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ere’s a simple proposition:  If you want to watch a big TV that uses more electricity, you simply exert your right to pay a bigger electric bill in return for a bigger picture.  That is unless you live in Crazifornia where know-it-all bureaucrats stand ready to strip Californians of their ability - or right - to watch big-screen TVs.

You know Crazifornia - the state where this book is a bestseller.

The effort by the California Energy Commissars … er, Commission … won the bureaucrats a Golden Trashcan from conservative California news aggregator FlashReport. The award is given sparingly to particularly “onerous” - in FashReport publisher Jon Fleischman’s word; I’d use “fascist” - legislation or regulation.

Last March libertarian OC Register columnist Steve Greenhut wrote about the plan:

In their continuing quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, state regulators have uncovered a new villain in the war on global warming : your big screen TV

Couch potatoes, beware.

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.

I read it back then, but haven’t heard anything else since, and figured maybe the bureaucrats had been slapped back into place.  Not so.  Here’s Fleischman:

I figured that this proposal, like that California Air Resources Board Report [CARB] that talked about banning black cars, would be rolled up and put into a file cabinet somewhere - a bad idea conceived by some government eco-bureaucrat that would never fly in the real world…

But I was wrong - and the CEC is actually DEAD SERIOUS about punching a huge whole in the California economy, and severely limiting consumer choice in big screen televisions, implementing a ban on many of them starting in 2011, with even more being banned starting in 2013.

The CEC is looking to move forward with proposed language for the ban in the coming weeks - under the guise of “adopting energy efficiency standards for televisions.”

You may have heard sporatic chatter that California is once again leading the nation - this time in unemployment, high taxes and barriers to business.  But don’t bother CARB with such trivialities.  Jobs, schmobs.  And who needs state revenues, even if we are bleeding out to the tune of $23 billion?  The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)  has published a study that shows by banning big-screen TVs, the state could lose as much as $50 million a year in tax revenue and lose 4,600 jobs in TV sales, distribution and installation. That’s 4,600 tax-paying jobs that would no longer be contributing to the state’s ailing economy.

The worst of it is the dishonesty CARB uses when talking to us about their plan. The bureaucrats must think we are so dumb.  This is from the CARB Web site’s FAQ:

Q: Is California considering banning plasma, large screen or HD televisions?

A: No, the state is not banning any type of TV. Consumers have the freedom to choose any type and size of television that meets the efficiency standard.

Never mind that TVs that don’t meet the standard would be, you know, banned. It’s no different from Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs proclaiming that there’s freedom in Iran - it’s the same insolent betrayal of truth by the forces in power.

You can walk into any consumer electronics store and buy an Energy Star-rated big-screen TV, with assurance that it is the most energy efficient brand available. Don’t bother the CARB bureaucrats with such niceties; it’s power of the political sort they’re concerned with, much more than power of the energy sort. And Fleischman reports that CARB itself isn’t too hot on Energy Star:

The CEC, of course, derides the EnergyStar program in their FAQ document, emphasizing that, in essence, because it is a voluntary program, EnergyStar doesn’t go far enough.

I did note that the CEC touts as supporters of this program California’s three heavily state-regulating power utilities - Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. So I dropped a call into a longtime [FlashReport] friend who is a prominent executive with one of these companies - this person made it clear to me — after confirming that I would leave their name out of it - that the utilities are in a bind. These regulations are being proposed and advocated by their regulators. So they don’t have a choice but to support them. He said it is now commonplace for the utilities to have to publicly feign support for “social engineering programs” because they simply cannot afford to alienate their regulators.

Quick question: Does what I’ve just described to you sound like the workings of a democratic government or a fascist one?

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esidents of other states may think they know how crazy things are in California, but I don’t think the power of human imagination is anywhere great enough to really capture just how insane this state is.  I mean, it’s like that book on the right is a best-seller here.

So I’m starting this periodic feature, Crazifornia, to help out-of-staters get a better understanding … and in-staters to realize that it’s way past time to throw all the #@$%!s out.

Today’s subject: Rainfall.

You’ve heard about our drought, so you’d think we’d love rain but in San Diego a few years back, the Regional Water Quality Control Board - let’s just call it “the San Diego Board” instead of the alternative SDRWQCB - tried to declare rain to be a toxic substance as soon as it hit the ground.  Why? Why because then they could regulate it even more, of course!  They figured it would pick up all sorts of human-caused nastiness as soon as it touched down, and that would allow the Board to force citizens and businesses to treat it before it left their property - or face nasty fines if they failed to.

