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esterday, a group of unelected know-it-all bureaucrats decided it’s not enough that California residents alread are crushed under the second-highest tax burden in the nation, they will impose a massive new tax so they might tip at global warming windmills and force us into their choices for our cars.

The LA Times happily established the motivation for this newest attack on Californians’ wallets:

California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

Oil built this economy; oil fueled the state; oil made fortunes that created universities and endowed charities, but oil is the bogeyman of the Warmies and must be killed at all cost because they think tiny increases in a negligible atmospheric gas are going to kill us all. So CARB, the California Air Resources Board, voted 9 to 1 to pass a complex new rule that will drive up the cost of gasoline and, they hope, penalize hapless car drivers into reducing their fuel consumption by a quarter in the next decade.

And, of course, they hope this false economy will finally create huge consumer demand for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and, as the LAT hopefully put it, “jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels” from algae, woodchips and other stuff that’s been around forever and has yet to produce energy anywhere near as efficiently as good ol’ God-given crude.

Still, CARB, which calls itself “ARB” in a bold move to reduce electron waste, said:

“The new standard means we can begin to break our century-old dependence on petroleum and provide California with greater energy security” said ARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols. “The drive to force the market toward greater use of alternative fuels will be a boon to the state’s economy and public health – it reduces air pollution, creates new jobs and continues California’s leadership in the fight against global warming.”

Nichols is a long-time California greenie, and one of its most powerful. She started the Los Angeles office of the nation’s richest, most powerful environmental law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and started her many stints on CARB in 1974, when Jerry Brown appointed her its chair. She also was an Assistant Sec at EPA under Clinton. In other words, she’s been forcing environmentalism onto the public for 25 years, and doing quite well at it. The CARB release continues:

According to ARB analyses, to produce the more than 1.5 billion gallons of biofuels needed, over 25 new biofuel facilities will have to be built and will create more than 3,000 new jobs, mostly in the state’s rural areas. Production of fuels within the state will also keep consumer dollars local by reducing the need to make fuel purchases from beyond its borders.

CARB doesn’t bother to tell us how many perfectly good jobs in oil will be displaced by this Quixotic scheme, nor does it deal with the 8,000 pound gorilla in this little matter: water. Many of the rural areas they hope to bring these jobs to already have unemployment rates over 40 percent because water deliveries have been cut back so much farmers can’t grow crops. Where does Nichols expect to find the water to grow the biofuel stock, and where, oh where, does she think she’s going to find the hundreds of gallons of water needed to process each gallon of biofuel?

But they plow on. Forcing the cost of transportation up so they can force us into the cars they want us to drive, or better yet, onto the buses they don’t ride in themselves.

This state is going to Hades in hyperdrive. I’d move, but the LAT tells me 35 states are watching CARB’s action with gleeful anticipation, hoping to follow in California’s path at their earliest convenience. Watch out! California may be coming to a neighborhood near you soon.

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s workers throughout the land – particularly in California – are just glad to have jobs and are going without raises and even accepting pay cuts, the goofballs in Sacramento decided quietly to give a bunch of California Assembly aides over $350,000 in bonuses.

Assembly speaker Karen Bass apparently never heard of the little uproar over AIG bonuses or thought she could stealth this through, but no dice.  Papers throughout the state carried the story and today, like a typical Dem politician, Bass tossed the folks she was championing under the bus.  Her quote:

“In hindsight, this was really becoming a distraction.”

You bet it was.  The Legislature and Gov. RINO are going to the people in three weeks with a package of ballot measures designed to bail them out from the state budget morass they’ve created through their intractability and obliviousness.  If they don’t pass, Sacramento will have to face reality and start cutting the feel-good bloat from the budget and do something to keep businesses from fleeing the state.

Bass’ recognition of reality probably comes too late to save the ballot measures.

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J.

G. Boswell died April 3 as he would have liked it – quietly, without a blast of activity and attention that might reflect badly on Boswell Farms, the family farming empire in California’s Central Valley.

Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman chronicled Boswell’s life in one of the best books on recent California history, The King of California.  It was a difficult biography because Boswell would have none of it, turning them down again and again when they attempted to interview him.  In an obit that ran this weekend, Arax tells how they finally landed the interview:

He was 76 years old but still running the show when I first appealed to his sense of history, and then vanity, in the hope that he might talk to me and my co-author Rick Wartzman. Boswell was living in Ketchum, Idaho, but flying into Corcoran on a regular basis to oversee an operation that punched out 146,000 bales of the finest cotton a year – enough fiber to make 840,000 pairs of boxer shorts every day. For two years, he wanted no part of our book. Then during one phone conversation, I let it slip that the old-timers of Corcoran were portraying his father as the town drunk.

“My dad had a problem, that’s true, but you’d be wrong to reduce him to some stumbling drunk.”

So as a way to keep us straight with certain facts, he invited us out for a tour of the land where he hunted Yokut arrowheads as a kid. We piled into a beat-up Chevy truck and barreled into an immense engineered landscape where the earth hardly rose or fell an inch as it rolled out – the secret heart of California.

Araz and Wartzman soon found themselves bouncing along in a beat-up Chevy pick-up truck through the cotton fields that surround Corcoran, when they were smacked on the side of the head by the the realization of how profoundly important Boswell was:

At some point, it occurred to us that we had traveled half a day, a distance of some 150 miles, and never left his farm. Nearly every road, field and irrigation canal belonged to Boswell and every worker we passed and he waved to was a Boswell worker, and every truck, tractor and leveler for which he politely moved to the side of the road bore the same diamond-B logo.

Boswell used his power to dam and re-route rivers and – although he contests this – to stop the Peripheral Canal, which he must have regretted later as California’s need for a new way to get water to go south from the Sacramento Delta become evident. His was a life far grander than most, but lived with far less grandeur than most. I strongly recommend the obit for your reading, and if that piques your interest, by all means read the book.

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UPDATED

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n a recent article, the LA Times blamed California’s increased water use, in part, on farmers’ decision to grow permanent crops that “can’t be fallowed.”  I wasn’t sure what it meant, but last Friday I went to a Southern California Water Committee meeting in agricultural Kern County and I got an earful.

San Joaquin Valley farmers have switched from cotton to tree crops like almonds in a big way.  The switch was made in part because stricter environmental regulations, especially for air pollution control and pesticide use, are crimping profits, as are rising energy costs.  So now, a drive through the southern San Joaquin Valley is a drive through tree groves, not cotton fields.  And that’s causing a big problem.

Kern County supervisor Ray Watson told the group that farmers have a tough decision this year, as water deliveries from the Central Valley Project to the western San Joaquin have been cut to zero (as in zero, no water deliveries).  They can get enough groundwater to produce a crop from half their trees, but that means letting the other half die, and it takes about eight years (with good water) for new trees to begin producing.  Or they can minimally water all their trees so they barely survive, but will produce no fruit or nuts – no income.

As a result, unemployment in California farm towns is reaching 40 percent, and even 60 percent. Yet the Sierra snowpack that provides the valley with water is at 90 percent of normal.  What’s happening?

Simple.  The environmentalists took the water.

California – the nation’s largest producer of tomatoes, lettuce, almonds, apricots, strawberries and many other crops – risks agricultural losses of over $2 billion for the upcoming season and $3 billion in total economic losses in 2009.  According to a University of California at Davis study, 80,000 jobs could be lost in the Central Valley.

Although global warming is expected to receive much of the blame for this economic disaster, government regulation is a more significant – and preventable cause – of it, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research.

For example, state and federal water officials have sharply cut agricultural water deliveries in California so that more water can go out to sea as part of an effort to protect the Delta Smelt – a three-inch long fish listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.  In February, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced a “zero allocation” of water from the Central Valley Project, cutting off the massive federal irrigation system that serves numerous California farms.  The supply of water from California’s State Water Project is 20 percent of normal.

