NEW FIGURES ADD PIZZAZZ TO THE RUN FOR GOVERNOR

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NEW FIGURES ADD PIZZAZZ TO THE RUN FOR GOVERNOR”

 

It was only a matter of time before major new figures began to people California’s next run for governor, with its primary election coming up on June 2, 2026.

 

Until very recently, the race looked to become the most canned and staid major California contest in decades: A former state Senate president in Toni Atkins of San Diego, a termed out state schools superintendent in Tony Thurmond and a former Los Angeles mayor in Antonio Villaraigosa.

 

Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, sure to be well funded by her mega-developer dad, was not going to liven things up. Nor was ex-Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter, a failed U.S. Senate candidate. It looked even duller when state Attorney General Rob Bonta opted to stay put, choosing untold numbers of legal battles with President Trump over a run for governor.

 

None of these folks ever set themselves apart despite myriad opportunities. That made this race a natural to be livened up, and now it’s happening.

 

First, Kamala Harris began floating rumors of a campaign.  A former U.S. senator and onetime California state attorney general who as vice president barely failed (by 1.6 percent) in her 2024 run for president, she revived memories of another former vice president who ran for governor after failing in a presidential bid, but then lost – Richard Nixon in 1962.

 

His defeat prompted one of Nixon’s most bitter lines, directed originally at political reporter Richard Bergholz, a persistent critic: “You won’t have me to kick around anymore.” That turned out incorrect when Nixon ran for president again in 1968 and won.

 

So far, Harris is not a formal candidate, content for awhile to let others talk about her chances. But she’s acted very candidate-ish since her return home after leaving office, visiting disaster areas and glad-handing local elected officials.

 

Without any measurable effort, Harris stunned the field by pulling 57 percent in a February Emerson College poll where Porter ran a very distant second at 9 percent. Villaraigosa and Kounalakis tied for third, each with an almost invisible 4 percent.

 

That led San Diego Republican Richard Grenell, a longtime aide to President Trump now carrying out “special missions” like attaching conditions to federal disaster aid for California, to announce he “just might” join this race if Harris does. The next entrant was Chad Bianco, the always vocal ultra-conservative sheriff of Riverside County.

 

Given California’s top two “jungle primary” system, if two Republicans stay in the race, they could split the state’s relatively small GOP vote and allow a second Democrat into the November 2026 runoff election along with Harris.

 

This may be the real primary election contest next year. For example, it was only after all other significant Republicans left the U.S. Senate campaign last year that Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey could make the runoff over Porter and then get pasted by current Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff.

 

Sidelights may also pop up during the primary season, which will place no constraints on the celebrity publicity hounds who occasionally run in California. That could mean a run by the transgender Caitlyn Jenner, formerly named Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion once thought to rival the late Jim Thorpe as possibly the greatest athlete of all time.

 

Jenner came out as transgender in 2015 and seemingly has not stopped talking about herself since. She announced her new name soon after coming out, and then starred in her own short-lived TV show, “I am Cait.”

 

The show may not have lasted, but Jenner seemingly never stopped talking about herself. She tried politics, too, pulling 1 percent of the vote to replace current Gov. Gavin Newsom in the 2021 recall election, which Newsom easily stymied.

 

Early this winter, she began ranting on social media about taking on Harris, even bragging that “If I ran…against Harris, I would destroy her.”

 

Harris, Bianco and possibly Jenner are already livening up what began as the dullest major California campaign in decades, a contest where no early entrant had even appeared on a reality show.

 

But no race including Bianco or Jenner should ever be dull, and this one likely won’t be either.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NEW CARS ALL ELECTRIC BY 2035? MAYBE NOT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2023 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        "NEW CARS ALL ELECTRIC BY 2035? MAYBE NOT”

 

     California government bureaucrats call it the “Advanced Clean Car II Rule,” last August’s update to the state’s prior edict mandating that all new cars sold here be all-electric or plug-in hybrids by 2035. Between now and then, other benchmarks are also set, starting with 35 percent of new cars sold being EVs starting in 2026, just three years from today.

 

Since the rule passed, it’s been a theme for folks who like to bash California, from Texas to Florida to Ohio. They call it just one more unrealistic regulation making California a very tough place for businesses to operate.

 

        But it might not happen. And not merely because of doubts about the state's electric grid capacity to handle all that extra demand.

 

        With little fanfare, more than a dozen Republican state attorneys general just the other day filed a new court document claiming California’s move and the federal law that enabled it are unconstitutional.

