Diaper benefit

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. It’s the last day of the legislative session. While we wouldn’t rule out last-minute fireworks, we aren’t expecting them. Instead, there will be a flurry of more modest bills (modest in scope, not necessarily in importance). 

For example, low-income Californians could soon receive a monthly, $50 benefit for diaper purchases, according to a bill approved by the Legislature on Tuesday.

The monthly benefit would be given for each child two years old or younger, with a requirement that the money be spent only on diapers.

The benefit would not begin being awarded until 2020, and is expected to cost around $14 million to $18 million annually as part of the CalWORKS welfare program.

CalWatchdog has more:

In other news:

• Democratic Congresswoman Janice Hahn, who is running for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, “may have to refund more than $280,000 in contributions from political action committees after county election officials alleged that her committee probably violated campaign finance rules,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
• “Gov. Jerry Brown will decide whether to eliminate California’s 10-year time limit to bring rape and child molestation charges after several women were precluded from bringing cases against actor Bill Cosby,” writes The San Jose Mercury News/AP.

• “New California parents would be able to take unpaid time off without losing their jobs under revived legislation that cleared the Assembly on Tuesday. The 43-15 vote for Senate Bill 654 marked a critical step in the once-dead measure’s revival. A nearly identical bill fell in the Assembly Labor Committee in June,” reports The Sacramento Bee. 

• “Lawmakers on Tuesday narrowly rejected an effort to create new disclosure rules for California political mailers and money gathered from several donors into a single contribution,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

Assembly:

• In at 10 a.m.

Senate:

• In at 10 a.m.

Gov. Brown:

• Attending the 20th Annual Lake Tahoe Summit, which will focus on water quality. Capital Public Radio has more. 

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California is about to undertake a massive multibillion-dollar investment in re-engineering fish habitats in the Sacrament Delta called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.  It is already rewiring and revamping the entire state energy and transportation systems to comply with the California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.  But Jim Steele’s breakthrough new book —  “Landscape and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism” — is highly skeptical that reducing global warming has anything to do with preventing a decline of fish populations, reducing droughts and flooding, or preventing a sea-level rise in the Sacramento Delta.

It is important to understand the significance of who is saying these things.

“We’re not getting hotter, just less cold”

Steele says that looking at average temperatures to find global warming is useless to a biologist. He found that maximum temperatures have declined and minimum temperatures have risen over the last 100 years near Lake Tahoe in California. His conclusion: “the world isn’t getting hotter, just less cold!”

In chapter one of his book, Steele takes on NASA climate change guru James Hansen: “In contrast to predictions of accelerating heat stress by ‘C02 advocates’ like Dr. Hansen, the past 60 years of climate change in California should have benefited wildlife. … Top-down global climate change models have repeatedly failed to explain regional climate change.” So much for all the global-warming scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and UC Santa Cruz.

Steele says C02 has been so demonized and politicized that it has created a blinding bias that has diverted focusing on factors that affect the biosphere and droughts such as urbanization and ocean temperature cycles called  El Niño (wet monsoon rainstorm years) and La Niña (dry years).

Steele is not one who avoids blaming industrialization where blame is due.  He relates a story of how he restored a watershed about 50 miles east of Tahoe City that had been degraded by the construction of a railroad 100 years ago. But such changes are local and regional, not global, says Steele. He also points out tornadoes don’t occur in California frequently because there is no naturally formed “tornado alley” as there is in the Midwestern U.S.

Don’t fear for emperor penguins, polar bears

In chapter four, Steele (shown at right) explains that the emperor penguins shown in the film “March of the Penguins” are not going extinct due to warming. Instead, he writes their numbers have decreased when environmentalists disturbed their habitat and explosives were used on three islands to construct an airplane landing field. Steele’s field research findings are reminiscent of California Judge Oliver Wanger’s ruling that the scientific basis for shutting down water deliveries to protect the Delta Smelt fish was bogus.

In chapters 14 and 15, he discusses photogenic polar bears that are the poster children of the media. Steele writes that polar bears aren’t going extinct and there never was any warming of their habitats. He offers evidence that the local food supply benefits from less ice.

Steele relates how he has experienced accusations from his colleagues that he is a global-warming “denier” who is collaborating with “Big Oil.” However, Steele explains that Galileo offered his antagonists the opportunity to look through a telescope and see the Earth is round and revolves around the sun and not the other way around.  Like Galileo, Steele has encouraged his opponents to look at the historical temperature data, but they have also refused.

He writes that the opposition to Galileo wasn’t religious but was due to entrenched Dominican scientists who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because their scientific fiefdom was threatened. In California, the impartial state Legislative Analyst’s Office has reported California spends $15 billion a year on energy efficiency programs for which there is no proven effectiveness. This is more than the Legislature appropriates for the entire state university system.  Entrenched California bureaucracy is not much different than in Galileo’s time.

Steele’s words of wisdom

A few guidelines for policy-makers and citizens to take away from Steele’s book:

“It is not getting hotter, just less cold.”

“Although it is wise to think globally, all wildlife reacts locally.”

“The U.S. is not particularly warmer or wetter than anywhere else.”

“Many people mistakenly believe limiting CO2 concentrations will control the devastating cycles of El Niño’s floods and La Niña’s droughts.”

“To my great surprise and great relief, when I examined 100 years of local climate observations throughout California, I found they contradicted the global models.”

