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We Can Attack Global Warming Without Donald Trump

We Can Attack Global Warming Without Donald Trump

It would be nice if President-elect Donald Trump took one of the most serious threats to life on earth seriously, but he does not. Trump called global warming a Chinese “hoax” during the campaign, and he’s assigned a science dunce to lead the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The comforting news is that America can move past the black hole of ignorance in Trump’s Washington — or New York or wherever he is. Enlightened state and city governments, as well as the private sector, can provide the leadership. As it happens, they’re already on the case.

Huge example: During the Paris climate change conference last December, Bill Gates organized a handful of billionaires and came up with $15 billion for his Breakthrough Energy Coalition. The group’s mission is to fund research on radical new clean energy technologies.

“Ten guys in a room produced more money than the entire world community of nations in commitment of resources,” Daniel Esty, professor of environmental law and policy at Yale Law School, told me.

“I’m not as sad or crushed as some people (that Trump was elected),” he added. “When the federal government collapses, state governments step up.”

California’s war on greenhouse gases is already 10 years old. Its original goal was to reduce the state’s carbon footprint to the 1990 level by the year 2020. The new goal is to shrink the carbon footprint to 40 percent below the 1990 level by 2030.

After the election, Gov. Jerry Brown rejected the notion of defeat or backsliding. “We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time — devastating climate change,” he announced.

Brown is not without economic firepower. California is the world’s sixth-biggest economy.

Regional compacts in the West, in the Northeast and elsewhere are following California’s lead. There’s also one in South Florida, where “king tides” are now flooding streets on perfectly sunny days.

Can Trump be educated on this issue — or at least tamed by forces he can’t control?

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, again running for the office, vows to slap a carbon tax on American imports if Trump pulls us out of the Paris climate deal. Could that happen?

Absolutely, according to Esty. Countries failing to meet international standards that form the base line for fair competition can be punished. And 195 nations have joined the Paris agreement.

Climate change has become a major priority for the U.S. Department of Defense. Rising waters already threaten Navy installations along the mid-Atlantic coast. And as the Arctic ice melts, Russia is opening bases in the region.

Higher temperatures worsen drought in Africa, unleashing mass migrations and spawning terrorists. Adm. Samuel Locklear III has called climate change the “biggest long-term security threat” in the Asia-Pacific region.

Trump may not know this, but China, the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, has been slashing its carbon emissions. How big is this? Ginormous. In the first four months of 2015, China cut emissions by an amount roughly equal to Britain’s entire emissions for the same period.

The smaller carbon footprint is merely a byproduct of China’s effort to clean up its putrid air. Getting rid of carbon emissions also gets rid of dirty air. That’s why states are still going after them even though the greenhouse gases themselves spread evenly around the globe.

As for Trump, he’s done little so far other than to embarrass reality-based Americans. But again, we can work around him.

Last summer, Brown told climate change deniers: “Bring it on. We’ll have more battles, and we’ll have more victories.”

Can Jerry Brown be our alt-president?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: The Eiffel tower is illuminated in green with the words “Paris Agreement is Done”, to celebrate the Paris U.N. COP21 Climate Change agreement in Paris, France, November 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

Governor Orders Mandatory Water Restrictions In California

Governor Orders Mandatory Water Restrictions In California

By Matt Stevens And Chris Megerian, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LAKE TAHOE, California — California Governor Jerry Brown, standing on a patch of brown grass in the Sierra Nevada that is usually covered with several feet of snow, on Wednesday announced the first mandatory water restrictions in California history.

“It’s a different world,” he said. “We have to act differently.”

Brown was on hand Wednesday as state officials took stock of historically abysmal levels of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada amid the state’s grinding drought.

Brown ordered the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory restrictions to reduce water usage by 25 percent. The water savings are expected to amount to 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months.

Brown’s plan would also:

  • Require golf courses, cemeteries, and other large landscaped spaces to reduce water consumption.
  • Replace 50 million square feet of lawn statewide with drought-tolerant landscaping as part of a partnership with local governments.
  • Create statewide rebate program to replace old appliance with more water- and energy-efficient ones.
  • Require new homes to have water-efficient drip irrigation if developers want to use potable water for irrigation.
  • Ban the water of ornamental grass on public street medians.
  • Call on water agencies to implement new pricing models that discourage excessive water use.