“By demanding that the water flow into the Pacific Ocean, government meddlers have forced farmers to abandon production, threatening both the nation’s fresh food supplies and the jobs of farm workers, many of whom are among the nation’s poorest minorities,” said Mr. Smith.  “Ironically, the cut-off of agricultural water has done nothing to help the Delta Smelt.  Every year less water is diverted for agriculture, yet the fish population continues to decline.” (National Center for Public Policy Research)

By the way, the Endangered Species Act also protects certain bass species in California.  Their meal of choice?  Smelt.  Logical people would find something wrong with that, but we’re not dealing with logic here.

The Obama administration, eager to please immigrants and supposedly concerned about the plight of poverty stricken farm workers, is allowing the water shortage to continue – and indeed, the Dems are doing all they can to further the crisis, in the eyes of the National Center, which points at a hearing today before the House Committee on Natural Resources on the California drought.

Only witnesses from federal agencies will be allowed to testify at the hearing – the same folks who are managing water resources to protect the smelt and the bass – and we will hear blame placed on climate change, farming practices and population growth.  Guaranteed, we won’t hear much about the role of activist-inspired environmental policies in creating a “regulatory drought” in California.

Not testifying will be unemployed farm workers or farmers who have been forced to chose between untenable options because of curtailed water deliveries.  Not testifying will be any of the thousands of scientists who don’t go along with absolutist global warming dogma.  Also missing will be any representatives of California’s water industry, who could address the state’s failure to build infrastructure to meet the state’s growing population.

The National Center has categorized this proceding correctly – they plan to show up for the hearings with a kangaroo in tow.

Update one: Representative Ken Calvert showed up at the hearing with a bagful of Delta smelt and some harsh words for the Dems.

And, unrelated but interesting timing, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service just announced that it is going to conduct a status review of the smelt’s listing.  Don’t get your hopes up, though – these almost never change anything.

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ust around the corner, on May 19, a raft of legislature-passed initiatives will go the a vote here in California. “Raft” is the perfect word: Our spending-addicted state government is clinging on to these proposals as a last hope keeping them from sinking beneath the stormy waters of the Sea of Insolvency.

It looks like California voters would rather send a message than save the state. A new statewide survey by the state’s leading nonpartisan polling outfit, the Public Policy Institute of California, the five initiatives that would rejigger state finances, robbing from Peter to pay Paul instead of making fundamental fixes, has majority support.  I expect support to wane further as the public’s understanding of the measures and frustration with governmental ineptitude increase.

Also figuring into my forecast is the overwhelming 81 percent support for the sixth proposition, 1F, which would limit salary increases for state elected officials when the state faces a budget deficit. We Californians are definitely thinking about meting out some punishment.  PPIC’s prez agrees:

“Californians are clear that the budget situation is serious, but most disapprove of the leadership in Sacramento—the people who are providing the solutions,” says Mark Baldassare, PPIC president, CEO, and survey director. “These leaders have their work cut out for them if they want to persuade voters that the ballot measures are necessary to address the problem.”

And in a note to RINOs everywhere, our barely Republican governor has become the poster boy for proving that being a political phony pleases no one.   His disapproval rate among registered voters is now 57 percent, with no one liking him much at all:  60 percent of Dems disapprove, 53 percent of GOP, 57 percent of indys.

Disapproval of the legislature, which brought us this mess by being a liberal Democrat rats nest, is far worse, with 81 percent of likely voters disapproving of them – a sign that a taxpayer revolt is roiling like magma under a thin crust.  If California voters do revolt on May 19, fiscal chaol will ensue, leading to a massive legislative turnover in subsequent elections.

I think voters in other states will watch the debacle and say, “Looks good to me – as goes California goes us!”

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Environmental fanaticism comes at a price.  When you start trying to eliminate hydrocarbon byproducts from the atmosphere, it’s messy, costly, and it puts people out of business.  There’s no need to wait for Obama to impose a $2 trillion cap and trade dead weight on the economy – it’s happening right now.

