as in lawsuits by the truckload), whose “science” would have us believe increased pumping would cause smelt corpses to be piling up quicker than debt in DC.
My piece on this fascinating mystery ran today in The Daily Caller. Here’s the set-up:
In Tracy, California, where the massive California Water Project pumps stand ready to move up to 15,450 cubic feet of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water southward every single second, it’s been a busy spring.
The pumps have been a mere shadow of their old selves ever since U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger began ratcheting them down in 2007 in response to environmentalist lawsuits brought under the auspices of the Delta smelt. The environmentalists blamed the pumping for the precipitous drop in the smelt population, ignoring any number of other Delta ills that could be decimating the little fish, including ammonia from Sacramento’s sewage plant, farm chemical runoff and hungry non-native bass prized by the very sports fishermen who joined the environmentalists in blaming the pumps.
But the 2010-2011 storm season has been a wet one, with about twice the average rainfall and snowfall. That, and his growing skepticism of the adequacy of the science justifying restrictions on pumping, has loosened Judge Wanger’s grip on Southern California’s spigot, and the pumps have been running at up to 80 percent of their capacity.
For the very interesting kicker, read on here.
Advice from Crazifornia to Texas
May 2nd
I strayed a bit far afield in my most recent opinion piece in The Daily Caller, focusing on an environmental story out of Texas. But there’s a connection – what oil producers in Texas are facing at the hands of radical environmentalists is exactly what California went through a few years back when the Natural Resources Defense Council tried to stop land development in Southern California by seeking the listing of the California gnatcatcher as an endangered species.
In that battle, which I was deeply involved with on behalf of developers, we ultimately prevailed thanks to intervention from a most unlikely source: a newly elected president by the name of Bill Clinton. Do you think the Texas oil producers can count on Barack Obama to extend a helping hand?
Here’s how the Daily Caller piece gets started:
There couldn’t be a better friend to radical anti-oil environmentalists than the sand dune lizard. No, wait. Perhaps the alternative energy true believers in the federal government, from the president down, are even better friends to the radicals. We’ll know soon enough, thanks to a fight that’s pitting lizards against oil producers.
The sand dune lizard caught the eye of environmentalists because it lives exclusively in the Texas and New Mexico counties located in the Permian Basin, the most productive energy-producing land in the Lower 48. As such, it is probably the single best species to latch onto if you want to stop much of our domestic oil and natural gas production in its tracks, since there’s nothing like an endangered species listing to keep people from doing much on the listed critter’s habitat.
Please click through to read the rest – it’s guaranteed 100 percent interesting and The Daily Caller would sure like to see you pop onto their website!
CalWatchdog: Jerry & His AG Want to Run Your Life
Mar 22nd
CalWatchdog editor Steven Greenhut paid me a nice complement yesterday: “I’m always glad to run your pieces.” And run one he did:
NEW: Brown, Harris Attack Suburban Growth
MARCH 21, 2011
By LAER PEARCE
The Santa Clarita Valley, a pleasant enough suburb of 250,000 in northern Los Angeles County, has the dubious distinction of the place most often targeted by terrorists over the eight seasons of the television show “24” – including the detonation of a nuclear bomb there during the premier of the 2007 season. Last Thursday, the Brown administration dropped its own nuke on the valley, trying to undo 10 years of regional planning in the name of saving the planet.
Hat-tip to The Deep Friar
Kamala Harris, the former San Francisco DA who never saw a criminal trial she couldn’t lose (which apparently is enough to get one elected California attorney general nowadays), sent a letter last week to the Los Angeles County planning department saying the Santa Clarita Valley Area Plan violates state law. She attacked the plan, which has been in development since 2001 as a blueprint for the Santa Clarita Valley’s future growth, because it doesn’t do enough to stop global warming by reducing the valley’s miniscule sliver of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Harris didn’t just send the letter – she publicized it through a news release and made sure it was posted on the Internet for all to see. “I think it’s kind of unprofessional to address the issues with the press rather than directly with the office you’ve been working with,” sniffed Los Angeles’ principal deputy county counsel, Elaine Lemke. [Continue reading]
Please click through. There’s more good stuff, and CalWatchdog wants to know you like reading about Crazifornia.
Stop the Desecration of the 4th of July!
Feb 15th
There are sane people in the California Legislature. They’re just outnumbered. One of my favorite of the outnumbered and sane set is Diane Harkey (R, of course, 73rd), who has a keen nose for regulatory insanity. She’s just introduced AB 206, a bill that would exempt municipal fireworks shows from the heavy hand of the California Coastal Commission (and the California Environmental Quality Act, to boot).