 

        The top government lawyers from Texas, Ohio, West Virginia and others claim in their lawsuit that the waiver in the 1970 Clean Air Act giving California the right to regulate smog emissions from cars sold here “puts it on an uneven playing field compared to other states in violation of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution," also giving this state unique power to regulate global climate change.

 

        The Clean Air Act waiver, first signed by then-Republican President Richard Nixon and later renewed by every president except Donald Trump, has been the authority behind many edicts from the California Air Resources Board. Those rulings, starting in the early ‘70s, led to innovations like early smog control devices, catalytic converters, hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, EVs and plug-ins.

 

        Each move was protested at first by almost all automakers as either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but all have turned out fine.

 

        The California rules carry extra clout that infuriates officials of some other states for two reasons: 1) the California car market is so large that manufacturers who want to sell nationwide figure it’s cheaper to make all their cars conform to California rules than to build different models for different places, and 2) 16 other states and the District of Columbia now automatically adopt California’s automotive rules five years after they become effective here. Those states make up 40 percent of the American vehicle market.

 

        None of that will last if the Republican attorneys general get their way. They are working in the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia, from which both judges and cases often eventually move up to the Supreme Court.

 

        And the Supreme Court has been notably inconsistent on states’ rights since Trump’s three appointees provided it with a 6-3 conservative majority.

 

        That court has consistently upheld the California waiver in the Clean Air Act, but never with its current membership, dominated by conservative Republicans.

 

 

        So the survival of the waiver is not certain, despite the court’s putting abortion and other matters back under state jurisdiction. Not from a court whose majority justices took firearms policy out of state hands by making their preferences on carrying guns and other issues apply everywhere.

 

        It’s uncertain whether, when this case inevitably reaches them next year or in 2024, the Trump-appointed justices will essentially validate his attempt to take away California’s unique authority, which has led to both millions of cleaner cars and much cleaner air nationwide.

 

        For the waiver was originally granted by Nixon’s administration because of California’s unique geography, with many of its large cities, from Los Angeles to Sacramento to
Bakersfield and Fresno, sitting in basins where mountains or large ranges of hills hold smog in place for longer periods than in flatter environments, where any old wind can quickly blow it away.

 

        That’s why air is often dirtier in those California cities than in places like Cincinnati and Seattle, Portland, New Orleans or New York.

 

        Will the Supreme Court recognize that unique environments require unique tactics to retain their healthy environments? Or will the justices go along with states like West Virginia and Texas, which don’t mind smog so much because it doesn’t hang around very long.

 

        At stake here is a continuation of the drop in diseases from lung cancer to emphysema that has paralleled the advent of cleaner cars and light trucks. No one can yet know whether the Supreme Court majority will heed any of that.

       

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

DESAL LOSES URGENCY IN HYPER-WET WINTER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2017, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “DESAL LOSES URGENCY IN HYPER-WET WINTER”

          Here’s a  cold, wet reality: the more water in California’s reservoirs, the less urgency there is to build new ocean-water desalination plants that became a major talking point during the state’s long, parched years of drought, an ultra-dry period some folks insist has still not ended despite months of heavy rains.

Those record or near-record rains have replenished everything reservoirs lost over the last few years of drought, and sometimes more.

          Desalination is always tantalizing here because – like Samuel Coleridge’s ancient mariner, who complained of “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink” – Californians can see billions of acre feet of water every day in the form of the Pacific Ocean, complete with all its bays and estuaries.

          But that’s briny salt water, containing an array of minerals that make it almost as inaccessible today as it was to the parched, fictitious sailor of 187 years ago.

          It won’t necessarily stay that way. Whenever the price of other water goes up, desalinating Pacific waters becomes more enticing. It will become more so if the price of filtering minerals out of salt water drops.

          But if the price and availability of fresh water remains reasonable, as it surely will be this year, desal stays in the back seat.

          Yes, Boston-based Poseidon Water since late 2015 has operated the largest desalination plant in America on the coast at Carlsbad, just north of San Diego. The facility supplies almost 10 percent of the San Diego area’s water needs. That’s a region which has long wanted to be as independent as possible from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (often called the Met), through which it gets supplies from the State Water Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct. Expensive as Carlsbad water may be at about $2,200 per acre foot, it improves the San Diego County Water Authority’s negotiating position with the Met.

          During the drought, that water agency signed a contract with the plant operator to purchase at least 48,000 acre-feet per year of water, but it can also demand up to 56,000 acre-feet in any year it feels the need. An acre-foot of water contains about 330,000 gallons, about the amount a typical family uses in a year. That water costs more than $100 per acre-foot above the price of recycled water and about $1,000 more than reservoir water or supplies from the Met, approximately doubling water cost. The San Diego authority claims that its take from the Met has been overpriced for years, and now pays more than $300 per acre foot for Colorado River water bought from the Imperial Valley’s irrigation district, which reaches San Diego County via the Met’s aqueduct.