“It is such an unprecedented lack of snow,” said Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Survey Program. He’s been attending the snowpack measurements since 1987 and said he had never before seen the ground barren of snow on April first. “It’s way below the records.”

It’s another foreboding sign for a state languishing in a drought, as the wet season winds to a close.

Electronic readings on Wednesday at about 100 stations across the Sierra showed that the water content of the snow was only about five percent of the state average for April first, the day on which snowpack is normally considered at its peak. Official manual readings will be announced Wednesday afternoon.

Early data show the snowpack is lower than any year since 1950, when record-keeping began. Never before has the amount of water in the snow on April first dipped lower than 25 percent of the historical average for that day.

Snowpack accounts for about 30 percent of the state’s water supply, and other sources, including reservoirs and rainfall totals, have recently improved. Still, officials from the Department of Water Resources say the state of the snowpack, which melts and replenishes California’s reservoirs, means there will be virtually no runoff this spring or summer when the rain stops and temperatures rise.

“This is sort of uncharted territory,” said department spokesman Doug Carlson, calling the situation “dismal.”

Wednesday’s reading will be state water officials’ fourth manual snow survey this year at Phillips Station, about 90 miles east of Sacramento. Carlson said he visited the area a few days ago.

“I can tell you what the reading will be tomorrow: Zero, as in Sierra Nada,” he said.

The station traditionally averages more than 60 inches of snow on April first, he said.

The snow levels in the Sierra have declined each month since manual surveying began on December 30. That initial electronic reading showed that the snow’s water content was 50 percent of normal for the date. A month later, the water content was down to 25 percent of average, and in March, it was only 19 percent.

“It does leave questions about where the water will come from,” Carlson said. “Will there be enough of it? It will probably have to come from groundwater again…and that brings in a whole other set of problems and complications since the groundwater seems to be over-tapped.”

Relatively meager rainfall, combined with unusually warm weather has kept snowfall limited, officials said.

At the eight stations in the northern Sierra where the Department of Water Resources measures precipitation, about 32 inches of rain — 76 percent of average — have fallen since the water year began in October.

Sacramento has seen temperatures as much as six degrees above normal each month for the past 15 months, a National Weather Service spokesman said.

The rest of the state’s water picture, though, doesn’t look as dreary.

Major storms that hit California in December and February were warm and fell as rain rather than snow. Though precipitation is below the state’s historical average, the northern Sierra stations have already gotten more rain since October than during all of the 2013-14 water year, which lasts from October first to September 30.

That rain has helped refill the state’s reservoirs. As of Monday, Lake Oroville — the keystone reservoir of the California State Water Project, which delivers water from Northern California to the south — was at 51 percent of its capacity, compared with 49 percent a year ago. Lake Shasta, the state’s largest reservoir, had about 150 billion gallons more water in it Monday than it did a year ago.

In early March, state officials also announced that customers of the State Water Project will get 20 percent of their contract requests, compared with only five percent in 2014.

But Central Valley farmers without senior water rights are likely to get no supplies from the valley’s big federal irrigation project for the second year in a row. And in April, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River, is expected to consider rationing regional water deliveries, as it did during the 2007-09 drought. That decision will have a ripple effect throughout the Southland as local agencies react, likely by increasing water rates and adopting stricter conservation measure.

In a first step toward bolstering such measures, the State Water Resources Control Board beefed up its emergency drought regulations this month, directing urban agencies to limit the number of days residents can water their yards.

The board also warned that it will impose tougher restrictions in coming months if local agencies don’t ramp up conservation efforts.

At the time, Board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus called the state of California’s miniscule snowpack “just terrifying.”

“We are not seeing the level of stepping up and ringing the alarm bells that the situation warrants,” Marcus said.

Brown and lawmakers have responded to the drought with new legislation, including a $1 billion plan the governor signed last week.

It includes $127.8 million for food and water supplies and immediate measures to protect the environment from the effects of the drought. Most of the funding is for long-term projects such as recycling sewage water, improving treatment facilities and supporting desalination plants.

Photo: Brian van der Brug via Los Angeles Times/TNS

Cutbacks In California Court System Produce Long Lines, Short Tempers

Cutbacks In California Court System Produce Long Lines, Short Tempers

By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times

SAN FRANCISCO — California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye remembers the moment she learned that the Kings County Superior Court had resorted to holding a garage sale to raise money.

