The California Spotted Owl faces extinction unless logging is banned in forests in which “the small and declining owl population” may be found in California’s Sierra Nevadas and the mountains of Southern California.

So warns a petition submitted last week to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service demanding the agency add the bird to the list of federally protected “threatened” or “endangered” species.

The petition was jointly filed by little-known advocacy groups Wild Nature Institute, based in New Hampshire, and the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, which maintains a post office box in Big Bear City.

The groups not only oppose continued logging on the 10 million acres of government-owned timberland in the Golden State, but also the 9 million acres of privately-owned timberland.

Their anti-logging zeal even extends to timberland ravaged by forest fires, like the 150,000 acres in Stanislaus National Forest and 77,000 acres in Yosemite National Park that burned up in last year’s Rim Fire.

“Forest fire is not the threat people think it is,” said Wild Nature Institute co-founder Monica Bond, the self-described “biodiversity activist” who co-authored the petition seeking protected status for the California Spotted Owl.

Devastating

The timber industry represents a far greater threat to the California Spotted Owl, Bond insisted. Indeed, she lamented, “logging on public lands is rampant, and having a devastating effect on this species.”

Her view was seconded by Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, who joined Bond in co-authoring the petition to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Science is telling us loudly,” he said, “that this species is in danger of extinction.”

Others think the threat to the California Spotted Owl greatly exaggerated.

John Heil, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, said the agency has determined the California Spotted Owl is not in danger of extinction. The agency also believes wildfires, rather than logging, pose the greater threat to the owl’s natural habitat.

That’s why the Forest Service supports “salvage” logging in the charred Stanislaus National Forest. By removing the remains of the burned trees, the agency aims to create healthier forests – and owl habitat – going forward.

Environmental Defense Fund

The decision by the Forest Service has the backing of the Environmental Defense Fund, which boasts more than 1 million members. It parts ways with the Wild Nature Institute and the John Muir Project as to the best approach to post-fire recovery on the 400 square miles of public land consumed by the Rim Fire.

“Many in the environmental community instinctively approach recovery after disasters like this with a strategy of ‘letting nature heal itself,’” noted Eric Holst, senior director of EDF’s Working Lands Program, in a February blog post.

That approach would result in shrubs sprouting from stumps, which would be deleterious to seedling survival of conifers, particularly pine trees.

The pines “are incredibly valuable for Sierra wildlife,” Holst blogged. And in the wake of the Rim Fire, he argued, nature actually “makes it much harder for tree populations in areas impacted by the (fire) to rebound.”

That’s why loggers salvaging dead burned trees in the Sierras are doing a service to the California Spotted Owl population.

On the day before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Labor issued its weekly report on new unemployment claims. While 45 states reported declines, California was one of five states to report an increase.

California claims rose by 11,794. To put that figure into perspective, it was more than 2,500 percent higher than that of Massachusetts, the state with the second-biggest increase in weekly jobless claims.

The reality is the California job market is still not where it should be as the state enters the sixth year of its recovery from the Great Recession.

Below potential

In September, the UCLA Anderson Forecast issued a report in which it declared “the state remains below its potential in output and employment.” Jerry Nickelsburg, Anderson’s chief economist, estimated California was “about 1 million jobs shy” of where it would be were its economic recovery not so “painfully plodding.”

This week’s Department of Labor report on jobless claims provides a clue as to why California’s job creation is not nearly as robust as it should be; and why its 7.2 percent unemployment rate is tied for second-highest among the 50 states. It reported, “Layoffs in the service industry.”

Indeed, the restaurant industry, California’s second-largest private employer, has been besieged in 2014 by the Service Employees International Union, which has orchestrated fast-food “strikes” in cities throughout the state, demanding owners of such restaurants as McDonald’s, KFC and Taco Bell pay their workers $15 an hour, $6 more than the state minimum wage.

On another front, the state’s hotel industry, which generates $7.6 billion a year in state and local tax revenues, faces growing calls by groups like the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy to pay workers a so-called “living wage.” LAANE actually was successful this past October, when it mau-maued L.A.’s  City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti to approve an ordinance mandating an hourly wage of $15.37 for hotels with 300 rooms or more.

