In an interview on Meet the Press, Brown cautioned that he did not “rule by decree,” working “through the Legislature,” but promised to move regulations further ahead than current law provides. “California now has groundwater management for the first time in its entire history, so we are much more aggressive” than in years past, he said. But, citing a new study claiming the state’s drought is connected to climate change, Brown warned “we’re not aggressive enough. And we will be stepping it up year by year.”

As the plight of California’s Central Valley residents has grown, political dividing lines familiar to voters and residents have begun to blur. Traditionally the Republican-leaning part of the state, with interests broadly opposed to the wealthy deep-blue elite concentrated on the coast, the poorer Valley has become a growing source of dismay for liberals as well as conservatives upset with Democrat-led water policy. Better-off towns and cities have weathered the Valley’s water cutbacks. “For less wealthy communities, however, the inconveniences quickly turn into catastrophes,” the Nation recently reported.

“In hundreds of poor rural spots — places too small to qualify as towns, too isolated to be incorporated into larger cities, and oftentimes condemned as “nonviable” by their county’s General Plan — the drought has literally meant the end of water. These settlements have long been at the mercy of ramshackle delivery systems, which pump unsafe water laced with arsenic, uranium, nitrates, and pesticides into family homes; now those wells are dry, too. And despite the passage of the state’s largely aspirational Human Right to Water Act in 2012, the large-scale investments needed to link these communities into the water systems of bigger towns, or to dig wells deep enough to allow them to survive off their own water supplies, haven’t materialized.”

Local controls

As legislators faced the prospect of more protracted water negotiations, some localities began taking matters into their own hands. In San Luis Obispo, the Tribune reported, county supervisors recently voted in favor of a parcel tax that would net $1 million for a water management district covering the Paso Robles basin, where aquifer levels have been falling.

Also breathtaking is what was the payload of the latest rocket, launched yesterday. NASA reported on an NSA (the government acronyms become confusing):

“The United Launch Alliance (ULA) have launched their Atlas V rocket on the NROL-39 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. Liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was on schedule at the opening of the launch window at 23:13 local time Thursday (07:13 UTC on Friday).

“Atlas V Mission:

“The primary payload for Thursday’s launch was a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, NROL-39, whose launch was contracted in 2003 as part of the second block-purchase of Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) launches; Buy 2.”

In the upper right of this article is the logo of the mission. Notice the arrogance: nothing is beyond their reach. They spy on, and control, everything in your life.

Daniel McAdams writes on LewRockwell.com:

“As the rest of the world — the US public included — reels from ongoing revelations that the NSA has infiltrated like a virus into the most private corners of our lives, the US Intelligence-Industrial-Complex presses on with a total absence of self-reflection.

“Entrepreneur and privacy hero Kim Dotcom points out that the latest spy satellite launched yesterday by the megabillion dollar National Reconnaissance Office carries with it a kind of extended middle finger to the entire world.

“NROL-39, as the mission is affectionately called, features as its logo an angry octopus whose tentacles are extending over the globe. Its slogan: ‘Nothing is beyond our reach.’

“Nothing. Total surveillance. Such arrogance seems foolhardy, terrifying, and dangerous. And, of course, totalitarian.”

The government is an octopus squeezing the liberty out of us.

These earnings, and Google’s expert deployment of its cash, have made the company one of the best places to work in the world. In fact, earlier this year Forbes (once again) ranked Google the best place to work.

From Forbes’ rousing endorsement:

“The Internet juggernaut takes the Best Companies crown for the fourth time, and not just for the 100,000 hours of subsidized massages it doled out in 2012. New this year are three wellness centers and a seven-acre sports complex, which includes a roller hockey rink; courts for basketball, bocce, and shuffle ball; and horseshoe pits.”

Perhaps one of Google’s nicest perks is the fleet of private jets it keeps for its executives.

But just because the company is doing well, doesn’t mean it spends recklessly. In fact, until recently, Google engaged in a very beneficial deal with the Department of Defense, a deal that exemplified the excesses of modern crony capitalism.

Discount fuel

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the DoD and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ended an exclusive arrangement with Google that gave the company access to steeply discounted jet fuel for its private fleet.

A private company representing Google bought 2.3 million gallons of jet fuel at an average rate of $3.19 per gallon. Corporate flight departments typically paid an average of $4.35 per gallon over the same period, meaning Google saved roughly $2.7 million through the arrangement.

So why did Google get favored treatment over other corporations?

