Free Republic

Extraordinarily smart people at the California Air Resources Board have taken to using the term "leakage" as they go about devising the experimental cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases. Homer Perez, head boiler mechanic at Pacific Coast Producers' tomato cannery off East Main Street in Woodland, might use a word that is more familiar to the rest of us: "layoff." The cannery has been operating under one owner or another since the 1920s. A cooperative of 16 growers in Yolo, Solano and Sutter counties owns it now. Perez has worked there for 28 of the past 29 years....

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

When Carbonite Inc. stock took a quick plunge this week, there was an obvious consensus about what caused the move: The company pulled advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s talk-radio program after the controversial host made inflammatory remarks about a Georgetown University law student. Yes, the market could have feared that Limbaugh’s fans would cancel Carbonite’s service, an online back-up solution for consumers and businesses, or mount their own boycott. Or maybe investors assumed Carbonite (US:CARB) will suffer because it will no longer have access to Limbaugh’s audience. Or it could be that investors saw in the release of the company’s Form...

Here’s a mind-boggling explanation of how the state government, setting out to manipulate private manufacturers into making electric cars, gets so tangled up in its special treatment for special constituents that its bureaucratic web ends up working against itself. The California Air Resources Board, second only to the federal EPA in government heavy-handedness, adopted rules ostensibly to cut down on smog and, of course, global warming. Tucked into the folds of this bureaucratic diktat is a provision that some call “a loophole.” Yes, we’re as shocked as you to find that the dictatorial among us would allow for exceptions to...

Green Politics: Golden State regulators have passed sweeping emission standards requiring one in seven new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. What can go wrong? Plenty, for if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that industrial policy and telling consumers what they need and must have vs. what they want and find useful doesn't work. Only the marketplace can accurately pick winners and losers. The government, having no competition, usually picks losers. We have also learned that climate change is an overhyped fantasy based on ideology rather than science. Yet the...

California continues its leading role as the national laughingstock of regulatory absurdity. This week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), forged another link in its unbroken chain of disastrous environmental policies. New CARB regulations reflect a decision process heavily influenced by three primary sources: Joseph Stalin, Al Gore and Pee-Wee Herman. Let's look at the latest batch of lunacy from those swell 'crats in Sacramento. As an added bonus, we read from SFGATE, the reliable Left Coast mouthpiece that happily shills for the hard left Democratic mouth breathers. ".... the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved strict vehicle emissions regulations...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- California air regulators passed Friday sweeping auto emission standards that include a mandate to have 1.4 million electric and hybrid vehicles on state roads by 2025. The California Air Resources Board unanimously approved the new rules, which require that one-in-seven of new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. The plan also mandated a 75-percent reduction in smog-forming pollutants by 2025, and a 34 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over roughly the same time. Automakers worked with the board and federal regulators on the greenhouse gas mandates in...

Ow, that’s gotta hurt. CA’s 2006 Global Warming law – denied.Federal judge blocks California low-carbon fuels ruleChico Enterprise RecordFRESNO — A federal judge moved today to block California from enforcing its first-in-the-nation mandate for cleaner, low-carbon fuels, saying the rules favor biofuels produced in the state.The lawsuit challenging the state regulations, which were adopted as part of the state’s landmark 2006 global warming law, was filed in federal court last year by a coalition including the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association and the Consumer Energy Alliance. Fresno-based U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence O’Neill’s written ruling Thursday said the low-carbon fuel...

The state unveiled a new set of clean car regulations Wednesday that aim to sharply increase the number of electric cars on California's roads, boost fuel efficiency and reduce air pollution. The proposed rules largely parallel President Barack Obama's goal of doubling the nation's auto fuel economy standards for new cars from the current 27.3 mph to 54.5 mph by the year 2025. But the rules from the California Air Resources Board cast a wider net. In addition to setting fuel economy standards, they regulate the amount of smog-forming emissions for cars and set targets for the number of zero-emission...

The California Air Resources Board is now being investigated by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. On Wednesday, the committee chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Temecula, sent Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols a 13-page letter advising her that he was "expanding" the committee's ongoing investigation into the establishment of fuel economy standards. .. "Your refusal to subject yourself and your office to congressional scrutiny is emblematic of the core concern that many in Congress share...that CARB, as a state actor, is unresponsive to congressional concerns and unappreciative of congressional priorities," Issa wrote.

The sun shines on the beachfront mansions of Malibu and La Jolla, just as it does on Compton and Barrio Logan in San Diego. ... But based on how California policymakers dole out valuable subsidies for solar panels placed on the residential roofs, the poorest parts of our sunny state might as well be on the dark side of the moon. California is in the midst of by far the nation's most ambitious program to convert to solar energy, one that began in 2006 when then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that during the next decade, the state would place solar...

