Will Our Elected Representatives Set Policy or Abdicate That Role to a State Agency?
Promoted as a monumental model for the rest of the world, the new climate change legislative and regulatory proposals under consideration now in Sacramento are being heralded as a way to transform global policy. Combined, SB 32 and SB 350 would establish the state’s energy and climate change policy for decades to come. Unfortunately, the […]
What Amnesiac California Needs Is a Museum of the Great Recession
Californians are bad at remembering things, especially about California. Our memories are so gone that our politicians, from Gov. Brown on down, can’t stop reminding us that only just a few years ago, we were in a recession and a budget crisis. So now—even with housing prices soaring, unemployment under 7 percent, and the state […]
Will Prop 13 “Reformers” Go After Homeowners?
Some of California’s politically powerful public-sector unions are gearing up for a 2016 ballot initiative that would “reform” Proposition 13 and get rid of its so-called tax “loopholes” to promote fairness. Their goal is to hike business property taxes by $9 billion a year by eliminating the limitations imposed by that groundbreaking initiative. And the latest evidence […]
Green Pope Goes Medieval on Planet
Some future historian, searching for the origins of a second Middle Ages, might fix on the summer of 2015 as its starting point. Here occurred the marriage of seemingly irreconcilable world views—that of the Catholic Church and official science—into one new green faith. As Pope Francis has embraced the direst notions of climate change, one […]