Both SEIU and LAANE contend that increasing by as much as 66 percent the wages of lower-skilled, less-educated fast-food and hotel workers will have no effect whatsoever on employment within those service industries.

In fact, a paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests the SEIU’s so-called Fight for 15 campaign will prove disastrous to the very workers it is supposed to uplift.

In their rigorously researched paper, co-authors Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither, UC San Diego economics professors, found “increases in the minimum wage significantly reduced the employment of low-skilled workers” and “significantly reduced the likelihood that low-skilled workers rose to what we characterize as lower middle class earnings.”

Extreme minimum wage increase

Similarly, a study this past June authored by John W. O’Neill, director of Penn State University’s School of Hospitality Management, concluded L.A.’s “extreme minimum wage increase” will result in job losses for 1,207 hotel food and beverage workers, as well as 187 housekeepers.

O’Neill also estimated a negative economic impact on California’s largest city of $255.4 million a year, not only from the job losses, but from reduced guest room revenues, reduced food and beverage revenue and lower hotel occupancy taxes, among other costs to the L.A. economy.

The layoffs in California’s service industry confirmed the U.S. Labor Department’s weekly report on unemployment claims may very well be a harbinger of things to come in 2015.

“This is very good news for the people of Southern California.” So said Erich Pica, president of the outspoken environmental group Friends of the Earth, celebrating in June 2013 the announced closure of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

A year and a half later, the people of Southern California are to be forgiven for thinking the decommissioning of San Onofre anything but very good news. That’s because it will cost them $3.3 billion in higher electricity rates under a settlement approved recently by the California Public Utilities Commission.

And here’s what most business and residential customers of Southern California Edison, San Onofre’s majority owner, and San Diego Gas & Electric, the nuclear plant’s minority owner, don’t know. Friends of the Earth in April this year joined the settlement with Edison and SDG&E that will saddle the utilities’ ratepayers with 75 percent of the total $4.4 billion cost of mothballing San Onofre, with Edison and SDGE shareholders footing the other 25 percent.

That’s not the result Friends of the Earth suggested to Edison and SDG&E ratepayers when they began their campaign in 2012 to Mau-Mau the utilities into decommissioning the nuclear plant.

Indeed, in Jan. 2012, a small radiation leak in one of San Onofre’s twin reactors prompted a temporary shutdown of the plant, during which it was discovered there had been certain wear and tear on tubing within the newly installed steam generators made by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Alarmist

Edison eventually repaired the problems and sought the permission of federal regulators to restart the nuclear plant. But Friends of the Earth insisted San Onofre was inherently unsafe, that it posed “a unique threat to 8 million Californians living within 50 miles” of the nuclear plant just south of San Clemente, and that it should be permanently shut down.

Friends of the Earth’s alarmist campaign ultimately succeeded. San Onofre sat idle for 16 month, costing Edison more than $550 million in repairs and loss of plant revenue.

In October 2012, the anti-nuke activist group argued that “continued operation of San Onofre is not cost effective.”

Edison agreed, with continued uncertainty as to if and when federal regulators would allow San Onofre to start producing electricity again, the utility decided to decommission the plant.

‘Victory!’

Friends of the Earth declared “Victory!” on its Facebook page, hailing Edison’s capitulation.

FOE suggested that the 2,200 megawatts San Onofre generated when fully operational – which accounted for roughly 20 percent of Edison’s total electricity production – could easily be replaced by a solar power and wind energy. It linked to a statement from Pica:

“We have long said that these reactors are too dangerous to operate and now Edison has agreed. The people of California now have the opportunity to move away from the failed promise of dirty and dangerous nuclear power and replace it with the safe and clean energy provided by the sun and the wind.”

But that hasn’t happened yet.

