WHAT A GOV. NEWSOM MIGHT BE LIKE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WHAT A GOV. NEWSOM MIGHT BE LIKE”

          As the fall election season begins officially this week, it’s high time to look closely at what a Gov. Gavin Newsom might be like.

          That’s partly because Newsom held leads of anywhere from 25 to 30 percentage points over Republican businessman John Cox in polls taken during the summer, drawing about 55 percent support –well over the 50 percent polling threshold that’s often viewed as decisive when campaigns enter their homestretch.

          By now, many Californians should already have acquired some sense of the potential new governor. He’s traveled to almost every corner of the state since declaring for the office about two years ago, long before any of the Democratic primary election rivals he easily bested last June.

          To get to know the state even better, the former San Francisco mayor lived long periods in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, working from the home of his in-laws. Newsom said he needed to develop more knowledge of and support in Southern California. This paid off in the primary, when he beat former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa by 10 percent in Villaraigosa’s home county.

          But most Californians likely still don’t know what to expect from a Gov. Newsom. So it pays to examine where he stands on some of the state’s major issues, items he explained in several interviews over the last year or so.

          For one thing, don’t expect Newsom to abandon the widely-criticized bullet train project, even though he well knows its trains will never reach the average speeds promised in Proposition 1A exactly 10 years ago. That’s in part because he sees high speed rail as a possible solution to problems major corporations have with recruiting because of sky-high real estate prices in Silicon Valley and the rest of the San Francisco Peninsula.

          He puts a special priority on links the bullet train could create between the Peninsula and the Central Valley.

          “If you get valley-to-valley transportation at very high speeds, you can get huge economic growth on that corridor,” Newsom said. “I think this should lead to some renewed optimism about what high speed rail can do for the state.”

          So instead of being “Brown’s train” or “Arnold’s train” before that, the bullet train may soon become Newsom’s property, for better or worse. For sure, it could make the housing markets of Central Valley cities like Tracy, Merced, Madera, Modesto, Manteca and Turlock into bedroom communities for Silicon Valley. But only after engineers solve the problems of traversing steep mountainsides near Highway 152 in Pacheco Pass.

          Newsom also proposes to tie funding for local transportation projects to local governments’ willingness to build new housing and help resolve California’s burgeoning problem of homelessness.

          “Transit dollars have to be contingent on housing production,” he said. “You cannot de-link the two issues.”

          But he opposed a springtime legislative proposal to rezone all areas within a half-mile radius of rapid transit stops and heavily-used bus stops for tall new buildings with thousands of apartments, most of them quite small.

          “There has to be a lot of regional discretion here,” said the onetime mayor, who relished independent local authority while in that office, using it to begin the national movement toward legalizing same-sex marriages, among other items.

          If he becomes governor at the same time as voters repeal the state’s year-old 12-cent per gallon gasoline tax increase, expect him to try to find other new money for transportation projects.

          “We have a transportation backlog that everyone experiences every day,” Newsom said, referencing his own sojourns in Los Angeles traffic jams.

          But Newsom remains noncommittal on the so-called California WaterFix, which would see local water districts assess taxpayers billions of dollars to fund two tunnels carrying Sacramento River water around or under the Delta formed by that river and the San Joaquin, east of San Francisco Bay.

          If there’s one thing to expect from Newsom, it’s probably the unexpected. For sure, no one voting for him as San Francisco mayor foresaw him legalizing same-sex marriage or spurring a universal health care system for the city.

          So no one can be certain of what he might tackle if and when he takes over California’s top office. Which might even include a run for president, in spite of his adamant current denials of interest.

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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

Suggested pull-out quote: “Transit dollars have to be contingent on housing production.” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.

TRUMP THREATENS STATE’S CLEAN AIR EFFORTS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “TRUMP THREATENS STATE’S CLEAN AIR EFFORTS”

          Californians interested in keeping this state’s toughest-in-the-world standards for automotive smog pollution heaved a sigh of relief just over one year ago, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency reversed an earlier decision to impose new national ozone standards on all cars sold in America.

          That relief turns out to have been premature.

          For on the same day this summer that the petulant and thin-skinned President Trump began revoking security clearances from former government officials who have criticized him, his EPA also announced plans to end California’s authority for setting its own smog standards.

          That will take some doing, of course, because the federal Clean Air Act signed by the late Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970 specifically gives California that power. Yes, the state must get EPA waivers to take particular actions, but the landmark law makes that virtually automatic.

          And 13 other states now regularly adopt California’s anti-smog regulations soon after they become effective here, with Colorado poised to make it 14. All those states are joining California in resisting the EPA’s latest threat. Many foreign countries with smog problems – Greece, France and Germany, for three examples – have also adopted most California regulations.