That bizarre campaign ulitmately failed, but the spirit lived on.

The Ventura Board - following some very secretive deliberations - just passed a new set of regulations for runoff that requires that all new development (they never hit existing development - voters live in existing development!) to meet strict limits for “effective impervious area,” or EIA.  That would be the portion of the parcel that becomes impervious as roads, roofs, sidewalks and driveways are built over it.

Ventura’s Board figured it would limit EIA to 30 percent for urban infill properties and … gasp … five percent for “greenfield” developments.  You can make more than five percent of a greenfield site impervious, but if you do, you have to capture every single drop that falls on that remainder of the impervious area and either infiltrate it into the ground, use it on the site, or hold it on the site until every last molecule of it evaporates.

As you can imagine, that will drive up the cost of new construction dramatically … and why?  In any good storm, water will run naturally off of more than five percent of any greenfield site.  And if runoff is such a big problem, why not treat it like sewage, let it flow  to a regional treatment, clean it and release it?

We tried to get that cost effective and reasonable idea approved by any number of regional boards, but they said they wanted the conveyance systems - be it a creek or a concrete-lined channel - to be “fishable” and “swimable.”  We had some fun with that, creating this image of what every Southern Californian would rather do than go to a nearby beach.

Up and down the state, Regional Boards are foisting this kind of insanity, pretending its normal human behavior.  And they’re getting away with it.

Now you may have heard that California is in just a bit of a financial squeeze, facing a $24 billion budget deficit and suffering an unemployment rate that’s a couple points higher than the depressing-enough national rate. Encouraging new construction would help get us out of this mess, since each new home generates three new jobs, $300,000 in economic output, $16,000 in state tax revenues and $3,000 in local tax revenues, according to the Building Industry Association of Southern California.

But instead of encouraging the end of the recession, California keeps doing things like these new stormwater regs, which make new homes, factories, schools and hospitals more expensive to build, more difficult to finance, and ultimately less likely to ever happen.  And why?  Even environmental groups report that beach water quality is way up - yet no one sees the need to stop ratcheting up the regulations.

Welcome to Crazifornia.

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armers and agricultural organizations have submitted more than 400 comments, totalling 25,000 pages, to the Senate Ag Committee regarding the pending Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade legislation - and they’re not supportive of the “let’s destroy the economy and say we’re saving the planet” bill.

Even the American Farmers Union, a haven for ag’s left-wingers, called for ag offsets and exclusions - in other words, stick the other folks with it if you must, but leave us out of it.

Here’s some decidedly negative comments from the Dairy Farmers of America, who have need to be particularly concerned because Waxman, Markey and the rest of the loons are fixated on cow farts as a heinous planet-destroyer.

“At this time, Dairy Farmers of America, Inc. (DFA) is reluctant to embrace any type of climate change legislation without a better understanding of its impact on the entire U.S. economy and specifically, the dairy industry. Should the U.S. enter into a system where it effectively reduces its greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in the aggregate, it must also work to ensure that other industrialized nations agree to similar terms and developing nations adopt equally significant reductions. The U.S. needs to ensure that the costs of any climate change legislation do not exceed the benefits, that new regulations are based on sound science and that the global burden is fairly distributed.

“We are especially cautious of mandatory GHG measures without a more complete and thorough understanding by all the major affected U.S. parties as to what these changes would mean for their incomes, businesses, livelihoods and ways of life. This is especially the case given the depths and extent of the nation’s current economic crisis whose negative effects are all too immediate and from which we have yet to see an end…

“DFA is also concerned about the ramifications of a cap-and-trade system on the entire, currently fragile U.S. economy, even though a carbon offset program might offer some incentives for dairy farmers to continue to pursue innovations and gain the market benefits as a result.”

Waxman and Markey will have none of that! Cost-benefit analyses? Consider the sorry state of the economy? Acknowledge China and India? What are those yahoos from dairyland thinking?! 

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ew York liberals will have to look for a new place from which to launch their anti-conservative diatribes if the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters is right:

Sea levels off the coastline of the Northeastern United States and Nova Scotia could rise more than in other regions within the next century if the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerated rate, according to a paper in the May 29 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

According to the paper, “Transient Response of the MOC and Climate to Potential Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st Century,” sea levels off the coast of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other Northeastern cities could rise 12 to 20 inches more than the average sea level rise by the year 2100 as ocean currents circulate water from the melting ice sheets in Greenland.

