Cap-and-trade critics had always warned that as soon as programs were introduced, there would be aggressive efforts to game and/or cheat the rules to make money. With these warnings reinforced by the EU scandal, California officials in early 2013 said they’d learned their lesson. Greenbiz.com reported that …

California, with the advantage of advanced warning, has taken the EU market’s lessons to heart. It has recognized the crucial need to tightly control — and extensively oversee — who can participate in the carbon market and how. With the help of the state Attorney General’s office, California has adopted more stringent rules than the EU ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme].

State tax credits for payments to indigenous communities?

Now, however, the Brown administration is pondering relaxing these rules by allowing companies to get pollution credits by paying for preservation of forest lands in Brazil.

The idea has been discussed for years but has picked up momentum of late. According to recent reports, state regulators are closer than ever to formally expanding the cap-and-trade program by allowing polluting industries to offset their carbon emissions by paying indigenous communities in the Amazon to preserve the rain forests in their region. 

This idea has won praise from environmental groups, who have long depicted preservation of the rain forests in the Amazon delta as a global priority. They call it a great way for Brown to burnish his environmental legacy.

The Western States Petroleum Association has also been supportive, saying industries need options to meet their commitments under AB32 and related laws.

Brazil’s huge corruption scandal bodes poorly for CA program

But the initial coverage of Brown’s trial balloon omitted mention of two key issues: Gaming and cheating of cap-and-trade programs remains a huge problem around the world, and Brazil has both a long history of corruption and a lack of transparency.

In early 2015, Foreign Policy magazine reported how the European Union’s program had become a “playground for gangsters, international crime syndicates, and even two-bit crooks — who stole hundreds of millions of dollars in pollution credits.”

In October, Forbes magazine reported on a slew of new scandals, starting with schemers in Russia and Ukraine being accused of using the EU cap-and-trade market to sells counterfeit credits for 600 million tons worth of carbon dioxide emissions. The account noted that the less sophisticated a nation’s law-enforcement system, the more likely cap-and-trade scams were to be — and that some of the world’s richest people and companies were taking advantage.

“The cap-and-trade system of emissions trading is very difficult to control and its effects are diluted. … It is precisely because I am a market practitioner that I know the flaws in the system,” Forbes quoted financier-investor George Soros as saying.

Meanwhile, in January, Transparency International reported that over the previous year, Brazil’s corruption problems were growing worse at a faster rate than in any nation on the planet. Agence France Presse reported last week that a scandal involving billions of dollars of missing revenue from state oil giant Petrobras continued to grow, with dozens of government and business leaders implicated.

Efforts to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office have been complicated by the fact it is hard to find many credible critics of Rousseff within the Brazilian government, given how many prominent Brazilian politicians are either directly tied to the scandal or indirectly tied through close political alliances.

According to Calmatters, state air board officials said they would look to avoid problems caused by Western nations’ cap-and-trade programs in another tropical nation: Nigeria. But the issues there involved indigenous communities being denied use of forest lands they relied on because of restrictions under new conservation agreements — not necessarily the problems that California could risk if it counts on Brazil as a partner in a cap-and-trade pact. 

Kim got a more far-reaching law — known as Fair Chance — adopted in January 2014 on a unanimous vote of the San Francisco board. Here’s her description of the measure and its rationale in a fact sheet distributed by her office.

The Fair Chance ordinance would provide that certain affordable housing providers, private employers with 20 or more employees, and contractors doing business with the city and county of San Francisco, may not inquire into an individual’s conviction history until after the decision-maker has determined the individual’s qualifications meet the requirements for the position or housing unit and may not include such an inquiry in the initial application for employment or housing.

An estimated one in four adults has an arrest or conviction record, creating unnecessary and significant barriers to employment and/or housing. The U.S. Department of Justice generates over 1.7 million criminal background checks annually for employment and licensing purposes. Otherwise qualified individuals are often discouraged from applying for work in the public and private sectors and from applying for housing because of a conviction history inquiry on an initial job or housing application.

Many business groups have objected to such legislation on the grounds that criminal records are extremely pertinent in deciding whether to hire someone. But the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce backed Kim’s ordinance after months of internal debate.

Parallels with “right to be forgotten” concept

There is a chance the measure could backfire and create embarrassment for the city, as happened with its sanctuary city law this summer, if it results in the hiring of someone with a violent past who has a new incident on the job. But so far, no such problems have prompted headlines in San Francisco and other cities which have adopted similar “ban the box” rules in recent years, including Philadelphia, Newark, Seattle and Buffalo.