          Of course, every time California proposes a new regulation, carmakers like General Motors, Toyota and Daimler-Benz claim their sales will drop due to costs of the change. But more than 2 million cars and trucks were sold in California last year, a record. And sales in the other states using California rules are also solid. Still, Trump aides argue they would be even better if prices were cut via less regulation.

          When President George W. Bush tried to deny a waiver for greenhouse gas regulation in early 2008, he lost in court. But today’s U.S. Supreme Court has a different – largely anti-regulation – majority, so there’s a possibility Trump could ultimately win on this issue, despite what the law says. The best hope for California and its cohort of cooperating states is to keep their lawsuit going for at least two years, betting Trump will lose in 2020.

          Over the decades, California’s unique authority producede the first primitive smog control devices, catalytic converters, hybrids like the strong-selling Toyota Prius, plug-in hybrids, electric cars and the current first generation of super-clean hydrogen-powered vehicles. Just as important has been a steady reduction in automotive smog, allowing residents of many urban areas once covered with murky brown air to see nearby mountain ranges and breathe significantly cleaner air.

          Now the EPA threatens to revoke California’s authority to limit carbon emissions from tailpipes and force carmakers to sell specific percentages of zero-emission vehicles here, thus reversing major advances.

          Trump, with support from a few automakers, wants uniform national smog standards, despite the Clean Air Act’s recognition that California smog problems are unique and more serious than any other state’s.

          For sure, if the new Trump plan goes forward, it will slow the pace of automotive cleanups long set by California’s Air Resources Board.

          One serious question, since automaker warnings of diminished profits and sales due to smog regulation have never panned out, is whether Trump is merely being vengeful in going after California despite his Republican Party’s longstanding support for state’s rights.

          After all, this state voted against him by about 3 million votes in 2016 and he remains abysmally unpopular here. The suspicion that he’s merely seeking revenge by trying to reduce the quality of life here is fueled by his consistent targeting of any person or country that dares criticize or oppose him.

          No, say supporters of his proposed change. “The administration is fulfilling its commitment to reinstate midterm evaluation of future fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards,” said Mitch Bainwol, head of the Alliance of Automobile Makers, which includes GM, Fiat-Chrysler, Ford, Mitsubishi and Daimler-Benz, among others.

          The bottom line: Scaling back today’s rules would put America far behind other countries in seeking reduced dependence on oil and gasoline. Germany and France, for example, will ban sales of all gas-powered cars with the next two to three decades.

          Which makes the proposed Trump move not only counter to the Clean Air Act, but also would move America backward environmentally while making it a less healthy country to live in than it is today.

         

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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

WESTERN REGIONAL GRID PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO REALITY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WESTERN REGIONAL GRID PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO REALITY”

          Almost daily, California’s entry into a western regional electricity grid grows nearer.

          As the legislative bill to move the state into a deal with coal-oriented states like Utah, Idaho and Nevada moves toward passage, the state also grows nearer to a real risk of repeating the energy crunch that produced big rate increases and weeks of brownouts here in 2000 and 2001.

          There’s also great irony in the strong support this bill, known as AB 813, draws from Gov. Jerry Brown, the moving force behind California’s steady progress toward getting most of its electricity from renewable sources including solar, wind, hydro-power and underground geothermal heat. For the bill carries a major risk of invalidating California’s green energy initiatives.

That’s despite steady denials from the Brown-appointed Independent System Operator, the agency which has run the state’s electric grid since the energy crunch with the specific mission of preventing repeats of the market manipulation which caused that crisis.

And yet…Brown and his ISO board members are backing the regional grid, claiming it might save California consumers as much as $1.5 billion a year. That’s less than $20 a year per electricity customer, not much of a benefit compared to the risks involved.

One reason the bill draws strong legislative support is that simple word “regional.” Bigger is better and more efficient, goes the frequent belief, even though that does not always prove true.

One problem for California in this proposal is that the new western regional board of directors would be appointed largely by the electric industry. That’s like letting Enron or its modern equivalent run the grid. It’s giving the fox control of the henhouse.

The potential danger to California’s green energy rules comes just as former state Senate President Kevin de Leon, now running for the U.S. Senate, pushes hard for a commitment to 100 percent green energy by 2050, just 32 years from now. De Leon claims there’s a new urgency for clean energy, spurred by the current symptoms of climate change, like frequent record-level heat and the related wave of huge wildfires.

But the regional grid would allow any such rules to be overridden by the Federal Energy Regulatory commission, now led by appointees of President Trump and recently showing a great desire to keep polluting coal-fired power plants in business indefinitely.

Earlier this year, for example, FERC passed a requirement that regional transmission organizations (like the western grid) counteract state-level renewable energy policies. This essentially makes FERC a strong opponent of California’s clean-power rules and the regional grid would allow it to countermand any such standards.