“If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise,” lead author of the paper Aixue Hu, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. “Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise.” (From Daily Environment Report, June ‘09)

Fifteen to twenty inches more than average by 2100 … let’s see, that’s 90 years from now, so that’s about a quarter-inch rise per year.

A quarter-inch a year is four times the rate of average sea level rise since 1880, right, which has been humming along at 0.6 inches a year.  To put that in perspective, it’s even greater than the number of times Obama has increased the national debt in the five months he’s been in office - just a measly three times.

Accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf is dependent on a lot of ifs.  Ocean temperatures would have to rise.  The North Atlantic Current would have to respond to that rise by shifting to the north. And atmospheric temperatures would have to rise as well. And the computer models would have to be accurate.

That last one’s a bugger because intuitively, it’s pretty obvious that if the ocean gets warmer, cloud cover will increase from move evaporation, and increased cloud cover will flummox those persnickety computer models.

Besides, a brilliant friend tells me, the hysterical paper is based on a running average of sea levels, like most hysterical papers, which yield “outlandish and statistically unsupportable claims of sea levels a century hence, to tens of a foot.”  Actual sea level measurement, rather than running averages, yields the cool, calm and collected data. But what fun is that?

Further messing up this little global warming nightmare is the chart on the left, which tracks ocean levels since about 20,000 years ago.  As you can see, they began rising after the peak of the last ice age, really took off about 15,000 years ago, plateaued for two brief spells, and have run pretty darn flat for the last 8,000 years.

So what does all this mean?  Not that islands are sinking anywhere, at least not any time soon, but that bureaucrats are having a heyday.  Someone has to do something with this data, and boy are they!

My brilliant friend spells it out:  The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not to be confused with a panel of climate scientists) says ocean levels will go up 17 inches a century - three times more than they have been. And they’re planning for our future accordingly.

The California Coastal Commission, however, has decided it’s going to base its planning on a 36-inch-per-century spike in ocean levels, and it’s making anyone who’s building in the Coastal Zone develop plans to protect homes from those levels.  Oh, but it doesn’t allow you to build sea walls, so go figger.

But wait!  When regulating itself and its fellow Earth-hugging agencies, the Coastal Commission uses an 11-inch-per-century sea level rise for its planning.  The thousands of homes adjacent to the new Bolsa Chica wetlands restoration project will soon have ocean tides immediately adjacent to their homes, protected by a little bitty levee that isn’t certified by FEMA and only anticipates an 11-inch ocean level rise over the next 100 years.

The area in red in this image will become a tidal wetland as soon as oil field clean-up in the area is completed.  The homeowners on the other side of that red line better hope the Coastal Commission is dead wrong with its 36-inch sea level rise prediction and spot-on or less with the 11-inch rise it applies when it’s doing its own touchy-feely projects.

Now, if you’re asking yourself why do private landowners have to plan for 36-inch rises while the agencies that write the rules can skate by with 11 inches, you just don’t understand how government works.

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uick, can you tell a Heermann’s gull (below), a federal species of concern, from your run-of-the-mill flying beach rat (above)?  You’d better be able to answer yes, or be prepared to face the wrath of the federal critter police:

LAGUNA BEACH (OC Register) – A Kansas man is contesting a $275 fine by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for attacking a rare gull in Laguna Beach when the bird tried to steal his wife’s ice cream.

Dragan Djuric, 50, of Wichita, Kan., opted not to pay the fine and to bring the matter before a federal judge in Los Angeles County Court, said Mona Iannelli with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Djuric is scheduled to appear in court July 2.

Djuric was not immediately available for comment.

Fish and Wildlife officials say Djuric violated the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act when he beat a Heermann’s gull with a stick New Year’s Eve. Heermann’s gulls are listed under the act.

Djuric - probably a 1st generation immigrant who’s learning a lot about America through this process - says the gull attacked his wife and dropped a gnarly dose of droppings on him while the couple was eating ice cream on Laguna Beach’s Main Beach.  The feds disagree, citing busy-body witnesses who say his attack was not defensive in nature because the ice cream had already fallen out of its cone and was on the ground.

Apparently no charges are going to be filed against the vet who euthanized the bird, which came out of the cross-species warfare with a broken wing.