“That was a day of extreme humiliation and embarrassment to me,” Cantil-Sakauye said.

During her three years as chief justice, recession-driven cutbacks in California’s huge court system have produced long lines and short tempers at courthouses throughout the state. Civil cases are facing growing delays in getting to trial, and court closures have forced residents in some counties to drive several hours for an appearance.

The effects vary from county to county, with rural regions hit the hardest but no court left unscathed. Governor Jerry Brown is expected Tuesday to announce his revised budget plan, which will determine whether more courthouses will have to close next year. Legislators from both parties have called on Brown to raise funding.

Unlike in federal court, it is impossible to file all cases electronically in most state courts, and fights regularly erupt in snaking lines at clerks’ offices. Telephone systems are antiquated, and there are not enough people to answer the calls. Court reporters who provide transcripts of hearings have been eliminated for civil cases in many counties, making it more difficult for the losing party to appeal.

Cantil-Sakauye said annual case filings have dropped by about 2.5 million statewide in the last few years, possibly because delays, higher costs and longer drives have discouraged users.

“I don’t believe we are becoming a more law-abiding, rule-following society,” she said. “But we have closed more than 50 courthouses and eliminated 3,900 full-time positions. So are people finally getting the message they shouldn’t bother to come to court?”

Retired Judge Stephen Jahr, who heads the court’s statewide administrative office, said delays in civil trials are approaching levels not seen since the 1970s, before laws were passed to speed up trial dates.

Without significantly more money in the coming year, civil cases “being filed today will not get to trial until five years, which is the mandatory dismissal date,” Jahr said. “We will be back to where we started 25 years ago.”

The picture is vastly different from the late 1990s, when the courts unified under one branch and funding shifted from counties to the state. New courthouses were planned. A computer system that was supposed to link all the courts was ordered.

Then the economy took a nose dive. Cantil-Sakauye had been chief for only one month in 2011 when the state issued an audit blasting the judicial branch for spending $500 million on a computer system plagued with problems. The project has since been abandoned, but the scandal damaged the courts’ credibility with state legislators.

A dissident group of judges charged that the court’s San Francisco administrative office, which receives 3.8 percent of the $3.14-billion court budget, was wasteful. Legislators have approved a pending audit of the office, and Cantil-Sakauye said she has trouble dispelling suspicions that it was hiding “buckets of money.”

She said she has a good relationship with Brown. “I enjoy his company, and he is always available,” she said. “He listens but never commits. … He is a person who thinks big ideas, he talks about the court reinventing itself by restructuring or becoming more efficient.”

She said she agrees the courts should not be “static,” but noted that some efficiencies require upfront investments to save money down the road.

H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for Brown’s Department of Finance, said the state has tried to ensure courts were maintained “at a relatively stable level in recent years.” Other state services fared worse, he said, and also are clamoring for more money.

Brown’s budget proposal concedes the coming year will be “challenging” for the courts. He has proposed a $105-million increase, which judicial leaders say is not enough to prevent more court closures and cutbacks. The local reserves courts tapped into in the past to cushion state cuts are now gone.

Cantil-Sakauye said the courts need an additional $266 million “just to tread water” in the coming fiscal year, $612 million to be fully functional and $1.2 billion over three years to make up for past cuts.

Many court delays stem from staff shortages. Legal documents pile up, delaying judgments. Clerks in Contra Costa County said they have received complaints from people who divorced and wanted to remarry but couldn’t because clerks had not yet processed the paperwork for judges’ signatures.

Presiding Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Barry P. Goode said he discovered 20 feet of unfiled civil law documents in a clerk’s office. Judges complained that they did not have the files before them when cases were called.

“It makes your heart sick to see what we have done to the courts,” said Goode, surrounded by unfiled legal documents in the Martinez court.

The number of public windows and their hours have been slashed at courthouses throughout the state.

The lines are so long at the Martinez courthouse that Cookie Gambucci, who files legal documents for lawyers, now brings stickers and toys for the children of parents waiting in line. “I am waiting two to three hours, and I can’t stand babies crying and parents wanting to beat their children,” Gambucci said.

Los Angeles County is down 80 courtrooms and has eliminated court reporters in civil cases. Getting a trial for a traffic case can take a year. Trials on civil matters may require a two-year wait.