By April 1, the California Air Resources Board (that’s CARB to you folks who like clever acronyms) wants every single gas nozzle in the state replaced with an $11,000 nozzle that’s reportedly cleaner than the costly vapor recovery nozzles they mandated a few years back.  When you figure most stations have six to eight pumps, the cost of fitting the new nozzles on is $66,000 to $88,000.  And that spells trouble, according to the OC Watchdog:

At least 51 independently owned gas stations in Orange County are in danger of closing next month because of costly new regulations implemented by the state. …

“We’re not talking about Chevron. We’re not talking about BP,” said Tom Kise, spokesman for the Responsible Clean Air Coalition. “It could be the guy, or gal, who owns just one gas station,” he said. …

“I think it’s going to be pretty bad,” said David Berri, who figures only three or four of his family’s 22 SoCal gas stations will be ready by April 1.

The rest of the stations might close, he said, putting a tragic end to a rough stretch that’s seen the family lay off employees and lose as much as 50 percent of their revenues.

Even worse, Berri predicted that so many other stations will have to close that gas prices could go up. At the very least, he said it’ll be more difficult to find a place to fill up.

In all, some 3,400 of the 11,000 affected gas stations in California have yet to comply with the regulations. One hundred fifty of them have formed the Responsible Clean Air Coalition to beg the state to delay implementation.

According to the Coalition, the best and most cost-effective of three systems that meet the CARB regs was not approved until just five months ago, so there’s been little time to comply, especially since the credit crunch has made it hard for many small operators to get the capital for the change-over.  Most gas stations are small operations, since the big oil companies have gotten out of the retail business.

Worse, says the Coalition, the manufacturers of compliant equipment know they’re the only CARB-blessed game in town and have been raising their prices.

California already has vapor-retrieving nozzles on its pumps. Californians already pay more than most other Americans because of CARB-mandated refining requirements.  Our air is far, far cleaner than it was at the peak of our air pollution problems, but remains non-compliant primarily because CARB and the feds keep setting higher standards, so this kind of nonsense can be imposed on us.

But, hey, that’s just gas nozzles in one state.  It’s nothing compared to carbon taxes on everything you buy, from hamburgers to houses.

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alifornia’s professional greenhouse gas worrywarts are insensitive dolts.  They have actually picked the hallowed March Madness festivities as the ideal time to announce their latest madcap scheme in their war to save the planet that doesn’t need saving:  Ban big screen TVs.

Yes, folks, you’ll be huddled around your 12″, peddle-driven black and white watching the Final Four if these hysterics get their way. Here’s the report, from OC Watchdog:

The California Energy Commission is considering a proposal that would ban California retailers from selling all but the most energy-efficient televisions. Critics say the news standards could take 25 percent of televisions off the market — most of them 40 inches or larger.

The TV industry points out that this is needless meddling by California’s ubber-Greens, because the feds already have set energy efficiency standards. The Energy Commissars counter that you can save $18 to $20 a year (OOOOH!) by buying a more energy efficient model.  Since that’s obviously no motivation whatsoever, the Commissars are turning to heavy fisted regulations.

Incredible Daughter #1 makes her own point:

Morons. The economy sucks, so let’s take products OFF the market.

She’s right. Televisions are the fastest growing consumer appliance in California. Let’s figure out how to sell more of them, and let people make their own decision based on the unit’s relative electrical efficiency and how much keeping up with the Joneses is required.

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here are so many reasons why California is slipping into fiscal and infrastructure chaos – most of them with (D) after their names – that we have become a textbook for other states to study.  It used to be “As California goes, so goes the nation.”  Now you’d better hope your state looks at California and runs full-bore in the other direction.

At the core of the state’s problems is self-centeredness.  The Legislature wants what it wants, without a care to the consequences.  And locally, anti-everything NIMBYs hold progress in check because they see all change as negative; there can be no change for the good.  Oh, c’mon, you say?  No, really:

Levee repairs in Sacramento’s Natomas Basin face new legal and financial threats that could delay construction of the massive project.

The Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency is just weeks from awarding a $90 million construction contract for a key phase of the project. But that work depends on state matching funds, which have been bottled up by the state budget crisis.

And last week, the Garden Highway Community Association filed two new legal actions against the project. (Sac Bee)

Natomas is an extremely flood-prone area that is protected (if we can use that word) by aging, deteriorated, undersized levees. So why would a community association sue to stop levees that would protect the homes in that association? Can you say “self-absorbed?”

