The students would tell Professor Laura Freberg after finding out she was a Republican that they could tell. It was because of what she WAS NOT SAYING.
To wit:
My oldest son’s English professor at C.O.C. talked positively about Bernie Sanders as well as socialism, how Republicans were bigoted, talked approvingly of #BlackLivesMatter, about how religion causes most wars, talked about global warming, the [fictitious] plastic trash island, on-and-on-and-on. He barely taught English.
During the comments about Christianity being behind many of histories wars, my son spoke up and mentioned that only 7% of the world’s wars were religious, and almost a third of them were done in the name of Muhammad (HJBUH). The professor countered… since they have WI-FI on campus, my son pulled up my post on it to clarify the issue (“Causes of Wars“).
Mind you, in the post I quote from an atheist professor, an encyclopedia written by 9-history professors, and another book by a religious author specifically about the Thirty Years War (he is Professor of Theology at DePaul University; his book was published by Oxford University Press).
The next class was an entire class on why you cannot trust books.
CRAZY!
If I were there, I would note that I agree with him in regards to history books written without footnotes, like Howard Zinn’s book about American history (which I would guess is a book the “professor” emphatically trusts).
My only admonition to the professors like my son’s is that if you put this passion into the material and class goals, you would be an excellent teacher of minds in that subject.
With the recent issues regarding some reports about Hillary Clinton’s health as well as what many are calling seizures due to her brain injury and subsequent brain clot… we have this bit of news after yesterdays episode.
YOUNG CONSERVATIVES have a great story regarding the glasses Hillary was wearing that day. Here is their partial comments:
If you saw pictures of Hillary Clinton from yesterday at the 9/11 commemoration ceremony before, during, or after her fainting spell, you noticed she was wearing her pneumonia glasses.
Wait, I have that wrong.
Those weren’t pneumonia glasses at all.
In fact, Hillary’s John Lennon-inspired glasses are given to seizure victims with hopes they’ll happen less often.
Say it with me, everyone…
HILLARY 4 PRESIDENT!
As a side-note, the Hillary campaign said she was dealing with pneumonia in regards to yesterdays episode. Why would they give her anti-seizure glasses for this? This information and these recent episodes have made me revisit two previous videos I have watched, and a few other mentioned in this video:
(The very last video in the above video was not discussed… but it is here.) At any rate, all this is getting Dems to talk about replacing Hillary. Here is an example via David Shuster:
Mind you, Philip Cunningham may be a bit tough to listen to… but his attention to detail — even if he cannot pronounce “intelligentsia” — are a must. Enjoy.
(Above video description) “Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer — or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that’s out of the way — if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.” ~ Richard Sternberg – Living Waters documentary
Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics – Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson – (excerpt from Living Waters video) [POSTED BELOW]
The abject failure of Natural Selection on two levels of physical reality – VIDEO (2016) (princess and the pea paradox & quarter power scaling)
Excerpt: My colleagues and I recently published a paper in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling, “The Waiting Time Problem in a Model Hominin Population.” It is one of the journal’s “highly accessed” articles. A pre-human hominin population of roughly 10,000 individuals is thought to have evolved into modern man, during a period of less than six million years. This would have required the establishment of a great deal of new biological information. That means, minimally, millions of specific beneficial mutations, and a large number of specific beneficial sets of mutations, selectively fixed in this very short period of time. We show that there is simply not enough time for this type of evolution to have occurred in the population from which we supposedly arose.
Historically, Darwin-defenders have argued that time is on their side. They have claimed that given enough time, any evolutionary scenario is feasible. They have consistently argued that given millions of years, very large amounts of new biologically meaningful information can arise by the Darwinian process of mutation/selection. However, careful analysis of what is required to establish even a single genetic “word” (a short functional string of genetic letters) within a hominin genome shows just the opposite. Even given tens of millions of years, there is not enough time to generate the genetic equivalent of the simplest “word” (two or more nucleotides). Even in a hundred billion years, much longer than the age of the universe, there is not enough time to establish the genetic equivalent of a very simple “sentence” (ten or more nucleotides). This problem is so fundamental that it justifies a complete re-assessment of the basic Darwinian mechanism.