More, as CalWatchdog.com has reported, there often is a delay between when daytime solar power ramps down and evening wind power ramps up. That delay forces the electricity companies to buy costly natural-gas generated electricity on the spot market – another shock to ratepayers. That problem didn’t occur with San Onofre’s electricity because generation was continuous.

FOE also suggested the cost of San Onofre’s permanent shutdown wouldn’t be felt by customers of Edison and SDG&E.

The people of Southern California now know the shocking truth: They were misled to the tune of $3.3 billion in higher electricity rates, plus higher rates during the solar-wind power transition.

“Here we go again with the same nightmare as a year ago. [I’m] truly fed up with Covered California’s technical incompetency.” So complained Igal Koiman, a health insurance broker, in remarks published this week in the Sacramento Business Journal.

His frustrations echo those of many other brokers throughout the state who fear the Covered California website will be no less glitch-ridden on Nov. 15, when open enrollment begins this year, than it was 19 months ago, when the state’s online Obamacare health exchange stumbled out of the starting gate.

Koiman related that, for the past two weeks, he has been unable to update plans for his established clients. When he contacted Covered California for help, he received an email reply informing him, “We do not currently have an ETA as to when this enrollment error will be corrected.”

These are the kind of system failures that have persistently plagued CoveredCA.com since its rollout. Indeed, the website has crashed numerous times, not just for hours, but for several days.

The Covered California website was developed by the consulting firm Accenture, which in 2012 received a $359 million state contract to not only build the site, but to operate it during its first three-and-a-half years. Meanwhile, Accenture brought on CGI Federal as a subcontractor for CoveredCA.com.

Both firms have recent troubling track records.

Accenture in 2011 paid $63.6 million to settle a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit charging the firm received kickbacks for its recommendations of specific hardware and software to the federal government, fraudulently inflated prices and rigged bids on federal IT contracts.

Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said of the lawsuit:

“Kickbacks and bid rigging undermine the integrity of the federal procurement process. At a time when we’re looking for ways to reduce our public spending, it is especially important to ensure that government contractors play by the rules and don’t waste precious taxpayer dollars.”

And Christopher R. Thyer, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, said:

“We strive each and every day to bring justice to the citizens of the Eastern District of Arkansas. … Fraudulent business practices that steal hard earned and much needed tax dollars from appropriate use will not be tolerated. The United States Attorney’s Office is committed to pursuing these cases to the full extent of the law.”

Subsidiary

CGI Federal is a subsidiary of the Montreal-based CGI Group, which in 2012 was fired by the provincial government in Ontario after the IT firm failed to fulfill its contract to build an online medical registry for the province’s diabetes patients.

According to the Washington Examiner:

“In Canada, eHealth, the Ontario provincial agency, scrapped its high-profile online medical registry for diabetes sufferers and treatment providers, and canceled CGI Group’s $46.2 million contract, on Sept. 5, 2012. The company was 14 months behind schedule when it was given notice of termination by the Ontario government agency.

“In the meantime, a group of other Ontario IT companies successfully replicated the registry, rendering CGI’s project obsolete.

“Because the contract terms stipulated payment only upon delivery of a satisfactory final product, the province has refused to pay CGI.

“CGI has not publicly discussed the eHealth failure, but has taken legal action, including filing a defamation suit against eHealth and the Toronto Star newspaper.

“CGI has received bipartisan condemnation from Ontario government officials for its failure on the registry.

“’They did not meet the requirements of their contract which was faced with many layers of delays, which caused great angst among the health care providers who are trying to do their best,’ Frances Gélinas, a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, told the Washington Examiner.

“’They basically said, “This is not working.” CGI is not delivering what we need,’ Gélinas said. Gélinas also serves as a health policy spokeswoman for the NDP, an opposition Canadian political party.”

Tterminated

In January, CGI’s U.S. contract to build and maintain HealthCare.gov, the federal Obamacare website, was terminated in the wake of the site’s disastrous rollout. The firm the Obama administration chose to pick up where CGI Federal left off was none other than Accenture.

The partnership of Accenture and CGI Federal on the Covered California website does not inspire confidence that the online portal will be good to go a mere two weeks from now.