The Weather: Regulations finalized by the California Air Resources Board establish the nation's first state-run cap-and-trade regime. Despite Solyndra, the state will gather solar panels while it may. The 262 pages of regulations implementing California's 2006 global warming legislation, Assembly Bill 32, approved by CARB last Thursday, will probably reduce employment more than it reduces emissions. The only thing it will cap is economic growth by bleeding a patient that is already hemorrhaging red ink. Signed into law in 2006 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cap-and-trade regulations are intended to force California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels...

California became the first state to cap greenhouse gas emissions across its major industries Thursday when air regulators unanimously approved a plan to allow companies to sell pollution credits as a way to ratchet down heat-trapping gases. The state Air Resources Board took the action almost a year after a nearly identical plan was approved, then delayed by environmentalists who demanded the board consider taxing carbon as an alternative to the cap-and-trade strategy. By 2013, refineries, power plants and the rest of the state's top 600 industrial sources of greenhouse gases will have to cut emissions on average by 10...

A warming climate and an aging population will bring a rise in heat-related deaths over coming decades in California, a new, state-sponsored study says, with heat waves rising in dangerousness as well as frequency. “The frequency of heat waves is expected to go up, and it could be rather dramatic,” said Laurence Kalkstein, a co-author of the study at the University of Miami. The report used two climate models, three socio-economic scenarios and multiple projections of population levels to make a range of estimates. The range is meant to account for uncertainties in the rate of globalization, control of greenhouse...

When President Barack Obama announced an agreement to double fuel-economy requirements Friday, standing with him were industry executives and environmental, public health and labor leaders, all of whom, remarkably, had signed off on the deal. But the real credit for this historic achievement, which is expected to cut oil consumption by 1.5 million barrels per day and eliminate half of all carbon pollution nationwide, doesn't go to the White House. Instead, thank California. For decades the state has set the nation's clean-energy agenda; it's been the tip of the spear in the fight for higher fuel standards. Its huge automobile...

OAKLAND -- To the accompaniment of big rig cabs driving through downtown and honking their horns Tuesday afternoon, a handful of protesters gathered outside City Hall to say truckers are being unfairly treated despite their progress in reducing emissions. New state rules that took effect Jan. 1 required truckers hauling at California ports to either install expensive filters (estimated by protesters at $15,000 to $25,000 per vehicle) or upgrade their trucks to models from 2004 or newer. After speaking to a small crowd of onlookers outside City Hall, AB Trucking President Bill Aboudi said in an interview that a UC...

At a California Senate oversight hearing yesterday called by Senator Pavley, a joint author of the state's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), Air Resources Board Chairman Nichols reaffirmed her agency's commitment to proceed with implementation of a robust package of clean energy policies backed up with a cap-and-trade program to cut the state's emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Chairman Nichols also announced a major new addition to the AB 32 package - CARB will require that major industrial facilities in California, such as refineries and cement plants, implement cost-effective reduction measures that will provide significant greenhouse...

The state can go ahead with its plans to cap carbon emissions by California's largest refiners, utilities and other industrial companies, under a ruling by a state appellate court on Friday. The 1st District Court of Appeals in San Francisco overruled a lower court ruling in May that ordered the California Air Resources Board to halt all work on its cap and trade program. The cap and trade program was set to begin operating in January and ARB officials had been working to develop the program's enforcement rules, oversight procedures and reporting requirements for heavy polluters.

More than half of oceangoing vessels serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have been skirting traditional shipping lanes to avoid air pollution curbs, prompting California officials Thursday to extend the state's clean-fuel zone beyond the Channel Islands. The unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board came after strong protests from the U.S. Navy that the jump in commercial ship traffic across the Point Mugu Sea Range was "seriously jeopardizing successful completion of vital Department of Defense testing and training missions." California's clean-fuel zone, which took effect in July 2009, is the toughest ship pollution rule in...

On the heels of a scathing critique by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Wednesday, President Obama faced pressure from a burgeoning environmental justice coalition demanding stronger action on ozone, a component of smog, in predominantly Latino communities. Fourteen groups sent a letter to Obama expressing dismay at missed opportunities and delays in bringing permissible ozone levels down to between 60 and 70 parts per billion: The EPA estimates that the strongest standard of 60 parts per billion would avoid as many as 12,000 deaths and 58,000 asthma attacks per year. Implementing a weaker standard would mean more lives lost...