This video is based on David E.W. Evans work over at MISES DAILY…
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
(BIO) Dr. David M.W. Evans consulted full time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavor with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a skeptic.
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
“Shrinking Glaciers – In 2013, an iceberg larger than the city of Chicago broke off the Pine Island Glacier, the most important glacier of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And at Montana’s Glacier National Park glaciers have gone from 150 to just 35 over the past century.”
Response:
Calling attention to anecdotal incidents of icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice sheet, while deliberately ignoring the overall growth of the Antarctic ice sheet, is a misleading and favorite tactic of global warming alarmists. Icebergs break off the Antarctic ice sheet every year, with or without global warming, particularly in the Antarctic summer. However, a particular iceberg – no matter how large – breaking off the Antarctic ice sheet does not necessarily result in “Shrinking Glaciers” as EDF alleges. To the contrary, the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been growing at a steady and substantial pace ever since NASA satellites first began measuring the Antarctic ice sheet in 1979. Indeed, during the same year that the EDF claims “an iceberg larger than the city of Chicago” broke off the Antarctic ice sheet and caused “Shrinking Glaciers,” the Antarctic ice sheet repeatedly set new records for its largest extent in recorded history. Those 2013 records were repeatedly broken again in 2014. The Antarctic ice sheet in 2013 and 2014 was more extensive than any time in recorded history, and yet the EDF pushes the lie that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is shrinking.
The EDF’s assertion about Glacier National Park is also misleading. Alpine glaciers at Glacier National Park and elsewhere have been receding for over 300 years, since the Earth’s temperature bottomed out during the depths of the Little Ice Age. The warming of the past 300 years and the resulting recession of alpine glaciers predated humans building coal-fired power plants and driving SUVs. Moreover, opening up more of the Earth’s surface to vegetation and plant and animal life would normally be considered a beneficial change, if global warming alarmists had not so thoroughly politicized the global warming discussion.
Hockey Schtick piles on with this historical look back on Glacier National Park:
A new paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews finds that alpine glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana retreated up to 6 times faster during the 1930’s and 1940’s than over the past 40 years. The “Multi-proxy study of sediment cores retrieved from lakes below modern glaciers supports the first detailed Neoglacial chronology for Glacier National Park (GNP)” and shows “maximum reconstructed retreat rates [in] 1930” of about 125 meters per year, compared to near zero in ~1975 and about 20 meters/year at the end of the record in ~2005. The authors report, “Results indicate that alpine glaciers in Glacier National Park advanced and retreated numerous times during the Holocene after the onset of Neoglaciation 6,500 years before the present” and “Retreat from the Little Ice Age maximum was the most dramatic episode of ice retreat in at least the last 1000 years.”
Some more in-depth studies on Glacier National Park detailing the rapid recession before man started to insert in earnest CO2 into the atmosphere can be found here:
Testimony of Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu before the united states senate committee on commerce (PDF)… (BIO — Dr. Akasofu is the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, serving in that position from the center’s establishment in 1998 until January 2007.)
A lacustrine-based Neoglacial record for Glacier National Park, Montana, USA (PEER REVIEWED)
Another blow to the glacier myth comes from WATTS UP WITH THAT and notes that the “receding Swiss glaciers inconveniently reveal 4000 year old forests – and make it clear that glacier retreat is nothing new,” …continuing:
Dr. Christian Schlüchter’s discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.
This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with “a wild landscape and wide flowing river.”….
…Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.”
Schlüchter criticizes his critics for focusing on a time period which is “indeed too short.” His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that “the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free 5,800 of the last 10,000 years.”
Such changes can occur very rapidly. His research team was stunned to find trunks of huge trees near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier which had all died in just a single year. They determined that time to be 8,200 years ago based upon oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice which showed marked cooling.