The more likely scenario is that the persistent glitches that afflicted CoveredCA.com during its first year of operation, that caused repeated shutdowns of the state-run Obamacare exchange, will continue apace in year two.

The franchise market in California, a keystone of small business in the state, soon could change radically.

The California Legislature last Thursday sent a bill to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that would effectively supersede the contractual agreements between California-based franchises and such national franchisors as Subway, Supercuts, 7-Eleven, Jiffy Lube, RE/MAX, H&R Block, Holiday Inn and The UPS Store.

The measure, Senate Bill 610, was carried by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara. It barely advanced beyond on the Assembly floor early last week before winning passage on the state Senate floor, when putative moderate Democrats backed the so-called California Franchise Relations Act after initially withholding their support.

Jackson maintained her bill will “level the playing field” between the state’s more than 80,000 “small-business” franchisees and the “giant, often out-of-state corporations” that oversee them.

“Current law allows these corporations to put these small franchisees out of business for even the most minor and arbitrary violations,” said Jackson. “This bill would put these small business owners on a more equal legal footing and protect them from unfair actions that take away their livelihood.”

The International Franchise Association suggested that the Santa Barbara lawmaker has ulterior motives; that she has not suddenly become a champion of California’s small business owners “working hard to live the American dream,” as she put it.

IFA President and CEO Steve Caldeira accused Jackson of doing the bidding of organized labor; in particular, the Service Employees International Union, which, he said, has waged “a blatant misinformation campaign against our industry.”

Indeed, the SEIU has not previously stood in solidarity with the American Association of Franchisees and Dealers, based in Palm Desert, which represents small business franchise owners, almost none of which are unionized. Yet the two natural adversaries joined together in support of the Franchise Relations Act.

Franchisees

That’s because AAFD represents disgruntled franchisees who don’t like the terms of the contracts they signed with Subway, Supercuts, 7-Eleven, Jiffy Lube, RE/MAX, H&R Block, Holiday Inn, The UPS Store or other such corporate franchisors.

And SEIU is hoping that its support for SB610 will engender such goodwill with small business franchisees – particularly in the fast food industry – they will happily allow SEIU to unionize their employees.

IFA CEO Caleira warned that, if Brown signs the FRA into law, it will be but a Pyrrhic victory for the AAFD and California’s small business franchisees.

“Without question,” he said, it will “shift franchise brands to more company-owned stores, thereby taking away ownership opportunities for both existing and prospective entrepreneurs in the state and would severely hinder franchise small business growth throughout California.”

The parent corporations cannot be forced to give out franchises. And if regulations become too onerous, it’s possible the corporations will just run things themselves, or simply shut down operations in some areas.

For example, according to Entrepreneur magazine, in 2014 7-Eleven has 44,400 franchises globally, of which 489 are company-owned. Each franchise is for 10 years. So if the franchise situation in California changes in favor of direct ownership by the corporation, the parent firm, although unlikely to do so, potentially could take over all franchises within a decade. Or it even could shutter them, pulling out of the state entirely.

Douglas Coe, an engineer under the employ of the California Department of Transportation, spent years working on the retrofit of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.

When the 25-year Caltrans veteran told his supervisors there were cracks in thousands of welds made at a Shanghai factory, and the quality-control firm that was supposed to have conducted inspections of the factory had not properly done so, he was taken off the Bay Bridge project.

In an appearance last week before the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, the Caltrans official who dismissed Coe told lawmakers that he decided the engineer could “no longer operate as a member of the team.”

But there was no attempt to squelch Coe’s warnings about the defective welds and related issues concerning the Bay Bridge project, insisted Tony Anziano. Anziano was the project manager for the eastern span retrofit who kicked Coe off the team, reassigning the engineer to a bridge project in the Contra Costa County city of Antioch.

Meanwhile, Brian Kelly, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, told committee members that accusations against Caltrans officials overseeing the bridge date back six years – three years before he assumed the agency’s top job.

