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can only imagine what folks living elsewhere think when they see our California wildfires raging up hillsides, down canyons and through homes. I imagine it’s something like, “Why in the world would they live there?”

Well, “there” in most of California necessarily means somewhere in close proximity to chapparel or sage scrub, the two most prevelant plant communities from San Diego to Mendocino. And what a plant community it is! It doesn’t just burn; it has to burn, as John McPhee wrote in “The Control of Nature,”

High or low – hard, soft, or mixed – all chaparral has in common an always developing, relentlessly intensifying, vital necessity to burst into flame.  In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral.  Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants. There are seeds that fall into the soil, stay there indefinitely, and will not germinate except in the aftermath of fire. …

When fire comes, it puts the nutrients [from mature shrubs] back in the ground. It clears the terrain for fresh growth.  When chaparral has not been burned for thirty years, about half the thicket will be dry dead stuff – twenty-five thousand tons of it in one quare mile.  The living plants are no less flammable. The chamise, the manzanita – in fact, most chaparral plants – are full of solvent extractives that burn intensely and ignite easily. Their leaves are glossy with oils and resins that seal in mositure during hot dry periods and serve the dual purpose of responding explosively to flame.

So Californians don’t really choose to live surrounded by chaparral and scrub. Unless they live packed in urban areas that were cleared of it by pioneers 150 years ago – who chose to live surrounded by it and clear it acre by acre – they have to put up with the stuff.  It’s pretty for a couple months of the year at best, fragrant with sage, resplendant in purple flowers, then it browns out and looks dead for the rest of the year.  And it burns.  But we can no more avoid it than Midwesterners can avoid living surrounded by agricultural fields.

Enter groups like the Coastal Property Owners Association of Big Sur, who watched 20 homes in their neighborhood burn last year, and who blame the regulatory rigidity of the California Coastal Commission – not oil-rich bushes – for their woes.  The Commission has rules that protect scrub and chaparral, and it requires homeowners to get a permit before they can trim back the explosive shrubs … permits that can be costly to pursue and difficult to get. 

[H]omeowners say the commission’s chaparral-protection rule blocks them from taking even basic precautions against wildfires, such as cutting a defensive perimeter around their homes, or from remodeling or expanding structures on their property.

They also contend that the definitions of precisely what constitutes maritime chaparral are vague, noting that the Coastal Commission staff said in one report that  “the syntaxonomy of maritime chaparral has not been formally studied, hence arguments as to the identity of a particular stand of chaparral as either falling within or without such a category is subject to the vacillation of personal opinion.”

The statement means that “people will have their land effectively condemned based upon the personal opinion of one person, the expert the county or commission requires them to hire to do a biological assessment of their property as part of the permit process. It seems you couldn’t find a more arbitrary and vague system for designating which land is ESHA and therefore essentially unusable,” said Michael Caplin, a member of the homeowners group who has lived in the area since the 1970s. ….

“Even when everybody could see the fire was raging, they said we had to get permits to cut. People didn’t have a choice. They had to get permits. Finally, the firefighters jumped right in, and of course they helped the property owners remove trees. It shouldn’t take a disaster like this to put some sense into the process,” [Lisa] Kleissner said. (Capitol Weekly) 

The Coastal Commission takes a “Who? Us?” attitude when accused of complicitcy in coastal area fire damage, and shifts the blame instead to the silly people who insist on living close to nature.  (The Commission is based in San Francisco, which was stripped of its habitat before the beginning of the 20th century.)

“The central message here for us is that the maritime chaparral, like the San Diego coast sage shrub, are not just fire-prone, they are fire-dependent. They have evolved over a millenium to require fire to regenerate. They have to burn, they will burn,” said Coast Commission spokeswoman Sarah Christie.

“When people build in those kinds of habitats, you have to expect that there are going to be wildfires. When a wildfire is raging out of control, it’s not reasonable to expect that you would be able to clear enough vegetation from around your house to keep it from harm’s way. People are emotional distressed and they are looking to lash out. Those fires were caused by natural forces. The Coastal Commission can’t control the lightning.”

Imagine being a coastal California homeowner looking at the charred skeleton of your home and reading that. You might be tempted to lash out.  Of course Commission staffers aren’t out there starting fires; that’s hardly the point, Ms. Christie, even if the Commission’s rules against thinning without permits may intensify the fires.  The point is, the Commission could do something to help contain the fires, but it puts Gaea first and people second.

It would be an interesting study to compare houses lost to wildfire in the coastal region to the number lost in scrub/chaparral habitat outside the Coastal Zone.  I’m sure the difference would be remarkable.  Outside the Coastal Zone, developers and homebuilders work with the less rigid California Department of Fish & Game and their local fire department to develop a fire plan that involves thinning native habitat around new homes. 

It works like a charm.  In last year’s Yorba Linda fire, one of the most exposed neighborhoods of all, Casino Ridge, which was surrounded on three sides by raging fire, lost not a single home because it was newly built and contained a carefully engineered “fuel modification zone” that knocked down the fire for the firefighters.  The neighborhood with the most losses, Hidden Hills, was built before the practice was put into effect, and had scrub growing up to the backyards of most of the homes.

The Coastal Commission’s desire to save every chaparral and coastal sage bush it can makes engineering protections like Casino Ridge’s in the Coastal Zone vastly more difficult.