(OOPS: Djuric was prosecuted under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, not the Endangered Species Act, so whether he hit a Heermann’s gull or a common flying rat is of no consequence. Any ol’ migratory bird is hands-off under the MBTA.)

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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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he bald eagle is the pride and joy of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service would like to tell you so itself:

A North American species with a historic range from Alaska and Canada to northern Mexico, the bald eagle is an Endangered Species Act success story.

Forty years ago, our national symbol was in danger of extinction throughout most of its range. Habitat destruction and degradation, illegal shooting … decimated the eagle population. Habitat protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act … and conservation actions taken by the American public have helped bald eagles make a remarkable recovery.

The ellipses are there to remove references to DDT, the first being “and the contamination of its food source, largely as a consequence of DDT, and the second citing “the federal government’s banning of DDT” as a primary reason for recovery. We wouldn’t want to diminish the Fish & Wildlife Services pride by pointing out that the EPA, not the FWS, regulates DDT.

And it’s really not nice to point out that many hold that the ESA may do more harm than good in protecting some species.  As Brian Seasholes of the Reason Foundation points out:

Most landowners want to have, and help, rare species on their land.  But the government’s harsh penalties and the dire financial consequences that can come with finding an endangered species on your property are encouraging landowners to make their land inhospitable to endangered species by destroying their habitat.

Seasholes goes on to say that if someone wanted to write a law aimed at harming wildlife, it would be hard to top the ESA - but I don’t think he had the bald eagle and the giant cormorant on his mind.  Still, it’s a pretty darn good case of ESA harming wildlife.  AP reports that bald eagles are now so prevalent in some areas that they are posing a threat to other bird species by gobbling up their young.  Of particular note are the giant cormorants of Maine, whose numbers have dropped from 250 pairs to 80, due primarily to bald eagle predation.

“They’re like thugs. They’re like gang members. They go to these offshore islands where all these seabirds are and the birds are easy picking,” said Brad Allen, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “These young eagles are harassing the bejesus out of all the birds, and the great cormorants have been taking it on the chin.”

By comparison, bald eagles were down to about 400 pairs in the U.S.; now there are about 10,000.  And it’s not just eagles, and it’s not just Maine.  Here in California we have protected foxes eating protected shorebirds, and one of the jobs government wildlife specialists do but don’t want to talk about is trapping and killing one species to protect another species, which happens all the time.  Someone should alert PETA!

Here’s a novel idea.  Stop regulating endangered species habitat on private land.

About 30% of the U.S. - 650 million acres - is federally owned, and states own huge amounts of land as well - like the 600,000 state-owned acres in Maine, where the bald eagles are giving the cormorants such a bad time.  Together, state and federally owned land and land held by private conservation organizations is somewhere over 40% of the U.S. land mass.

Let the animals figure out how to survive on that land.  Sure, you can keep restrictions in place not allowing the hunting of endangered species on any land, but knock off all the habitat restrictions on private land.  Show the critters all the land the feds and states have to offer them, sing a bit of Sinatra - “If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere,” and be done with it.

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hat’s not a typo in the headline - it’s the greenhouse gag, not generic greenhouse gas, because the depravity of declaring the fourth most common element in the universer, carbon, a pollutant and carbon dioxide, the byproduct of human breathing, something needing regulating is coming home to roost.  Like an 800-pound chicken.

In her confirmation hearing, EPA Director of Air and Radiation nominee Regina McCarthy put an end to EPA Director Lisa Jackson’s curt dismissal of concerns by manufacturers and chambers of commerce that EPA was poised to impose greenhouse gas regs on small business.  “It is a myth … EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Huts, your lawnmower and baby bottles,” Jackson said, according the the WSJ, the primary source for this post.

McCarthy countered her boss, telling lawmakers that litigation could force her office to draft emission rules for small emitters like hospitals, schools and farms.  And, true to form, the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity promptly piped up with Kassie Siegel, its climate warmonger director of the CBD’s Climate Law Institute, saying she is poised to sue for regulation of smaller emitters if the EPA stops at simply large emitters.

The administration is now set to regulate only about 13,000 large emitters, including refiners, smelters and cement plants. The position seems radical next to Siegel’s stand, but when you consider that refiners, smelters and cement plants are all backbones to our industrialized, mobile society, you’ll understand that there’s nothing moderate about Obama’s position; it’s no less extreme, only more efficient, than the CBD approach.