“The result of all this is delays and backlogs,” Presiding Judge David S. Wesley said. “I have long lines all over the county.”

In San Bernardino County, the Superior Court has stopped summoning jurors from Needles, making the guarantee of a jury of one’s peers elusive. Because of court closures in the high desert, a trip to court from Needles can take some residents 3{ hours.

“We are really on the borderline of a constitutional crisis,” said Marsha Slough, the county’s presiding judge. “We have victims who want to give up because they don’t want to testify in criminal trials because of the driving distances and costs.”

The county has closed four courthouses, scaled back hours in a fifth and remains short 600 employees, Slough said. Poor high-desert communities were the most affected.

A change in a child custody order can take at least four months because of lack of staff, Slough said. “This is a lifetime for a child,” she said.

At the Victorville branch, people without lawyers who need help take a number and wait. A sign warns those waiting that they may not be seen that day. Mario Campos, 43, said he had been in line an hour and a half to get help with a divorce. About 10 people were still ahead of him.

“It is a long time, but it is a lot faster than usual,” said Campos, a pizza delivery driver.

Kerrie Justice, a family law attorney, said one of her clients has been waiting nearly three years to resolve a child custody dispute because of court closures and judge reassignments. “This case should have taken a year,” Justice said.

Victorville criminal defense lawyer Brendon Atwood said there aren’t enough judges to handle the caseload. “You may get 30 seconds of the court’s time instead of six or seven minutes,” he said.

Virginia Turner, the mother of a teenage girl who was attacked at her school, said her daughter went to court in Richmond in October to obtain a domestic violence restraining order. The girl’s lawyer discovered the court had stopped providing reporters to transcribe such hearings.

With the judge’s permission, the lawyer turned on her cell phone to record the alleged attacker’s testimony. But it didn’t pick up his words, and his statements could not be used against him in a later proceeding, Turner said.

Photo: Steve Rhodes via Flickr
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California Governor Brown Reinvents Himself Yet Again

California Governor Brown Reinvents Himself Yet Again

By Anthony York and Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On a recent Thursday morning, Jerry Brown walked unannounced into the basement office of the Alameda County registrar’s office to draw re-election papers. With a post on Twitter and an email to supporters, he then declared his bid for an unprecedented fourth term as California governor.

The moment — low-key, offhand, deliberately anticlimactic — captured the essence of the Democrat’s newest incarnation: Late in life, at age 75 and apparently done seeking higher office, Brown has reinvented himself again, this time as the anti-politician politician.

He shuns most trappings of the office. There’s no motorcade, no entourage. The governor showed up at the elections department with a lone campaign adviser and his wife, who snapped a photo using her smartphone.

Brown fashions many of his own speeches, veto messages and even press releases. His staff in the governor’s office is about half that of his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who employed as many as 230.

He often goes months without a public appearance, sometimes holed up at his home in the Oakland hills, calling authors, experts and others he wrings for information — conversations that usually open, “Hello, this is Jerry Brown. Do you have a minute?”

It is as though Brown wants to run the most populous state in the nation more or less by himself, tackling matters large (California’s budget) and small (picking a poem to mark Arbor Day) with the same degree of supreme confidence and minimal public display.

“A lot of organizations quickly take on extra layers and unnecessary procedures … just to carry on the business,” Brown said in an interview. “We’re leaner, and I think more coherent as a result.”

Brown being Brown, there are the usual idiosyncrasies.

For three days last summer, as the federal government hurtled toward a shutdown, the governor checked out to attend a conference in Oakland on the ideas of the late social critic Ivan Illich, opening the session by noting the two met in the 1970s at Green Gulch, a Zen monastery in Marin County.

Illich, who had been a Jesuit priest, railed against institutionalized education, the prevalence of automobiles and modern medicine — or, as the Jesuit-educated Brown put it that day, challenged “the certitudes of modernity.”

For Brown, a spokesman said, the getaway was “the equivalent of you or I going to a baseball game.”

The conspicuously inconspicuous approach may be at odds with today’s culture of rapid-fire tweets, blogging and around-the-clock news coverage. Other governors huddle with tacticians who stage-manage their public appearances, focus-group their statements and work to shoehorn them into every passing news event.