Yet, not until recently, Kelly confirmed, has he gotten around to ordering an investigation to ascertain whether Anziano and other Caltrans officials retaliated against Coe and other engineers who blew the whistle on shoddy work on the $6.4 billion bridge retrofit.

Aside from being well overdue, the investigation initiated by Kelly is problematic because the CalSTA secretary delegated it to the California Highway Patrol, which is a branch of CalSTA, along with Caltrans.

Conflict of interest

Kelly apparently does not see a conflict of interest in having CHP investigate Anziano and other Caltrans officials that oversaw the Bay Bridge. But the conflict is obvious from Kelly’s decision at the investigation’s outset that it would be administrative, rather than criminal.

If an investigatory body independent of Caltrans were tasked with looking into charges of retaliation against Coe and other whistleblowers on the Bay Bridge project, it almost certainly wouldn’t rule out criminal charges before it had even interviewed the first witness.

Especially when there are allegations that Caltrans officials overseeing the retrofit of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span violated California’s Public Records Act by covering up evidence of shoddy work.

Indeed, Coe told an investigator retained by the transportation and housing committee that Anziano told him “not to record his concerns in writing, either on paper or email, but rather to communicate orally” so the concerns would not be found out under a public records request.

The investigator concluded that as many as nine engineers, including Coe, were either fired, demoted or reassigned (as Coe was) to quiet their criticism of the Bay Bridge Project.

Following last week’s hearing, Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty told reporters he had seen no evidence of “criminal activity.”

Nevertheless, Senate Transportation and Housing Committee Chairman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said he will turn over the committee’s findings to state and federal prosecutors and let them determine if there has been an criminal wrongdoing by Caltrans managers or officials.

Eduardo Benard, a custodian at San Francisco’s Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School, received $107,912.31 in pay and benefits in 2013.

He was one of 31 custodians employed by California public schools that boasted more than $100,000 in compensation last year, according to just-release figures revealed on Transparent California, a database maintained by the nonpartisan California Policy Center.

The handsome compensation packages enjoyed by Benard and the other six-figure custodians almost certainly aren’t what California voters had in mind when they approved Proposition 30 two years ago.

The measure, championed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democratic-controlled Legislature, and bankrolled by such special interests as the California Teachers Association and SEIU/California State Council of Service Employees, imposed $7 billion in new taxes for seven years, 89 percent of which was supposed to reach the state’s K-12 classrooms.

But Prop. 30 has proven a bait-and-switch. Indeed, 80 percent of the Prop. 30 money the state has collected has gone to salaries and benefits of public school employees, according to the state Controller’s Office.

$763,000 compensation

That includes Jose Fernandez, who left his post this month as superintendent of the Centinela Valley School District after revelations by the Daily Breeze in Torrance that he received more than $763,000 in total compensation last year.

And if that was not excessive enough for the superintendent of one of the state’s smaller school districts, Fernandez’s contract with the school district entitled him to a 9 percent annual raise. It also allowed him to secure a $910,000 low-interest loan from the district to purchase a home in Ladera Heights.

While none of California’s other public school superintendents was as extremely well compensated as Fernandez, they haven’t exactly been shortchanged by their school districts. Indeed, at least 100 superintendents received more than $250,000 in compensation last year.

Then there are the state’s unionized public teachers, who were portrayed during the Prop. 30 campaign as grossly underpaid.

The reality is that the average full-time teacher received nearly $85,000 in pay and benefits in 2013, according to Transparent California. And nearly 35,000 teachers received more than $100,000 in compensation.

Among the well-compensated unionized teachers are more than 1,000 “retired” instructors, the Los Angeles Times reported, who have taken advantage of a loophole that allows them to keep on teaching (and receiving a salary for doing so), while receiving their taxpayer-funded pensions at the same time.

These are the kind of abuses opponents of Prop. 30 foresaw in 2012. And in 2014 their fears have been realized.

An Air Force request for proposal (RFP) for the next generation stealth bomber is about to hit the street. The contract is worth an estimated $55 billion.