Steele’s book is written for nonscientists and should be of interest to those who are concerned about California’s wildlife and who are open to a nonconformist evaluation of global warming.

Brown, in a statement, said, “Today, California reaffirmed its longstanding partnership with the state of Nevada to protect and enhance the beauty of Lake Tahoe.”

Nevada Gov. Mark Sandoval, in the same statement, said that the bill is just part of California and Nevada’s long tradition of working together on issues related to Lake Tahoe.

“Lake Tahoe truly is the Jewel of the Sierra and with the signing of this law both states can continue to ensure the protection of the environment and help enhance the economy of the region,” Sandoval said.

Beyond the friendly statements, though, was a gritty political battle. The Los Angeles Times explained the basic contours:

Almost as long as California and Nevada have shared Lake Tahoe’s pricey shoreline, the two states have harbored competing visions of how best to prosper from the region’s stunning natural beauty while preserving the lake’s deep-azure color and remarkable clarity.

At times, the disputes have flared into what Joanne Marchetta, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, describes as a ‘red-hot crucible for debate and dissonance.

Earlier, CalWatchdog explained how, as California veered further to the left, a rift grew between the two states about how to handle development. The changing relationship prompted an interstate political battle:

 […]As time passed, officials in Nevada grew impatient with California’s approach to the pact. Nevada wasn’t angry about a specific incident; rather, the problem was about broader issues surrounding development. Nevada officials, who were inherently more skeptical of overregulation than officials in California, wanted the interstate agency that makes decisions about development to take economic considerations into account. California didn’t.

This caused a major rift between the two states, and Nevada threatened to pull out of the agreement with its more liberal neighbor. In fact, Nevada threatened to do so over half a dozen times. In 2010, the frustration reached a boiling point, and it appeared that Nevada was finally going to walk away from the agency—and develop its side of Tahoe however it wanted.

For Nevada, the threat was perfectly timed.

After Nevada threatened to pull out, California took their considerations more seriously. To the environmentalists that often influence Brown and the Democrat’s policy thinking, it was better to capitulate on some demands throughout the lake, rather than allowing the Nevada side to become an economic free-for-all.

After negotiations between the two states, Sandoval got most of what he wanted from Brown. An environmental activist told the Los Angeles Times that environmental interests “got rolled” by Nevada’s maneuvering.

And so the bill was signed into law.

Naturally, any politician signing a bill will declare a victory. But Brown’s hand was forced, and the pact’s new conditions were far from optimal (from his view). It was, no doubt, a loss for Brown. Perhaps that’s why he signed the bill on a Saturday, typically the slowest news day of the week.

Beyond comparisons, those differences also lead to outright competition. Perhaps the most memorable example of this was when Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry visited California businesses earlier this year to market Texas for growth and expansion.

But Texas isn’t the only state that has been outmaneuvering California lately.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that Nevada, through deft political maneuvering, has moved California to the right on environmental policy:

“Almost as long as California and Nevada have shared Lake Tahoe's pricey shoreline, the two states have harbored competing visions of how best to prosper from the region's stunning natural beauty while preserving the lake's deep-azure color and remarkable clarity.

“At times, the disputes have flared into what Joanne Marchetta, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, describes as a 'red-hot crucible for debate and dissonance.'”

Although California and Nevada have different ideas for how to develop the lake — Nevada being more open to commercial development — the two states have maintained a development pact for more than 45 years.

The pact was simple. California and Nevada, both states with partial control over the lake, will negotiate on how to develop the land. That way, any development would be consistent throughout the lake. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a joint effort between the states that received an overwhelming majority of its funding from California, made decisions about how to develop the lake.

Impatience

However, as time passed, officials in Nevada grew impatient with California’s approach to the pact. Nevada wasn’t angry about a specific incident; rather, the problem was about broader issues surrounding development. Nevada officials, who were inherently more skeptical of overregulation than officials in California, wanted the interstate agency that makes decisions about development to take economic considerations into account. California didn’t.

This caused a major rift between the two states, and Nevada threatened to pull out of the agreement with its more liberal neighbor. In fact, Nevada threatened to do so over half a dozen times. In 2010, the frustration reached a boiling point, and it appeared that Nevada was finally going to walk away from the agency—and develop its side of Tahoe however it wanted.

For Nevada, the threat was perfectly timed.

As the Times put it, “The maneuver was political brinkmanship, playing on California's fears about what would happen on the Nevada side of the lake without the planning compact. It worked.”

In fact, it worked well enough to produce a very rare bipartisan consensus in the California Legislature. The state Senate approved the bill with a 37-0 vote. Likewise, the Assembly approved the measure, 74-0.

One prominent environmentalist told the Times, “We got rolled.”

Others, however, see the move as a legitimate compromise. Development will remain limited, but instead of maintaining a myopic focus solely on environmental protection, the state will also consider economic factors.

The Times summed up the situation:

“Critics of the plan have warned that it will lead to pell-mell development and a Reno-ization of the picturesque lake. Public officials on both sides of the lake say that is an exaggeration.

“But everyone agrees that Lake Tahoe's foreshore will take on a new look: denser and taller development squeezed into town centers and fewer of the region's dowdy but affordable mom-and-pop '60-s era motels.”

Gov. Jerry Brown has yet to comment on whether or not he will sign the bill. But one thing is certain: there is now a bipartisan consensus against dowdy motels.