Casting serious doubt upon alarmist U.N.-IPCC projections that the Alps will be nearly glacier-free by 2100, Schlüchter poses several challenging questions: “Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the Earth ‘tip’ in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1980s? . . . Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid.”
Although we witness ongoing IPCC attempts to blame such developments upon evil fossil-fueled CO2 emissions, that notion fails to answer these questions. Instead, Schlüchter believes that the sun is the principal long-term driver of climate change, with tectonics and volcanoes acting as significant contributors….
Regarding IPCC integrity with strong suspicion, Schlüchter recounts a meeting in England that he was “accidentally” invited to which was led by “someone of the East Anglia Climate Center who had come under fire in the wake of the Climategate e-mails.”
As he describes it: “The leader of the meeting spoke like some kind of Father. He was seated at a table in front of those gathered and he took messages. He commented on them either benevolently or dismissively.”
Very happy for my “cyber friend” to be in the Prager-U mix!
What did the Founding Fathers believe about religion? Were they Christians, or just deists? Did they believe in secularism, or did they want Americans to be religious? Joshua Charles, New York Times bestselling author and researcher at the Museum of the Bible, explains.
“You, Hillary are a liar, and a pathological one at that. You’re a cheat. You’re dishonest. You are condescending, arrogant and contemptuous. And if you think that your half-a–ed apology will wipe the slate clean, you are wrong.” – Judge Jeanine Pirro
I am a BIG fan of editorial cartoons/cartoonists and will let these talented people memorialize this solemn day ~ their talent to catch a big-idea in one image is unrivaled. New frames will be added under the GOLD moniker just below. The newer cartoons will be larger than the older ones. The parameters of the old blog did not allow for bigger. Likewise, the videos embedded throughout work here as they stopped at the old site. Enjoy.
[Note: this does not mean the newer cartoons directly below are themselves “new,” it just means that I recently found them… they in fact may be old.]
These are mainly by fireman/port authority guys in remembrance of those lost
BEAMS
Just a few pictures of steel beams and info
You are looking at what some people believe is a miracle.
Two days after the disaster, a construction worker found several perfectly formed crosses planted upright in a pit in the rubble of the heavily damaged 6 World Trade Center.
The large, cross-shaped metal beams just happened to fall that way when one of the towers collapsed. An FBI chaplain who has spent days at ground zero says he has not seen anything like it on the vast site.
As word of the find has spread at ground zero, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed rescue workers have been flocking to the site to pray and meditate.
“People have a very emotional reaction when they see it,” says the Rev. Carl Bassett, an FBI chaplain. “They are amazed to see something like that in all the disarray. There’s no symmetry to anything down there, except those crosses.”
This is the Ground Zero cross seen Friday, October 4, 2002, in New York. Father Brian Jordan and a group representing construction workers and victims of the World Trade Center are asking the governor to preserve the ground zero cross and use it as part of the eventual memorial that will be erected at Ground Zero.
VIDEOS
From Cox & Forkum’s Site (cartoonists):
In the excellent book Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001, authors Mitchell Fink and Lois Mathias collected stories from eyewitnesses. Here’s an excerpt from what David Kravette, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker, told the authors about his experience at the World Trade Center:
On the morning of September 11, I was on floor 105, tower 1. I had an 8 a.m. meeting set up with a client. He was bringing by some tech people to do some due diligence on our technology company called E-Speed. I get to work usually around seven, seven-fifteen. At eight, the client called to tell me they were running late. And I said fine. But I reminded him to bring photo ID downstairs. Ever since the last terrorist attack in ’93, the building requires photo ID downstairs. He’s been there before, so he knew the drill. He said, “Fine. No problem.”
At 8:40, I get a phone call from the security desk downstairs, asking me if I’m expecting visitors. I said yes. “Well, they’re here,” they said. “But one of them forgot their ID.”