          It’s hard to see why legislators would essentially give over one of their significant powers to an agency currently determined to undermine California’s goals. Yet, backers say “Regionalization…would mobilize more states to engage with Trump if FERC were to do something crazy.” How likely to defy Trump are the solidly Trump-backing states of Utah and Idaho?

          The regional grid bill also says big utilities, like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, would be entitled to “just and reasonable compensation” for their past investments in transmission lines if control of the state’s grid changes.

          Why include that provision when the costs of those facilities are paid by consumers through their monthly bills, not by the companies themselves?

          If the utilities could somehow get double-paid for their power lines, that might explain why they’re not opposing regionalization.

          Plus, there has so far been no thorough public analysis of the full financial impact of regionalization. For sure, until such a report is made and proven reliable, this plan should go no farther.

          But chances are it will. For the Legislature has a history of passing plans and attempting to deal with fiscal consequences later on. That’s what happened with the disastrous electric deregulation plan passed in 1998 that led to the energy crunch. Several legislative committees did the same this year in passing single-payer health proposals with no definite sources of financing.

          The bottom line: A regional energy grid is simply too risky for California, even if there’s some (yet unproven) possibility it might save customers a dollar or two each month.

           

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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

PROP. 8 GOES TOO FAR, INTERFERES WITH MEDICAL CARE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “PROP. 8 GOES TOO FAR, INTERFERES WITH MEDICAL CARE”

          Suppose for a moment that your favorite relative – father, mother, aunt, uncle, brother or sister – were getting urgently needed cancer treatment and California’s government suddenly decreed the doctor could not include his assistant’s pay in any fees he charged. So he fires his assistant and then has less time to devote to caring for your loved one.

          Would that constitute interference with the doctor-patient relationship, an act no sane politician would ever want to be accused of?

          And yet… well over 569,000 Californians signed off on an initiative that would do essentially the same thing to the 139,000 patients now getting treatment at the state’s more than 550 dialysis clinics. These are places where people whose kidneys have failed get their blood cleansed of toxic substances several times weekly, the only way they can survive more than a few weeks.

          This initiative will be on the November ballot as Proposition 8, and it’s almost a sure thing that dialysis patients will get lower quality care than they do today if it passes.

          Yes, there are flaws in today’s system. For one example, two multinational companies, the German-based Fresenius Medical Care and the Denver-based DaVita Corp., operate 70 percent of California dialysis centers, places where patients are hooked up to blood-cleansing machines via large needles inserted into their arms or chests.

          That creates a non-competitive situation and most likely drives up the cost of dialysis treatment, from which a kidney transplant is the only way to escape alive. There are legitimate complaints about staffing levels and the fact that some patients must drive many miles to get treatments.

          But Prop. 8 could make a flawed situation much worse.

          Sponsored primarily by the Service Employees International Union, which would like to recruit most dialysis technicians, it would forbid clinics from charging insurance companies for the work of physician medical directors vital to maintaining quality care. It would not allow clinics to charge for the work of facility administrators, security personnel and professional services like accounting, payroll and legal expenses.

          It does this not by naming specific areas where payments are banned, but by listing classes of work where payment is allowed. The measure does not cover the substantial percentage of California patients whose treatments are covered under Medicare and Medi-Cal.

          It also limits what clinics can charge to 15 percent above what is spent directly for patient care by nurses and technicians and the equipment and supplies they use. Clinic directors and the doctors who oversee operations would have to be paid from that 15 percent, leaving almost no room for profits.

          If Prop. 8 passes, Fresenius and DaVita, both very profit-conscious companies that have bought up many previously doctor-owned dialysis clinics, might sell off many of their facilities to buyers with unknown qualifications.

          So it’s no wonder most physician groups oppose the measure, for which the SEIU had already spent more than $5 million as of early August. They contend Prop. 8’s strict rules would force clinics to cut back staff, including supervising nurses who often are vital to solving patients’ problems. And that, they say, could reduce access to dialysis centers.

          Said Dr. Aimee Moulin, president of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, “This proposition will leave this fragile population no choice but to go to the emergency room for treatment, or increase their threat of life-threatening complications. Treating dialysis patients in the emergency room is more expensive and drives up the cost of…the entire health care system.”

          Added kidney specialist Byron Wong MD of Berkeley in an essay, “The (payments allowed) would not cover the cost of providing high-quality care…Patients would have to travel farther…and chances would increase that they will miss a treatment.”

          In short, no previous ballot measure has ever attempted to interfere so strongly with the medical care of any one patient group. That makes Prop. 8 a bad precedent which could lead to more interference in other types of care. It deserves a strong “no” vote.