The first reason is geographical: NASA’s Ames Research Center is based at Moffett Federal Airfield, just three miles away from Google’s Northern California headquarters.  Google pays $1.3 million a year to house seven jets and two helicopters at the same airfield, and using the government fuel already there was just convenient.

But the second reason for the steep discount is more interesting:

“In explaining the unusual arrangement, NASA officials have pointed to a related agreement by the Google executives to perform scientific flights and other NASA-related transport. That mostly has involved flights by an Alpha jet, a small trainer bought by the Google executives and used by NASA to measure atmospheric greenhouse gases and ozone.”

A representative for Google said the company simply bought the only fuel available.

Not happy

But not everyone is happy, particularly those businesses that don’t participate in NASA’s favored research. Fred Fitts, the president of a nonprofit that negotiates jet-fuel discounts for different corporate flight departments throughout the United States, was incredulous.

“I don’t see how in the hell anybody can buy it that cheap,” he told the Journal.

Luckily for the taxpayers, it doesn’t look like the Pentagon lost any money in the arrangement (though it certainly could have made some back).

However, it still might not be legal. The contract between the company representing Google (H211) and the DoD said that the fuel was meant for performance of government contracts or approved use. If Google didn’t comply, they’d be faced with civil penalties.

Since most of the flights weren’t NASA related — a Google executive flew out to his brother’s wedding in Croatia, for example — Google may have violated the arrangement.

But the last part of the arrangement might irk taxpayers the most.

It appears as though Google may even have dodged some taxes:

“One reason commercial prices are higher is that they include sales tax levied by California on all fuel sales to private jets, currently 8.75% in Moffett’s locale. It’s unclear if H211 ever paid that tax. The Pentagon said it collected only federal taxes, and H211 was responsible for remitting any local taxes owed. [An H211 executive] said the Pentagon’s invoices included ‘all applicable taxes.'”

Some might call it savvy business; others would call it crony capitalism at its worst.

By CHRISS STREET

California’s wildly expensive AB 32, Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, is supposed to prevent man-made global warming. AB 32 took effect Jan. 1 — just in time for it to suffer another devastating scientific blow. Temperature data from 30,000 worldwide measuring stations analyzed by the United Kingdom‘s Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit confirmd that the rising temperature trend in world temperatures ended in 1997 and the world may be facing a mini-ice-age.

The new research follows a commentary I published four months ago in the Big Government blog, “Nature Journal Discredits Global Warming.”  The article reported on the Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, publishing of the “definitive study” by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, rebuking anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming and attributing temperature variances to the effects of cosmic rays from the sun.

When my article appeared, conservatives gushed with praise.

But liberals, including the New York Times and Media Matters, threated to ruin me as a fraud for stating that one study could undermine the “proven science of man-made global warming.”  The controversy has continued to rage on the internet as a current search of Google generates 5,230,000 results and a search of Bing generates 12,600,000 results.  In spite of the powerful CERN study, on October 20, 2011, the California Air Resources Board voted to quickly implement the provisions of AB 32 as the first and only comprehensive limit on greenhouse gases in the United States.

Following release of the new Met and University of East Anglia data, leading climate scientists told The Daily Mail of London over the weekend that after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading toward a “grand minimum” in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

11-Year Cycles

The Mail quoted an analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface. The analysis suggested that solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.  These sunspots are generated from a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun, referred to as the Great Conveyor Belt.  It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit.  Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle.  That is why a circulation slowdown impacts climate predictions.

Recent weather station measurements of cooler temperatures are consistent with the current peaking of “Solar Cycle 24,” which is running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.  Solar Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, is predicted to be a great deal weaker still.

Dropping Temperatures

According to the Meteorological Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830, when average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2 degrees Centigrade (-3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology commented that water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans “have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate.”

When oceans cooled from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled.  When the Pacific cycle warmed after 1970, the climate warmed.  But the ocean “flipped” back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years.  In 2011, world temperatures fell by more than half a degree, as the cold water “La Nina” effect re-emerged in the South Pacific.

The result was widespread outbreaks of bitter cold and frequent snow storms, both across the United States and Europe.  Said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, “We’re now well into the second decade of the pause.  If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk.  And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.”

As my article stated in September, “After 20 years of academic supremacy and hundreds of billions of dollars of costs, the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory seems headed for the dust bin of history.”  As the preponderance of science continues to turn against man-made global warning, it is now time for Californians to turn against AB 32.

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