I’m 105 flights up. The commute to get downstairs takes about five minutes, especially around that time. So I’m annoyed, obviously, because I have to go down now to sign these people in after I just told them to bring ID. I look at this desk assistant across from me, thinking maybe she’ll help out and go down, but she’s on the phone. She’s also about eight months pregnant. She’s a few weeks from maternity leave and she’s on the phone talking to a friend and she’s on a website looking at bassinets and cribs. A very nice girl expecting her first child. So how lazy am I? I decide to go myself. …
… I take these two elevator rides down. I take the elevator from 105 to 78, change, and take the express down to the ground. I got down to the lobby. Our elevator banks actually face the visitors’ gallery. And I started walking over to the visitors’ gallery, I’d say it’s about thirty yards, and they’re standing there waiting for me. And I remember yelling, “Which one of you knuckleheads forgot your ID?”
And as I say this, you hear this really loud screeching sound. I turn around and it’s kind of coming from the elevators. So I run away from it, like ten steps, and look back. And the elevators are free-falling. Then, from the middle elevator bank, not the one I came down on, but from the middle one, a huge fireball explodes in the lobby. This huge fireball is coming right toward me. People got incinerated. And I remember just looking at this thing, not feeling scared, but just sad because I knew I was going to die. But as quickly as it came toward me, it actually sucked back in on itself, and it was gone. It left a lot of smoke and everything was blown out, all the glass and revolving doors leading into the shopping area. All I felt was a big wave of heat come over me, like when you put your face too close to a fireplace. My customer and my general counsel and I just ran out. The three of us ran over the overpass to where the Financial Center is. We went down to where the marina is, where the yachts are. And that’s when we found out what happened, that a plane had hit the building.
I looked up and saw this big gaping hole. I said, “What’s that falling out of the window?”
My general counsel looks at me like I’m nuts. And he says, “That’s people jumping out.” …
Cantor Fitzgerald had four floors in the North Tower — 101, 103, 104, and 105. Nobody got out on those floors. Everyone who was upstairs perished. There were a lot of phone calls to wives and husbands at around nine o’clock saying good-bye, as though they knew they were going to die.
Remembering The Jumpers
On another note, there is an old SNL skit where, coincidentally, John Belushi explains how the Twin Towers will come down via SkyLab:
WHERE WAS GOD?
Where was God at 9/11? Columbia asks the tough questions to an Oxford scholar on 9/11 at a Veritas event:
Listen… I do not gloat in the idea that Hillary is seriously ill. What I cannot stand in reality and why I post such a video is to make the point that Democrats decried John McCain as being too old and possibly ill due to his age. Read a couple examples CNN quotes: Listen to some Democrats, and you’ll think the 71-year-old Arizona senator is a man lost in a perpetual fog. He is “confused” and has “lost his bearings” or is “out of touch.”
In the wake of a well-publicized coughing fit that has caused the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to redouble its efforts to dispel concerns about her health, a new survey of doctorshas bad news for the campaign.
A survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons found that 71 percent of the doctors responding agreed that concerns over Clinton’s health are “serious — could be disqualifying for the position of President of the U.S.”
You never hear the media badger her on her age and obvious illness. You never hear her dedicated followers (the ones who badgered McCain) press her on her age and obvious illness. Like the “racism thing” with Obama, I will tuck this away as a card to bring out in future elections. Until then, “enjoy” the video below:
Mark Levin played a couple excerpts from Trump’s Values Voter Summit (watch the full speech). Good points and it makes you support Trump in some of his key positions he is FINALLY elucidating on.
California’s annual statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventory is an important tool for establishing historical emission trends and tracking California’s progress toward the goal set by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).The law set a target of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
[….]
Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. recently established a 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goal of 40 percent below 1990 levels, an interim target toward meeting the 2050 goal of reducing emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels.
John and Ken discuss how Governor Jerry Brown may have just bankrupted California.