President Obama has also called for a more forgiving approach to people with criminal pasts, including providing felons the right to vote.

There are parallels in U.S. attempts to reintegrate felons and the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” 2014 court ruling allowing people to compel search engine providers to block search results that include unflattering items about their histories. Both are spurred by the idea that individuals should be able to reinvent themselves later in life after embarrassing mistakes made while young.

The vast majority of violent felonies in the U.S. are committed by men under 30, according to a Pennsylvania State University analysis which found crime most common among young men 15 to 24 years in age. This concentration of crime among young men is generally true in Europe and around the world as well, according to a 2014 United Nations report.

The European Union has had bans and various restrictions on genetically modified crops and foods for decades. But efforts to limit or more heavily regulate GMO foods in California have failed at the Legislature. And in 2012, voters rejected Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling of GMO foods.

This year, the Label GMOs organization couldn’t even find a legislative sponsor for a bill that would require the labeling of GMO food products by the Feb. 27 deadline for introduction of legislation. One of the group’s state directors told me that there was optimism a sponsor could be found in 2016.

However, that may be tough if state lawmakers understand they’re taking on what amounts to conventional wisdom among the scientific community. A Pew survey of scientists released in late January found that 88 percent believe genetically modified foods are safe. Vox explains why:

At this point, billions of people around the world have been eating GM foods for decades without any noticeable ill effects. And numerous scientific studies have concluded that the GM crops currently on the market pose no more of a health risk than conventional crops.

Europe’s anti-GMO consensus is no more

Further evidence that the anti-GMO movement has crested can be found in Europe. This is from The Economist in January:

Europe has long been defiantly GM-free. The Americas and most of Asia grows the stuff without fuss. But crops whose genes have been modified in some way may not (with a few exceptions) be grown in the European Union. Until now. On January 13th the European Parliament lifted the EU-wide ban, instead allowing national governments to impose their own restrictions. The plan has already been approved by governments, so the change should come into force this spring.

It will still not be a breakthrough for GMOs, as most European governments remain firmly against them. In the past, they would not (in theory) have been able to stop GM crops being grown on their soil if the EU approved them — and the EU was supposed to consider scientific evidence in its ruling. Now governments will be free to impose national bans for almost any reason.

Eight GM modified crops await EU approval but only one variety of maize (corn) has been grown commercially. Some countries may now allow more. These include Britain, which does a lot of plant science, and Spain, which has over 130,000 hectares of GM maize. In the rest of the world GM crops are spreading and GM vegetables are appearing. America has approved a new modified potato. Europeans may soon learn what the lack of fuss is all about.

By Chris Reed

One of the most befuddling things about being a public-policy watcher in California in recent years has been the durability of the argument that the higher energy costs forced by 2006’s passage of AB 32 won’t be a drag on the state economy. Instead, the claim goes, the innovation triggered by the mandate that California use cleaner-but-costlier types of energy will at the least make up for jobs lost because energy is much cheaper in rival states and nations.

Now I understand why religious greens would believe this. But allegedly rational, neutral journalists? Incredibly, it wasn’t until this March that The Los Angeles Times had a news story that operated from the straightforward premise that AB 32 carried huge risks for the state economy.

‘Rising energy prices a threat to competitiveness’: Duh

In Europe, however, the learning curve is a little farther along. This is from a Financial Times article headlined “High energy prices for industry occupy officials at EU summit”:

“[There is] a growing fear in Europe that rising energy prices now pose a threat to the industrial competitiveness of a region mired in recession. It has been driven home by a steady stream of announcements from European manufacturers about plans to build new production facilities in the US.”

And where are those European manufacturers planning to build new factories? Not in California. In states with access to cheap natural gas made available by fracking, such as Louisiana, Texas and Pennsylvania.

But then the California media have a little problem with reporting on fracking, too. They can never even bring themselves to admit the Obama administration supports it. Even when Obama’s secretary of the interior says it loudly and clearly.

A dead heat in the Reverse Pulitzers competition

This creates a dilemma for those on the Reverse Pulitzer jury. Who deserves the 2013 award?

1) The legions of California journos who idiotically argued that high energy prices will be good for or won’t hurt the economy, or …

2) The legions of California journos who dishonestly depict fracking as new and evil while never mentioning that the Obama administration backs fracking as just another heavy industry.

On the other hand, it’s no dilemma at all when you think about it. Everyone in Group 1 is in Group 2, and vice versa.

Reverse Pulitzers for the lot! My congratulations! Y’all are doing a hell of a job!