Aerospace giants Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman – both of which have a major presence here in California – are in a dog fight for the federal contract. Lockheed Martin is teaming up with Boeing, which also has major operations in the Golden State.

However, the Legislature last week voted to grant Lockheed Martin a $420 million tax break to sweeten its bid to build 80 to 100 of the state-of-the-art long-range bombers.

“This tax credit is exactly what the aerospace industry needs to remain competitive for the next decade,” said Assemblyman Steve Fox, D-Palmdale, author of Assembly Bill 2389, which created the Aerospace Industry Tax Credit.

But Northrop Grumman, which was headquartered in Los Angeles until 2011 (when it moved to Northern Virginia), which remains the Golden State’s largest aerospace employer, strenuously disagreed with Fox.

The defense contractor said it was “extremely disappointed” the legislation fast-tracked by Fox and his fellow lawmakers to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk – “a jam job,” Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, criticized –  “favors only one aerospace company.”

Fox maintains the Legislature’s $420 million tax break to Lockheed Martin “will create and retain aerospace jobs in California.”

Indeed, the Bethesda, Maryland-headquartered Fortune 500 company said the gift from Sacramento will result in 1,100 California jobs (provided, of course, that it outbids Lockheed Martin). Some 750 of those jobs would be created, while 350 existing California jobs would be retained.

Even without a state tax break, said Tom Vice, president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Services, his company would create 1,500 new jobs in Palmdale if it wins the Air Force contract.

Underbid

However, it is unlikely Northrop Grumman can beat out its competition when the $420 million its rival Lockheed Martin was gifted by from Legislature enables Lockheed Martin to underbid Northrop Grumman.

Meanwhile, the Legislature has tacitly acknowledged its unwise decision to favor one aerospace company over the other. Fox and his fellow lawmakers assured Northrop Grumman they will consider a tax break for the company as soon as they return to Sacramento from their summer recess.

Lawmakers can debate the prudence of bestowing as much as $840 million in tax subsidies to two of the nation’s largest aerospace companies to bid on an Air Force contract.

But all can agree that, if the state is going to award tax credits, it should not pick winners and losers among competing companies.

Expense

The proposed bomber has been criticized for its high cost, as much as $550 million per plane before the usual cost overruns. DoD Buzz.com reported in April:

“The figure refers to the estimated unit production cost of the Long-Range Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, and doesn’t include research and development expenses, which are likely to be significant. [Undersecretary of the Air Force Eric] Fanning declined to specify what the latter might be, only that they wouldn’t ‘double’ the overall cost of the plane.”

So the Air Force admits the final cost could soar to $1 billion per copy.

It’s possible the new bomber could be canceled in favor of keeping the aging B-2 Spirit, which first became operational in 1997. In June, the B-2 was granted funds for upgrades to keep it flying until 2058.

And in May, the even older B-52 bombers, which flew their first missions in 1957, were given their first new communications system since the 1960s.

“Boom!” read the signs carried by some of the five dozen or so protesters who raised a ruckus Saturday outside the Kinder Morgan rail yard in the Contra Costa County city of Richmond.

The aim of the environmental and community activists is to stop further rail shipments of crude oil extracted from North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield to refineries in Richmond and other California cities. They claim Bakken crude is highly flammable and explosive.

They point to an accident last year in Lac-Megantic, Quebec that occurred when an unattended freight train – which happened to be carrying Bakken crude – derailed and caught fire, resulting in the tragic deaths of 47 people.

Andres Soto, an organizer for Communities for a Better Environment, suggested it is only a matter of time before a similar tragedy occurs near one of the cities along the rail line on which the Bakken crude is shipped.

“What’s really scary,” he told the Oakland Tribune, “is on the other side of these ‘bomb trains’ are schools and houses.”

Ethanol

Yet, neither Soto nor any other of the demonstrators outside the Kinder Morgan rail yard expressed similar concern about rail shipments of other potential hazardous fuels, like ethanol, which is used as an oxygenate in gasoline sold in California.