Some main points about the bill:
➤ The new SB 32 requires a massive 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, with a deadline of December 31, 2030. The Bee reports that the new measure gives CARB extended authority to force the extreme reductions upon Californians without setting the parameters of those regulations …. Two related bills, AB 1550 and AB 2722, set out the wealth redistribution piece of the regulatory scheme, taking moneys collected in fines and through extorting businesses and forcing those funds to be spent in districts represented by many legislators voting for SB 32… (BREITBART)
➤ According to author Brad Plumer: “It’s hard to overstate how ambitious this is. Few countries have ever achieved cuts this sharp while enjoying robust economic growth.” The only countries (France and Sweden) that have achieved this, he wrote, did so by increasing their use of nuclear power — something off the table in anti-nuke California. “It will mean reshaping virtually every facet of the state economy, from buildings to transportation to farming and beyond,” he added. “California is essentially offering itself as a guinea pig in the world’s most important policy experiment.”…. What’s really troubling, however, is what these measures will mean for the state’s economy. The additional costs imposed by CARB bureaucrats will make it tougher to keep manufacturing and agricultural jobs from fleeing. Additional land-use edicts mandating fewer suburban developments and an end to major freeway construction will mean higher home costs and more congestion. Radical policies will lead to radical results. This isn’t scare mongering. It’s just the truth. (AMERICAN SPECTATOR)
➤ But it was driven by legislators in poor communities who are critical of the current cap-and-trade system that, according to the Capital & Main blog, “allows big polluters to pollute as long as they pay for credits or offsets purchased in other parts of the state or country. AB 197 requires that the (CARB)… target direct reductions at both stationary and mobile sources in those communities.” Another apparent goal is to force CARB to spend money from the cap-and-trade system more equitably in poorer legislative districts. (IBID.)
Energy prices, food prices, car costs, etc., will all go up. As California becomes more expensive as a state to do business in, MORE businesses will leave and jobs will be lost. It will leave only the giants in business being able to pay for the extra costs, thus, whittling out competition. California will have a few large corporations left in it as well as a few large unions… all subsidizing the Democrat Party to force competition out of their markets.
…“You’re going to be increasing the cost of moving goods through California ports,” said Jock O’Connell, a trade expert at Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics.
Feisty competitors on the South and East coasts have been eating into Los Angeles-area ports’ business, and in June the Panama Canal opened wider channels that may divert more traffic away.
“At some point [importers] reach a tipping point where they say it makes more sense to send goods through Houston, or Charleston,” O’Connell says.
That could be a threat to the hundreds of thousands of Californians who are directly or indirectly employed by port business. “You wind up jeopardizing an awful lot of blue collar workers,” O’Connell said.
Brown dismissed the concerns of business leaders as “very dubious”. This, despite the fact an analysis cited in the article indicates that implementation could cost the state over 300,000 jobs.
This is really a back-door way to implement the previously failed SB 350 and more in order to tax people for California’s unfunded liabilities. JOHN & KEN previously discussed SB 350 noting the harmful effects it would have.
In an excellent article over at the WASHINGTON TIMES, we read this:
Fleeing California: A hostile business climate sends more companies to friendlier states
More than a century ago, Roy Farmer, 20, went door-to-door in Los Angeles with his bags of home-roasted coffee beans. By the 1930s, Farmer Brothers was selling coffee to restaurants throughout the nation. Today the company employs 1,200 men and women and generates $200 million in annual sales to restaurants, convenience stores, hospitals, hotels and universities.
But after surviving depressions, recessions, earthquakes and wars, Farmer Brothers is leaving California, finally driven out by high taxes and oppressive regulations.
The company says it’s fleeing in search of a place where business is appreciated. Relocating its corporate headquarters and distribution facilities from to a friendlier location, Farmer Brothers expects to save $15 million a year. Company executives are looking at Dallas and Oklahoma City. The relocation will bear real consequences for California. Nearly 350 workers will lose their well-paying jobs in Los Angeles alone….