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) has put a hold on Ms. McCarthy’s nomination in part because of her responses on the greenhouse gas issue.  Barrasso wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundary (which could, I suppose, itself be regulated under the new regime),

Special interest groups around the country are scheming to sue the EPA to prosecute hospitals, farms, nursing homes, commercial buildings and any other small emitter of greenhouse gasses. These regulations are a dangerous loose cannon in the wrong hands.

When asked about potential lawsuits, Regina McCarthy, the Administration’s nominee as Assistant Administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation said that she will “request that I be informed if any such notice is filed with regard to a small source, and I will follow-up with the potential litigants.”

The solution to this problem is not to have government officials go around asking litigants not to sue. That is not a solution and entirely unrealistic. I quite frankly expect more.

The only jobs this option will create are in law firms as the litigation bonanza begins.

In considering the economic impact of this lunacy, Barrasso cautions that the 1.2 million businesses that might fall under EPA regulation as a result of GHG emission controls would face something akin to the EPA’s current pre-construction permit process, which the agency itself says costs each applicant $125,000 and 866 hours to obtain - and that was in 2007; I’m sure it’s become more costly and less streamlined since then.

Do the math - that’s $150 billion in new regulatory burdens and a billion hours of productivity down the drain.  If you’re sill in school, go into environmental law - the guys who work on regs like these will be the only people making real money in Obamaland.  Meanwhile, our competitors presumably will have avoided this lunacy, making America even less competitive and more vulnerable to foreign business domination.

As all this insanity looms, Rasmussen reports that only about a third of Americans believe human activities are causing climate change, about 50 percent less than believe it is caused by global climatic cycles, so there is opportunity for the GOP to position itself as the party of sanity on climate issues - something McCain reused to do.

And for those who feel the system will have to be on the edge of collapse before we will be able to reign in runaway regulators should keep their eyes on the regulation of GHG emissions in all its ramifications.  This baby is setting up to be one spectactular, collossal train wreck.

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his morning, Capt. Ed took a macro view of California and pronounced, “Maybe Escape from LA wasn’t so far-fetched after all.” Well, taking a much more micro view, I suggest we add Escape from Ventura as well, because what just happened there is emblematic of how tarnished the Golden State is.

By way of background, I draw your attention to the most recent news release by Santa Barabara Channel Keeper about water quality in the Santa Barbara channel.  Channel Keeper, a spawn of Robert Kennedy’s River Keeper franchise, is an environmental group that crusades for better water quality because, you know, our water quality just sucks so bad.  So here’s what the release said of the waters off Ventura County:

Ventura County beaches also fared better this year than last, showing a 37 percent decrease in the number of beach closing and advisory days – 452 in 2004, down from 720 in 2003. In California overall, the number of beach closing/advisory days decreased by 26 percent in 2004 to 3,985, from 5,384 in 2003.

Wow!  That’s great!  Maybe we could slack off a bit on the over-regulation and enjoy our considerable success at protecting our water quality.

Not on your life.

After a hearing that involved 11 hours of public comment, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) adopted a raft of tough new stormwater pollution rules for Ventura County aimed at keeping local waterways and beaches clean.  The considerable financial burden the unelected RWQCB imposed will fall on taxpayers and land developers, two segments of the population that are just rolling in dough.

Taxpayers are getting creamed because the RWQCB is requiring the city and county of Ventura to step up water quality testing along the ocean beaches because, you know, the ocean’s getting cleaner.  Here’s the Ventura County Star on the action:

The board added language just before the vote that calls for weekly, year-round beach water quality testing along county shores. The county and cities now have to figure out how to pay the tab.

Local officials estimated the cost of compliance at $20 million to $33 million annually, or $60 to $100 per household per year.

Current fees generate about $3 million a year, far short of what’s now needed - and any increase in the fees will require a vote of the electorate, thanks to California’s initiave system (Prop. 218).   Like that vote’s going to pass.  So local government will be stuck - forced by non-elected enviro-bureaucrats to spend money, and probably having to cut cops and firefighters to come up with the scratch.

Developers are getting creamed because the new permit requires all new development be low-impact development, as in:

Under the language, new development and redevelopment projects would have to be designed to capture virtually all runoff and treat the water on-site during most rain events. On projects, particularly infill, where that wasn’t feasible, the runoff would have to be mitigated downstream in the stormwater system to prevent pollution from reaching the oceans.