          At the depth of the drought, the Met paid some farmers in the Sacramento Valley an average of $694 per acre foot for parts of their supply. So even at drought-inflated prices, fresh surface water remained much cheaper than desalinated supplies.


          These numbers all establish that desalinated water is now by far the most expensive alternative California water districts can pursue. This is one reason a proposed desal plant at Huntington Beach in Orange County has run into resistance. Environmental problems are another: The Carlsbad plant was cited several times for environmental violations during its first few months of operation.


          But the price tag is the biggest problem. The Carlsbad plant cost $1 billion to build, with about $50 million in yearly operating costs. When treating wastewater or catching more storm runoff can keep supplies at acceptable levels, there’s no need to pay so much for desalination.


          But if new methods to purify sea water beyond the standard technique of reverse osmosis ever become workable, all bets will be off.


          Despite claims by some companies that they can desalinate water for less than $700 per acre foot, none has yet demonstrated it can do the job on the extremely large scale needed to assure California water supplies.


          Which means that more it rains, the more the prospects for new desalinated water supplies fall. But they will surely resurface the moment a new drought arrives.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PG&E GAS RATE REQUEST: NEW STANDARD FOR CHUTZPAH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “PG&E GAS RATE REQUEST: NEW STANDARD FOR CHUTZPAH”

          At the very moment that California’s largest utility company was being assessed a $14 million fine for failing to report discovery of flawed records on its gas pipelines in the San Francisco Peninsula town of San Carlos, the same company was asking for well over $1 billion in rate increases to pay for repairs to that very same pipeline system.

          That alone would demonstrate remarkable chutzpah, the Yiddish word for sheer audacity and gall in overstepping the bounds of accepted behavior. But at the same time late last year, the company, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., was also asking the state Public Utilities Commission for a 12 percent increase in its ordinary rates.

          If PG&E gets away with much of what it now seeks, you can bet on similar breaks for the other big California gas utilities, Southern California Gas Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric, both owned by Sempra Energy, which has annual revenues of more than $10 billion.

          It’s certainly not the first time PG&E, the San Francisco-based outfit whose pipeline exploded in 2010, killing eight persons and destroying 38 homes in San Bruno, has shown chutzpah, sometimes interpreted as insolence. “Negligent” was the word employed by the National Transportation Safety Board to describe PG&E’s conduct (along with a finding of lax enforcement by the PUC).

          This, after all, is the same company that got away with using obscure rules to declare bankruptcy while sitting on plenty of resources during the energy crunch of 2000-2001, a move that allowed it to restructure itself for greater future profit.

          But bankruptcy did not have a direct adverse effect on the consumers – residential and commercial – who finance PG&E. The requested new rates would.

          For much of the repair and maintenance work PG&E (like the other gas companies) wants customers to pay for now should have been done years ago with billions of dollars in maintenance money consumers have paid via their monthly bills since the 1950s. It’s still unclear just what PG&E and the others did with the cash earmarked for maintenance, but plainly, not all was spent on that.

          All of which means PG&E has not deviated from its long-stated goal of having its customers put up new funds for it to bring its system up to the level of safety it should have had all along.

          The $14 million fine utility commissioners assessed against PG&E for its San Carlos misbehavior may signal some change in the attitude of the PUC, which has long given its obligation to keep the utilities financially sound a higher priority than its other big mission, keeping prices in line for customers.

          “This penalty is to serve as a deterrent against similar future behavior,” said Commissioner Mark Ferron.

          But only time and the PUC’s final decisions on both PG&E rate increase requests will determine whether the commission’s kabuki dance of the last six decades will continue. This dance has long seen utility companies make large rate increase requests only to see the commission cut them down.

          Of course, no one but company executives ever has known how much they really needed to remain solvent – all we know is that no California utility has ever gone under, despite PG&E’s highly questionable 2000s-era venture into bankruptcy, a trip to financial purgatory that somehow did not cause even one of the firm’s top executives to lose his job.

          What we do know is that consumers who paid billions in maintenance money over many, many years would have every reason for righteous indignation if asked to pay for upgrading the pipeline systems of any of the utilities.

          The same, of course, would be true if Southern California Edison and SDG&E customers who have paid for years into a fund for use in the eventual decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, were forced to pay extra because now it really is closed. In both cases, the blunders leading to the problems were done by the companies, not their customers. Which means they and their stockholders, not the customers, should be paying the price of failure, whatever it might be.

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    Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net