Of course I have been talking about this for years (CARL’S JR. as one example), and posting audio on this issue for years as well…
When California makes it too expensive for alternative energy companies to survive in this state… you know the chickens are coming home to roost!
APPENDIX
The question my wife asked, very astutely, is what are these numbers we are talking about. Here they are:
…Getting to the 2030 and 2050 cuts that California seeks will require steeper cuts than the state has yet experienced over an extended period. Reducing greenhouse gases to the 2020 levels ordered by AB 32 requires a cut of 5.5 percent between 2010 and 2020. Brown’s executive order requires a 40 percent cut below the 2020 target by 2030. That means, in theory, that California would need to reduce emissions about 7 times as quickly between 2020 and 2030 as between 2010 and 2020.
In practice, however, the acceleration may not be quite so dramatic. That’s because most experts expect California to come in below its 2020 targets. If, for example, California’s emissions come in at around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020, rather than at 431 (the figure needed to exactly meet its 2020 goal), California would need to cut emissions roughly three times faster between 2020 and 2030 than during the preceding decade.
Between 2030 and 2050, emissions will also need to decline much more quickly than has been the case in recent years.
These calculations come with one slight caveat: the state has specified its long-term goals only in terms of percentage reductions, rather than in terms of exact emissions figures. But the exact numbers, when they are formulated, are expected to be roughly what the percentages suggest (eg, around 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for 2030, and 85 metric tons in 2050).
Here is page one of a more bullet pointed and graphed path (click it for the PDF) to these reductions that are impossible and is only a way for the state to gain more monetary resources to pay for their B.S.
A mere 2% of the carbon emissions credits that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) put up for auction in May were sold. The quarterly auction raised only $10 million of the $500 million that CARB projected. That’s awful news for Democrats in Sacramento who planned to spend the windfall on high-speed rail, housing and electric-car subsidies. (WSJ)
According to the Vermont Senator’s website, the Democratic Party draft platform reads:
“Democrats believe that climate change is too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science, and support using every tool available to reduce emissions now.” (Global Warming Is Too Important To Wait For Democracy)
Too important to wait for Congress? Which is why stuff like the above have to be passed via executive order — like Jerry Brown did. Whether on the state or federal levels, Democrats love growing government and regulating every aspect of the citizens life… by fiat. King George is back. It is merely “King George” forcing policies the public would never approve of:
Brown appears bent on forcing cap-and-trade on Californians, stating last month that “they’re going to plead for a market system called cap-and-trade so they can respond in a way that’s more beneficial to their bottom line.” The Bee reported that Brown also lambasted his opponents in Sacramento, calling them “Trump-inspired acolytes,” but concluded that “they have been vanquished” with the passage of SB 32.
In an excellent post at CLIMATE UNPLUGGED, it is noted that this signing into law by fiat would still need to pass a “California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13”
In 2006, the California Legislature enacted AB 32, which mandated that statewide greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020. California’s cap & trade auction system followed. Last week the Legislature passed SB 32, which extends and deepens AB 32’s original mandate, requiring the state to further reduce emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030. This is ambitious, to say the least, in a state where all of the “low hanging fruit” (cheap emissions reduction) has presumably been harvested.
None of this is news. Nor is it news that the legality of the entire cap & trade structure is on thin ice. A California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13 (yes, that Prop 13, for those of you who remember it) insofar as AB 32 did not pass both houses of the Legislature with the requisite 2/3 vote needed for tax increases. And even if AB 32 survives, few lawyers expect the new, post-2020 authorization to pass the forthcoming Prop 26 challenge. Enacted after AB 32 (and so not applicable to it), Prop 26 was explicitly designed to close the many loopholes the politicians exploited to get around Prop 13’s vote requirements.
The “good” news for California is that if its cap & trade system gets overturned, the Air Resources Board must still hit the 2020 and 2030 targets. The bad news is that it will have to achieve truly massive emissions reductions at a breakneck pace solely via pure command and control regulations….
I hope the court sees the unconstitutionality [California’s constitution] of this and kills it all!
