Can California really reduce petroleum-based fuels by 50 percent and still have any sort of economy? Most of California’s businesses and residents rely on oil and gas for day-to-day transportation needs. But a bill currently in the legislative committee process, SB 350, would compromise the availability of transportation fuels.

TheRenewable Portfolio Standard, passed in 2011, called for 33 percent of electricity retail sales be served by renewable energy resources by the year 2020.

However, the President of the California State Senate, Kevin de Leon, no student of economics, is pushing a bill through the… Read More

Last week, Pope Francis called for a cultural revolution to correct what he calls the “structurally perverse” economic system of the rich exploiting the poor that is turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.” Under the sub-heading “Climate as a common good,” hedisparaged free market principles while indicating “global governance” as a solution to the politically created climate change crisis. The Pope also said that governments should redistribute wealth to the poor, advocating socialism, and he even gave communism a backhanded compliment.

Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said it is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucialUN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.

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Nearly every climate change and clean energy expert admits that California will achieve the legislatively mandated policy goals of AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which said the state has to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

So why is the California Air Resource Board and Legislature seeking to move the target before the deadline?

The Assembly Select Committee on Clean Energy was asked to address how Californians can reduce on-road petroleum use by 50 percent, by 2030. Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, the Committee Chairman,… Read More

Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown said California has an overpopulation problem. He said the ongoing drought is a sure sign that the explosion of population in California has reached the limit of what Nature can provide.

“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown said during a discussion with Austin Beutner, publisher and chief executive of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune.“If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today.… You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use… Read More

As Gov. Jerry Brown prepares to sign another climate change agreementwith “government leaders from around the world,” as his office announced, remember the recent agreement Brown got into with the scandalized Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber. “In October 2013,California Gov. Jerry Brown, together with the Governors of Oregon and Washington and the British Columbia Premier,signedthePacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, “to align climate change policies and promote clean energy,’” I wrote in February.

The Pacific Coast Collaborative links with theWest Coast Infrastructure Exchange(WCX), a compact betweenCalifornia, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, formed in 2013 to promote “the type of new thinking necessary to solve the West Coast’s infrastructure crisis.” And the WCX is linked to… Read More

California Gov. Jerry Brown issued an Executive Order Wednesday for a new target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts. Brown said it was critical to address what he called “an ever-growing threat” posed by global warming to California’s economy and well-being. Brown’s order goes even further than Pres. Obama’s radical proposals, but aligns with the European Union and United Nations proposals. Jerry Brown hasjumped-the-sharkon climate change (Origin of this phrase comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumped a shark on waterskis. Thus was labeled the lowest point of the show).

Senate Republican Minority Leader Bob Huff correctly replied to Brown’s latest edict:

“The state already has the nation’s most stringent goals. Before moving the goal post, we should be careful about the impact of increased energy costs. These higher costs will hurt the low income and working poor the hardest and will create an even greater divide between the haves and have nots. At what point does being on the leading edge of climate change and… Read More

Legend has it that upon being informed that the citizens of France had no bread to eat, Marie Antoinette, Queen-consort of Louis XVI of France, exclaimed “let them eat cake.”

California Governor Jerry Brown recently had his own “let them eat cake” moment: At a press conference last week announcing the need for a 25 percent cut in water consumption, Brownsaid, “People should realize we are in a new era. The idea of your nice little green lawngetting watered every day, those days are past.”

Brown showed his “let them eat cake” character once again.

Brown-the-elite

Jerry Brown enjoys an upper-crust Bay Area lifestyle, and is dependent on the very water projects he loathes and has shut down. Brown was the original push behind canceling crucial water infrastructure projects in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and has been supportive of diverting desperately needed reservoir water for fish, rather than food production in the Central Valley.

There is no doubt California is in a drought; we’ve been in one for several years. And California has had many droughts in its history, including when Brown was… Read More

On April Fools Day, Gov. Jerry Brown issued an Executive Order limiting the duration of Californians’ showers. However, this was no April Fools joke.

Sounding once again like Weird Uncle Fester on ABC’s “This Week,” Brown said Californians can expect to be hit with heavy fines for taking long showers. Using the enforcement power of the state water board, Brown said people can be fined $500 a day for failing to comply with the new water restrictions and shower allowances – whatever those restrictions really are. “(Water) Districts can go to court to get a cease and desist order,” Brown said. “The enforcement mechanism is powerful. In a drought of this magnitude, you have to change that behavior and you have to change it substantially.

During this drought, city and county governments are still running sprinklers and wasting water as though there is no drought, yet now imposing penalties on citizens who violate unclear water policies.

What will happen to shower offenders? Will the state water police perform a black-ops take down of your home, demanding you “Turn off the water, drop the… Read More