It may all get down to varying views of how much of this stuff there is around us.  When I was fighting to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed as endangered, we found a simple, dumb mathematical error in the fed’s computation of habitat loss.  They put it at 95 percent gone, but if they’d done their math right, they would have seen it was actually 70 percent lost – and that was based on suspect data; the actual amount lost is almost certainly much lower.

As for chaparral, locals say there’s 1.3 million acres of it, but the Commission clings to an entirely insane 20,000-acre figure, which it gets by counting only eugenically pure patches of the stuff with no other plants gumming up the purity.  It’s an absurd and artificial standard, and it’s causing houses to burn.

So it’s your choice: Is California going down the tubes or up in smoke? Or both?

hat-tip: Marshall

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n Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget panic attack yesterday – a rightful panic attack, but a politically timed panic attack nonetheless – was a proposal that could doom the political prospects of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and other GOP governors who rejected the Obama stimulus package because of the federal strings attached to it.

Before getting to that, though, I’d like to report that with considerable glee, I found in Schwarzenegger’s proposal a promise to drill for oil offshore if next week’s “budget fixing” (i.e., taxpayer screwing) initiatives fail to pass.  Sure, the Gov is probably just trying to scare the gee-willikers out of California voters with that “threat,” but to me and millions like me, it was yet another great reason to vote against the initiatives. 

Covered way down in most reports on Schwarzenegger’s announcement was his proposal for Medi-Cal cuts. He picked his target for proposed cuts carefully – 225,000 poor children, to tug on the sympathy chords of everyone.  But to whack off their benefits, Schwarzenegger would have to get a waiver, untying California from all the strings that came with the federal stimulus dough.  In accepting the money, Schwarzenegger and other cash-hungry governors had to agree that they could not increase eligibility requirements; now he wants permission to break those chains.

Do you think the other governors will stand idly by?  Every single one of ‘em who took the fed money will pile on with Schwarzenegger, bawling about how they can’t possibly balance their budget without Obama’s gracious and godly help, snipping this string, cutting that requirement.

Schwarzenegger comes begging with considerable clout -  not only California’s fantastic electoral college prize, but also his Schwarzenegger to Shriver to Kennedy to Obama bond, which assures Obama will listen.

And there’s a special prize for Obama, should he give in and urge Congress to even temporarily unbind the states from their obligations under the stimulus package.  Should that happen, Mark Sanford, Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal and other GOP governors who rejected portions of the package will become easy political targets of their states’ Dem operatives, who have all been attacking them shrilly about their decisions. Now the Dems will have their ultimate “See, I told you so!” moment, and the good gentlemen’s prospects for re-election or higher office will be substantially diminished.

It’s a sweet opportunity for Obama: Be flexible, be gracious, reattach the strings once the vaunted recovery occurs, and obliterate some pesky foes in the process.  He just might go for it … in fact, I find myself wondering if it all wasn’t his Machiavelian scheme in the first place.

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efore I go home for what I hope will be a pleasant evening … or maybe the chance to spend an hour or two writing my geopolitical novel … I want to share this funny comment with you. It’s from frequent commenter Socratease, responding to the recent post, California, What’s Wrong With This State? He answers the question:

I blame our mild climate. If we had freezing winters or killer heat spells like other parts of the country, the stupid people here would have all found stupid ways to die through their poor planning or lack of appreciation for reality.

Instead they’re able to survive, thrive, and have children who they’ve raised to be stupid as well. Successive generations of this have produced today’s California voters, and the government they put in power.

Heh! He’s right; stupidity is trashing the once-Golden State.

On the more practical side, another frequent commenter, Francis, suggests a change I can believe in:

Of course Californians are to blame for our current fiscal mess. They continue to demand government services without consideration of how to pay for those services, and it’s largely done through the initiative process.

I think allowing citizens to take direct action via initiatives is good but it has been abused by special interests. Take CIRM, for example, which committed the state to spend 3 billion on stem cell research. Did anyone that supported the measure consider how to pay for that investment? Did they ask how the state would recoup its considerable investment into research? Did they ask who would hold the patents for inventions the will be the result of such research? No, no and no again.

This is but one example. They are many more.

I would argue that it’s time to change the initiative process so Californians can’t vote for new government services without addressing how they will be funded. One way to do that is to change our laws to disqualify any unfunded initiatives from getting on the ballot.

Now if we could just get all the stupid Californians to understand that intelligent thinking …

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he headline poses quite a question as May approaches and the passel of ballot measures designed to bail out Sacramento from its budgetary ineptitude appear poised for defeat. The more I think about it, the more I think what’s wrong with California is simple: Californians.

Check out this information from the latest Field Poll, a prominent if liberally biased CA poll:

• A large majority prefers resolving the state budget deficit mostly through spending cuts rather than through tax increases.

But:

• Majorities oppose cutbacks in ten of twelve major categories of state spending, including the three largest – public schools, health care and higher education.  Only prisons and parks were cited as programs that could be cut.

However, a solution is evident:

• Three in four voters (74%) favor increasing taxes on millionaires.

Yes, let’s be sure to punish success!

The poll found that a slim majority of Dems (53%) favor spending cuts over tax increases, but 83% of GOP voters want cuts.  It’s incredible, given the momentous evidence of over-spending and lack of discipline by the Dem-dominated state legislature, there’s still that many Dems who want to give them more of our money … or at least more of the millionaires’ money.  I’m guessing this 53% is pretty much the same bunch that pays no taxes but still gets a tax cut under Obama’s budget.

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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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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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