California motorists in a traffic jam. (Photo: Shutterstock)OPINION: Just as the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard requires electric utilities to phase in a specific amount of clean energy in our electricity mix, the LCFS mandates that the oil industry phase in cleaner fuels to tackle the state’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions: the fuel that runs our cars, trucks, and buses.
A parched lake bed at Lake Oroville, about 60 miles north of Sacramento. (Photo: sddatta, via Shutterstock)As drought-parched California withers, salt water captures attention – again. Santa Barbara, which built a desalination plan more than 20 years ago and then abruptly shut it down because of costs, is considering upgrading and restarting the project and provide the city of 91,000 with about a fourth of its drinking water. The tentative price tag is $40 million. In Sacramento, the State Water Resources Control Board is poised to adopt new regulations in May governing desalination.
A homeless man in a wheelchair wiping his eyes at a pier in Oceanside, Calif. (Photo: David Little via Shutterstock)We are moving into the post-industrial age, an era of mechanized production, where machines can increasingly do jobs that used to pay real people livable wages. In California, we have strong environmental and labor regulations that did not exist at the birth of the industrial age. These rules have improved and saved lives of workers and the communities where manufacturing plants are based. But they have also driven costs of manufacturing higher.