Got that?  Imagine a downpour cascading down on a large subdivision.  Virtually every drop will have to be contained and treated before it can leave.  Or a shopping center. Or a hospital.  How is this done?  Well, you could build a huge reservoir under the parking lot at considerable expense, or you could slice off a few acres of perfectly developable land and put in a retention basin.

Then you’ll buy some expensive to purchase and expensive to maintain equipment to filter the storm water, or carve off even more acreage for a natural treatment system - a manmade wetland.  And you’ll price your homes, set your rents, charge for your surgeries, sufficiently to recover the extra costs.  Meanwhile, all the developed lands all around you - which produce vastly more runoff than your subdivision, shopping center or hospital - get off without a nickel’s impact since even unelected enviro-bureaucrats are afraid to impose any costs on established residents.

Oh, and this being California, the Building Industry Association of Southern California was not invited to the hush-hush negotiations that resulted in the low-impact development rules.

Of course, it would have been wiser by far to build a regional stormwater treatment plant, paid for by all the taxpayers to clean all the taxpayers’ runoff, but such ideas are not even considered by RWCQBs throughout the state - because they want gutters, storm drains and flood channels to have good water quality.  As if anyone cares.

Bottom line:  For all that money, the quality of water that reaches the ocean to be tested in those weekly tests won’t change all that much, and California, already home to the greenest metropolitan areas in the country, just got less competitive and more expensive because  no one here can control our environmental extremists.

The OC Register Watchdog blog has quite a post today on the risks of standing up for truth, justice and your rights … at least when the offending party is a government bureaucracy.  The story of Dan Bader and the OC Fair Housing Council is a cautionary tale well worth reading.

Here’s Bader’s big crime that turns out not to be a crime, not that it not being a crime protected him from losing over $40,000:  He ran an ad in Craig’s list for an apartment, right, and included a line saying the 480-square foot rental unit was “Well suited for professional adults” and “Perfect for 1 or 2 professionals.” The Fair Housing Council took that to mean Bayden was discriminating against people with children - who would no doubt find a 480 square-foot unit perfect for them - figured he was jus another racist honky (there are so many!) and filed a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

The Department is really a non-profit, but it has judicial responsibilities and can adjudicate matters like this one. Let’s put it another way: They’re not responsible to anyone, and it shows:

Our research indicates that these nonprofits aren’t well funded, but they do have a way to make money: they’ve been granted special legal powers to seek money from the very people they accuse of discrimination. As one attorney told us, there’s nothing to stop these agencies from effectively blackmailing landlords.

“They hold all the cards,” Bader said.

At the hearing in Los Angeles, Bader found himself before a couple of fair employment staffers. The council wasn’t even represented. The bureaucrats told Bader they had investigated and found that Bader does not discriminate… BUT the ads were still a problem.

The complaint would be dropped — if Bader paid the Orange County council $4,000 and agreed to five years of classes at $250 a class.

There’s a word for that: blackmail. Bader refused and kept up the fight with a countersuit, thinking it was the right thing to do since the state had said he didn’t discriminate. No brainer, right? Wrong:

Last year, Orange County Superior Court Judge Andrew Banks dismissed Bader’s countersuit and said Bader would have to pay the department, the council and Pierson’s attorney’s fees.

Then, in the Fall, right before the trial on the Craiglist ads, the state dropped the suit. Two years after the initial complaint, all charges of discrimination were dropped. The case went away.

But by then Bader had spent quite a bit defending himself. Quite a bit. He asked the court to award him attorneys fees.

Nope. This month, Judge Banks denied his motion to have the department and council pay his legal bills. So now Bader is hurting. He’s already paid Pierson $7,500 in attorney’s fees. The council and the department haven’t asked for their money, but they could each ask for about $7,000. And Bader owes about $30,000 for his own defense.

So, Bader is on the hook for as much as $44,000. For a case that was dropped. Where the state already said he didn’t discriminate.

Judge Banks won’t talk about it, natch. And Bader? He says if he had it all to do over with, he’d forget about what’s right and just pay the blackmail.

“There’s nothing you can do. You have no ability to win this.”

Note: Should Obama succeed in imposing national healthcare on our country, there will be groups like the Department of Fair Employment and Housing with names like the Department for Healthcare Decisions that will be deciding whether you really deserve that pain medication or that heart transplant. If that day comes, remember Bader’s quote: There’s nothing you can do. You hae no ability to win this. Just curl up and die submissively.