Quite ambitious, especially considering that California itself is one of the world’s largest economies. Expect swift and furious blowback from Koch et al…
Ambitious and also doable and needed. The idea that going clean is hard is one of the ways energy companies prevent people from doing it, even though when you look at the total cost its really cheaper now to go green.
Strange, considering I just received an email stating that BLM is proposing opening up 1.6 million acres of California public lands to drilling and fracking, including two parcels that abut my high school in Ojai Valley. This shit has to stop.
Democratic Sen. Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat
So, we’ve established that de Leon is a Dem.
who is running for U.S. Senate against Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
What’s the story there? Why do we have a Dem running against another Dem in what I assume is the general (i.e. not a primary)? How is this good? In the Senate, seniority is a vital factor in committee assignments.
Result of the jungle primary, where the top two finishers were de Leon and Feinstein. It sounds like de Leon is going to run to the left of Feinstein and that’s just fine by me. Usually the second Dem in these situations is forced to run as a Republican-lite. If that makes GOP voters just stay home, that’s even better.
By far the best, most consequential news of recent weeks. This should be a standard goal for pretty much every state.
California now uses a jungle primary, so we can have two Democrats or two Republicans facing off in the general election. In the case of de Leon, there are a lot of liberals in California who are upset that Feinstein is too far to the right and thing we should be able to get somebody more liberal.
I’m sure the Republicans on the Hill and the Troglodytes in the White House can enact some legislation that forces California to burn coal. Federal preemption to the rescue.
ETA: The Sun Protection Act of 2018. You heard it here first.
Check my post above. You’re right.
There have been numerous fires in California this year and last. My wife and I were chased out of our home by a fire in northern California last October. Our home survived but on the night we left, our house had fires on three sides visible in the distance. Four friends lost homes. Over 5,200 homes were burned down within about a 10 mile radius of where we live (the last major fire was over 50 years earlier). In December of last year, the last home my parents lived in (down in S. Cal.) received severe smoke damage. Eventually, the house was torn down. Add numerous incidents around the world that are far from normal, and it’s clear that global warming is not something anyone can afford to put off dealing with. There are signs noticed by numerous scientists that suggest global warming may be happening faster and more aggressively than we realized.
The irony is that there are solutions. Clean energy like solar and wind are far more efficient than most people realize. And costs have been falling rapidly in the last ten years. Those costs will continue to fall. Now the cost of batteries are falling. Other solutions are coming online. In California, it is not economically smart to continue with business as usual. The same is true of the rest of the United States. Understandably, however, California is one of those places where the urgency is clearly felt.
Meanwhile, Florence hit all that nice, toasty bathwater in the mid-Atlantic and went from a Cat 2 to a Cat 4 in all of seven hours. Helene is behaving much the same way, though it, thankfully, looks like it’s going to head north over open ocean.
Remarkably potent Chinese hoax.
I’d love to see Jerry Brown as President of the USA.
He would have loved to have seen that too… in 1992.
He’s pushing 80 these days and has no interest in making a go of it. I love the guy and wish he could be around forever too.
We have scads of younger and totally awesome pols coming out of California these days, and Jerry Brown is rightfully and reasonably developing policy anticipating that Dems will continue to govern the state properly.
Well, the oil companies always complain the special gas mix required in CA is the reason prices are always 30-40% higher than the rest of the country, so how about we remove that profit margin… I mean burden, off the oil producers?
Well, you know… right now there’s technically a Right to Shelter in this country. It’s not exactly one of those well-publicized things, but it’s there(1). Part of “shelter” in most parts of the United States includes things like adhering to safety codes, which means electricity. In addition, the language guaranteeing that right includes food, medical care, and security, all of which are enabled via power utilities.
There’s a case to be made that the power grid should be subsidized, and rates negotiated with the state, not passed along to individuals.
- Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a funny thing, what you can find when you start putting things together. Like the Right to Privacy. Where is it, some ask? Well… it’s right there in Article 12. Which, after all, comes with this proviso in the preamble:
And, of course, Article 30:
“Well, that’s ok,” you might think, “But it’s just the UN. It’s not actually law.” Except, of course, that the US signed and ratified the United Nations’ Charter as an international treaty. And what does the Constitution have to say about that?
We could, at the cost of 700 additional deaths per year. The CA formulation cuts ozone much more than the Federal formula does.
As a Californian, I am very proud of our Governor and Legislature today.
A Dem running against a Dem has happened before. Kamala Harris ran against Loretta Sanchez in 2016 for the seat Barbara Boxer vacated.
Harris and Sanchez emerged from a 34-candidate primary field to challenge for California’s first open U.S. Senate seat in nearly a quarter-century. But the race was never close, despite Sanchez’s two decades of congressional experience representing a comparatively moderate Orange County district. Harris held a double-digit lead in nearly every public poll since she entered the race, and had a massive fundraising advantage despite heavy early spending.
But on Brown’s initiative, there’s this from SF Chronicle. He’s going where “a do nothing president” won’t go.
Pretty stoked about this. The timing of next week’s Global Climate Summit made it rather likely he’d be signing DeLeon’s bill. We can’t (haven’t) foresee the cost reductions and technological advances that will be coming in the next 25 years.