But ever since his last unsuccessful presidential bid, in 1992, Brown has shown an acute sense of political timing, serving as his own strategist and methodically climbing back to political power one elected post — Oakland mayor, state attorney general, governor — after another. (He has ruled out — reluctantly — a fourth try for the White House in 2016.)

“Going dark is not a strategy I would recommend for 99.9 percent of other politicians,” said Steve Maviglio, who ran Governor Gray Davis’s press operation and served as spokesman for three California Assembly speakers.

For Brown, though, “if not being in the newspaper or in front of the camera every day is working for him, why mess with success?”

Still, there is no shortage of critics.

Costs have soared for one of Brown’s pet causes, a $68 billion high-speed rail project, and voters have distinctly cooled on the idea. One of Brown’s main GOP rivals for office this year, Neel Kashkari, has made opposition a centerpiece of his campaign.

Another major proposal, a $25 billion project to redistribute water throughout the state, is opposed by environmentalists and others.

Some fellow Democrats, speaking privately to avoid the governor’s ire, say he should do more to address the state’s soaring pension costs, be more daring in overhauling public education and use his high profile to become a leading national voice in the debates over immigration and same-sex marriage.

Brown, though, appears unmoved by those who question his style, practicing an almost improvisational form of governing, without the office structure or hierarchy typical of most governors. “Making it up as he goes along, day-by-day, depending on the nuances,” as one insider put it, speaking anonymously so as not to anger Brown or his wife.

Late into the night, Brown pecks away at his iPhone, conducting his own policy research with a decades’ accumulation of sources, people he sorts by subject. “Jerry puts us in silos, silos of expertise and knowledge,” said Rusty Areias, a former Central Valley lawmaker whom Brown has known since the 1970s and typically consults about water, agriculture and other rural issues.

The governor usually won’t telegraph his thinking, preferring to exhaust a subject with questions and move on to the next phone call.

“He’s constantly synthesizing … foraging for information,” Areias said.

It is not advice that Brown seems to want from those he consults, said Areias and others who speak regularly with the governor, but rather facts and some perspective to help guide his decisions.

A former seminarian and Yale Law School graduate, Brown has never been shy about flaunting his intellect, quoting obscure philosophers and sprinkling his conversation with Latin proverbs. He can be quick to dismiss those who question his judgment or the purity of his convictions.

When the Sacramento Bee raised questions about the construction of the $6.4 billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Brown called the reporters “amateurs” and said their work “border(ed) on malpractice.”

Nine months later, when various defects delayed the bridge opening, the governor told reporters, “I mean, look, (stuff) happens.”

Not surprisingly, some find Brown’s manner off-putting and arrogant. But if he is not warmly regarded in all quarters, he is widely respected, and since returning to the governor’s office in 2011, he has more or less had his way.

California’s finances are on the mend after years of teetering near collapse, thanks to an improving economy but also the tax hike the governor won from voters in an uphill fight.

And he has rarely been challenged by the Legislature, even when Democrats had a veto-proof supermajority.

Despite some grumbling, lawmakers have supported most of his major policy initiatives: a shift in school funds from richer to poorer neighborhoods, changes in public pension arrangements, the prison “realignment” program that altered custody rules for felons, elimination of redevelopment agencies to help balance the budget. Brown gets strong marks from California voters, with a public approval rating in the 60 percent range — impressive for an incumbent — and is the prohibitive favorite to win in November.

The governor has never been a charmer or back-slapper like his father, the late Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr. But what some regard as hubris or intellectual high-handedness, friends and allies say is simply awkwardness. He tries reaching out a little more now than he did the last time he was governor, when overtures were rare.

By now, that effort has a familiar, somewhat stilted routine: Visitors are invited to the governor’s Capitol office, where Brown shows off a portrait of his great-grandfather, a German immigrant who came to California during the Gold Rush. He points to some rocks on his desk, taken from his family’s ranch outside the town of Williams.

But politics is always in the background.

Democratic state Senator Kevin DeLeon of Los Angeles was wrapping up a meeting with Brown outside that history-laden office last year when the lawmaker casually expressed concern that the governor would not approve a bill widely granting driver’s licenses to immigrants in the state illegally.

“Send me the bill,” Brown fired back, “and I’ll sign it.”

With that, a years-long political log jam was broken.

Photo: Steve Rhodes via Flickr