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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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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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f you’re not interested in buying that bridge in Brooklyn, perhaps I could interest you in some stark, middle-of-nowhere desert land that’s ideal for the energy of tomorrow – solar! Yes, friends, imagine this dreary wasteland glimmering with solar panels as far as the eye can see! And what else glitters, friends? Gold! Yes, there’s gold to be made buying up desert land for the inevitable solar revolution! Step right up!

Er, before you whip out that checkbook, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Greenie, who loves alternative energy – unless, of course, someone proposes to actually build an alternative energy facility anywhere. As the amazingly appropriately named Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club in Phoenix told the Phoenix Business Journal:

We are very supportive of a mix of renewable generation. But we’re not in favor of paving the desert with mirrors.

Here’s a story about environmentalists concerned about a desert solar plant’s impact on pupfish.  It’s all pretty frustrating, says the governor of CahLEEforNEEa in Capitalism Magazine:

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put it, “But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.” The answer, Governor, is nowhere, according to many environmentalists. A group called the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, discussing the plans for arrays in the desert, argues that this portends the “permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine public lands . . . [this is] wilderness killing.” Despite lip-service to human needs, protecting “pristine nature” is their goal, and “pristine nature” means nature undefiled by any human presence—even a footprint in the desert.

The NY Times succeeded in actually finding some desert residents who don’t like the idea of productive use of their woebegone climes:

But it is also home to the Mojave ground squirrel, the desert tortoise and the burrowing owl, and to human residents who describe themselves as desert survivors and who are unhappy about the proliferation of solar projects planned for their home turf.

“We’re tired of everyone looking at the desert like a wasteland,” said Donna Charpied, who lives with her husband, Larry, in Desert Center, Calif., where they have been farming jojoba, a native shrub cultivated for its oil, for 27 years. She is also the policy advocate for the Desert Communities Protection Campaign of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.

Wait a minute! Some desert rat is also an environmental justice radical who just happens to have a hotline to the NYT?  What are the chances?!  You got to hand it to those NYT reporters – if there’s a radical leftist to quote, they’ find ‘em, even in the remotest of places.  Don’t be deceived by that highfalutin’ “Desert Center” name – the hardscrabble place has a population of 125.

Even if you succeed in overcoming environmentalist opposition and get your incredibly difficult permits from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which will be watching out for every bush and bunny, you’ll still have to figure out how to get your power to anywhere, since Greenies are fighting the new power line corridors that would bring electricity to metropolitan areas from the desert.

But let’s say you get past that hurdle.  Now, let me introduce you to the rather formidable Diane Feinstein.

In a move that could pit usual allies — environmentalists and the solar and wind industries — against each other, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is preparing legislation that would permanently put hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land off limits to energy projects. The territory would be designated California’s newest national monument. …

“It’s frustrating. We really do have competing national priorities here,” said Paul Whitworth, whose San Diego-based LightSource Renewables hopes to put in a solar project on about 6,000 acres near Amboy. “We spent a lot of time researching the desert, and consulting with the BLM to make sure we didn’t apply on top of an area of critical environmental concern, or area with other issues. . . . Now, there’s uncertainty on whether these projects will go ahead.” [LA Times]

My advice?  Buy oil.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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