This is a subject near and dear to Crazifornia’s heart – and the subject of much of my upcoming book’s chapter on the Coastal Commission – due to the plight of the good people of the North Coast town of Gualala (pictured), whose Fourth of July fireworks show was blasted out of existence by the Coastal Commission. Here are some posts you can check out for more on the story:
From Cheat-Seeking Missiles: Coastal Commission Attempting to Ban Fourth of July Fireworks
From The Daily Caller: The Queen of the Coastal Star Chamber
The bill is not yet posted on California’s LegInfo site, but it should be soon, and I’ll update this with a link when it does. A fact sheet on the bill summarizes the issue as:
Broad interpretation of environmental regulation law has defined fireworks as “development” which has expanded regulators authority to require permits or licenses in order to display fireworks. This interpretation has applied particularly to coastal communities. These regulations threaten the ability of local municipalities along the coast to provide this public service to both their communities and the state.
In order for Californian’s to celebrate the great independence of this country and continue with traditions that previous generations have enjoyed, it is necessary that the ability of public entities to put on such firework displays is protected.
These shows are a cultural event that are enjoyed by many Californians and also provide an economic benefit for the municipalities that display them.
Assemblywoman Harkey also sent me a sample support letter. Please help her in this important effort (which faces a bleak future in the Dem-dominated legislature) by getting folks in your neck of the woods to support it. Here’s the sample letter:
Dear Assemblywoman Harkey,
On behalf of the (INSERT NAME OF YOUR ORGANIZATION) I am writing to express support for Assembly Bill 206, which will provide an exemption for municipal firework shows from the California Environment Quality Act and California Coastal Act.
In 2008, the Gualala Festivals Committee received a cease-and-desist order from the California Coastal Commission for discharging fireworks without first receiving a coastal development permit. The Coastal Commission determined fireworks caused an increase in nest abandonment.
This action was confirmed by a court, setting a dangerous precedent in which “development” was deemed to encompass the discharging of fireworks as described in the California Coastal Act because the displays deposited spent materials into coastal waters.
Fireworks shows are an inexpensive way for families and the community to celebrate the independence of this country. Previous generations in California have enjoyed these shows without burden of a government agency standing in the way of a long celebrated tradition.
In addition, these shows provide an economic benefit for the municipalities that display them. As a coastal community this issue is especially significant to the citizens of (INSERT NAME OF YOUR CITY OR ORGANIZATION).
Environmental protection is important, but a line should be drawn to ensure the preservation of long held traditions that provide enjoyment, foster patriotism and stimulate our coastal economies.
(INSERT NAME OR ORGANIZATION) stands in support with AB 206 for the above mentioned reasons.
Sincerely,
Catching Up
Feb 5th
It’s been a busy week, so let me catch you up quickly with a couple of my op/eds – published here first – that have hit the big time.
The Daily Caller picked up “California’s public universities are the best. No really,” detailing Berkeley’s recent designation as the world’s (yes, the world’s) greenest college campus. The award was based more on sustainability practices than on its excellence in turning normal students into raving eco-warriors, but it’s all the same game, as the key paragaph of the piece points out:
Now don’t get me wrong. Green space is great and eco-sustainability policies are as cool as it comes. Whether there’s a looming eco-catastrophe or not (I think it’s “not”), nothing feels better than whipping out that re-usable grocery bag at Safeway. No, the problem with Berkeley’s newfound glory is that it’s the outgrowth of the deeper commitment to deep green brainwashing that goes on at UC campuses. If it weren’t for regents who have bought into environmentalist doctrine, a faculty that’s bought into environmentalist extremism, and a curriculum that ensures wave after wave of freshly minted environmentalist soldiers will graduate every spring and go into battle for Mother Earth, Berkeley would not be at the top of the green university rankings.
Read the rest here.
Also last week, California Watchdog ran “A clue to Governor Brown’s pension plan.” It relays an interesting last-minute appointment by Schwarzenegger: Cameron Percy to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System board of directors. What’s interesting is that Percy was one of the student authors of Stanford’s breakthrough study into California’s real pension liability, which they pegged at a deeply disturbing half-trillion dollars, so I explain why it’s suddenly the appointment to watch:
Percy’s nomination will give us a clear insight into Brown’s thoughts as he grapples with this dilemma. The appointment must be confirmed by the Dem-dominated Senate, but Percy may not even get that far, since Brown has the power to boot him and name his own appointee. How Brown acts on the appointment will tell California voters and public employee union bosses what they can expect from the new administration. It’s routine for incoming governors to replace the nominees of out-going governors, but there’s nothing at all routine about the Percy nomination.
Read the rest here. I really appreciate it when you click through. The more hits my op/eds get, the more it supports my efforts with Crazifornia.