In fact, there have been, over the past years, at least a half-dozen train derailments around the country that resulted in fiery explosions fueled by corn-based ethanol. That includes the derailment of freight train four years ago that was traveling from Barstow to Stockton. A tanker car carrying ethanol burst into flames, creating a toxic cloud.

No one is suggesting that California regulators ban ethanol-by-rail shipments. But environmental groups and community activists are demanding that the state ban crude-by-rail. They dismiss recent lab tests of Bakken crude (tapped from Marathon Petroleum’s Capline Pipeline) suggesting that the fuel source is not nearly as dangerous as they have represented.

For at least some of those determined to stop crude-by-rail shipments to the Golden State, Bakken is just a convenient target. They would just as soon ban oil use in California whether Bakken or another rude, whether it’s shipped by rail, pipeline or tanker.

Indeed, said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction, which helped organize Saturday’s demonstration at Kinder Morgan’s rail yard, “Crude oil should stay in the ground.”

And if demonstrations don’t work, opponents of crude-by-rail will rely on the courts. In fact, a host of activist groups – the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council, Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Communities for a Better Environment – filed suit against the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for issuing Kinder Morgan a permit to transfer crude oil from rail cars to trucks.

They are asking that Kinder Morgan’s BAAQMD permit be voided and its crude oil operations be suspended pending a full review under the California Environmental Quality Act. A hearing will be held July 18 in San Francisco Superior Court.

The scene brought to mind Tom Wolfe’s essay “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers,” which was published all the way back in 1970, when young Jerry Brown was a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

Wolfe’s non-fiction essay was set at San Francisco’s Office of Economic Activity, where government functionaries – flak catchers – kowtowed to community activist types issuing one demand or another.

Fast forward to the recent meet-up of the University of California’s Board of Regents at the Sacramento Convention Center.

Outside the meeting room, a few dozen student activists from a group that calls itself Fossil Free UC noisily demanded that the regents – latter day flak catchers – divest the system’s $7.7 billion general endowment fund of fossil fuel investments.

The regents responded to being mau maued by Fossil Free UC’s student activists by expressing empathy with the group’s cause, which regent Norman Pattiz declared “valid.”

Regent Jerry Brown, now the governor of course, went so far as to say he was amendable to “some targeted disinvestment” in fossil fuels, with coal being at the top of the hit list.

Indeed, Brown and his fellow regents tasked managers of the UC endowment fund to prepare an analysis by July of the financial consequences of dumping the fund’s coal equities. Depending on the findings, the regents could act at their September board meeting in San Francisco.

‘Excited’

Fossil Free UC’s organizer, UC Berkeley student activist Ophir Bruck, said his group is “excited about” the prospect that the regents will vote to disinvest in coal. However, he added, the ultimate goal is complete disinvestment in fossil fuels. Or, as the group’s website states, “to remove the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate.”

This is a common meme among disinvestment groups. For example, urges We Are Power Shift, a climate-change group, “Divestment is an opportunity to expose the real financial liability of investing in a company, country, or industry, and to remove the financial support that enables that them to operate according to business as usual.”

However, the global reality is that fossil fuels are as vital as ever. China and Russia just signed a $400 billion natural gas deal. And since 2010 China, not the Unites States, has been the world’s largest manufacturing economy, a position it keeps expanding. Anything done by the UC Regents might only free resources to be used by China.

Regents

It remains to be seen if the UC regents bow to Fossil Free UC’s demands. According to UC reports, the school’s general endowment has holdings in 67 of the 2,000 largest fossil-fuel reserve firms. If the endowment sold off all those holdings, it almost certainly would incur substantial losses.

As UC regents consider whether to disinvest in fossil fuels, they should consider the last time they made a politically-driven investment decision. It was in 2001, when they voted to sell all of UC’s tobacco-related holdings. As a result of the regents’ decision, UC lost a whopping $500 million in potential gains between 2001 and 2012.

UC can hardly afford to repeat that expensive mistake when it comes to fossil fuels. But if that does happen, the ultimate victims could be the students, who might face higher tuition or, for poor students, a reduction in scholarships.