Doug Cummings, president of the Garden Highway Community Association, said his group is particularly concerned that 1,000 trees are already being removed to accommodate the wider levee.

“Am I just protecting my own house? That’s part of it, because I don’t like to drive down Garden Highway just looking at a giant berm of dirt,” Cummings said.

Never mind that the giant berm of dirt is what they call a levee, you know, something that keeps the flood waters out of your living room.

Maybe the state should just take its scarce levee-building money elsewhere, let the homes in the Garden Highway Community Association wash away, and protect folks who are decent enough to remain a part of the gene pool.

hat-tip: Neil

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resident Obama’s kowtow to the green lobby – tens of billions of dollars in green tech incentives and tens of billions of dollars in old energy penalties – was on the ballot in LA yesterday. That’s LA, as in Hollyweird and Dem strongholds, as in Ed Begley and abounding Greenie fanatics.

Measure B would give LA’s Dept. of Water & Power authority to install 400 megawatts-worth of solar power on rooftops throughout the city, an action which curiously would increase, not decrease, the cost of power by two or three percent. It was backed by the mayor, the labor unions, the environmentalists and (natch) the LA Times, who all said it would help clean the air by speeding the demise of coal fired power plants. High-fives all around!

Well, the morning after has hit and Measure B is losing in a squeaker, 50.3% to 49.7%. It might still win, but even if it does, voters in LA have sent a couple signals by their vote.

First, they are not in a spending mood. Another two or three percent on their utility bills does not make them happy. Imagine what they’ll think when they hear about the impact Obama’s carbon cap and trade will have on all their bills.

And second, they don’t like dirty green. Opponents to B successfully positioned the vote as all about power – political power – that was rushed onto the ballot without due process. They pointed out that DWP is free to install solar without a vote of the people, so the ballot measure was a way for the city council and its union buddies to lock organized labor into all future municipal energy projects.

If LA can’t pass (or can just barely pass) a measure like this, why should the rest of America agree to the costly green energy measures crammed into Obama’s stimulus bill, which was crammed through Congress so quickly no one had time to read it?

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mong the more paltry cuts from Porkasaurus was $50 million that would have gone to the San Joaquin Delta, the key to any solution to California’s water mess. We have to have new infrastructure to move water through the Delta without killing the little fishies that are holding California’s water users hostage.

I understand the cut; it wasn’t money that would generate jobs. But the Parkasaurus largess has overlooked the necessary, job-generating fixes to California’s water infrastructure entirely. That hasn’t happened because it’s not essential to fix it, or because it won’t generate jobs – but because of the iron grip the Green lobby has on California’s Dem legislators.

GOP congressman Devin Nunes, who represents ag communities in the Central Valley, has had enough of the eco-politicization of our future and told Obama and Schwarzenegger as much in a letter released yesterday.

After explaining the two primary water conveyance systems within the Central Valley (the CVP and the SWP, never mind what they stand for) that provide water to 25 million people and three million acres of the nation’s most productive cropland, Nunes launches into his plea to the prez and the gov:

Recapping: Half a million acres out of production, 40,000 jobs for already-poor people lost, and huge consequences to the California economy – the largest in the nation.  But because of the dominant influence of the environmentalist lobby on CA Dems, Nunes pleas will go nowhere.  Remember who leads the House:  California’s preeminent Green, NanPo, Gaia’s own handmaiden.

Nonetheless, Nunes soldiers on with a good idea:  Maybe we could note that the economic downturn is having a huge, negative impact on the human species and waive for a moment some of the more onerous environmental restrictions on building new water infrastructure.

Vitter’s amendment went down on a 32-65 vote, meaning every single Dem and a big chunk of “moderate” Republicans voted for the critters, not the people.  If there was ever a sign that even the Dems aren’t ready to respond intelligently to the “greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression” meme, this is it.

Meanwhile, unless we get a miraculously wet winter, cash-strapped Californians will be facing increases of 30 percent or more on their water bills, and will face mandatory rationing in at least the 20 percent range.  That’s OK with me as an individual; I can cut back my sprinkler timers and shorten my showers.  But for ag and industry – and the people they employ – it will take an economic and human toll.

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