          (Full disclosure: Columnist Elias has had a kidney transplant since 1997. He underwent regular dialysis treatments for many months prior to his transplant.)

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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

HIGH TIME FARMS ABANDON NAZI-DERIVED NERVE GAS

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2018 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “HIGH TIME FARMS ABANDON NAZI-DERIVED NERVE GAS”

          After almost 15 years of squabbling over whether the federal Environmental Protection Agency should ban the nerve gas pesticide chlorpyrifos from fields and groves in California and elsewhere, a federal appeals court has now ruled that it must issue a ban within 60 days.

          President Trump’s administration appears all but certain to appeal that ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, either taking the case straight to the U.S. Supreme Court or to an 11-judge “en banc” panel of judges from the same circuit that ruled the pesticide must go.

          But despite any delays, the handwriting is clearly on the wall for the California farm that use more than 1 million pounds of the chemical on everything from broccoli and melons to nuts and oranges. The pesticide is used most heavily in Kern, Tulare and Monterey counties.

          It gives the lie to the old saying that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” as there are proven links between this noxious substance and neurodevelopmental disorders affecting the brain and nervous system, including autism and intellectual and behavioral disabilities. Small children are most affected.

          This product, primarily manufactured by the Dow Chemical Co., which once produced the infamous chemical weapon napalm, is not your ordinary pest killer. It is an organophosphate very similar to and based upon the nerve gas Zyklon B used by Nazi Germany to execute six million Jews and eight million other victims in its notorious death camps.

          If it were still called by its Nazi name, there would be no tolerance for using this chemical.

          But because it’s effective and has a complicated-sounding name in today’s use, many farmers embrace it. Never mind that in May 2017, 50 farm workers exposed to its spraying near Bakersfield suffered immediate symptoms like vomiting, nausea and vomiting. No one knows what long-term effects the spray might have on them, and that’s just one example.

          Trump’s disgraced former EPA director Scott Pruitt knew most of this before he ruled in early 2017 that use of chlorpyrifos could continue nationally – just weeks after a lengthy private meeting with Dow’s chairman.

          Now it’s a sure bet the EPA will appeal the court ruling, delaying a ban indefinitely.

          But the decision still lets farmers know they can’t keep using this stuff forever. Even if Trump wins reelection in 2020, his time in office will be up no later than early 2025 and given the history of this pesticide and the strength of the negative evidence, its days are surely numbered.

          And farmers have alternatives. They can fight insects with botanically sourced pesticides including cinnamon oil and garlic oil. State officials report some have already switched to another family of insecticides known as neonicitinoids. One problem with that family: It can threaten bees, even if it’s easier on people.

          Of course, many farms using chlorpyrifos are owned by the same people and companies who have long argued that water distribution in California favors fish over people, particularly resenting protection of the silvery, minnow-like Delta smelt.

          Are these same folks now going to argue for favoring bees over people?

          It’s also true that the former Barack Obama administration dragged its feet on the chlorpyrifos issue so long that in a 2015 hearing by a Ninth Circuit panel, longtime appellate Judge Wallace Tashima scolded an EPA lawyer about the eight years the agency had then worked on a possible ban. “I think this is a pretty miserable record,” said Tashima.

          And a scientific panel of California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment earlier this year voted unanimously to place chlorpyrifos on the list of dangerous substances under the 1986 Proposition 65. That group included professors from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Davis, along with a representative of the pharmaceutical firm Genentech.

          All this makes it plain spraying of chlorpyrifos will end pretty soon.

          Farmers who don’t recognize this now, especially after the appellate decision, could be left struggling to find a substitute when the inevitable ban arrives. They’re better off if they act now, getting ahead of the game and maybe even making hay by advertising safer food products.

         

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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

HOW SAFE ARE STATE PARKS?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “HOW SAFE ARE STATE PARKS?”

          From Anderson Marsh State Historic Park in Lake County and Woodson Bridge State Recreation Area on the Sacramento River in Tehama County. From the vast Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in San Diego County to Point Lobos State Reserve in Monterey County and Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County.

          View California’s far-flung 280-unit State Park system either alphabetically or geographically, and you see a resource unparalleled in any other state and hard to match in any nation around the world. There are dune buggy tracks in the deserts and pristine redwood groves near the North Coast. Historic resources from the oldest active Chinese temple in the West to the Pio Pico House in downtown Los Angeles.

          What they have in common is a commitment for preservation by the state and a responsibility for the safety of the more than 60 million persons who use them yearly.

          Even before the late June shooting death of a father of two from Irvine while fast asleep in a campground at Malibu Creek State Park near Calabasas, there was reason to question the safety and upkeep of the State Park system.

          A reader from Davis wrote this column just after that unsolved murder complaining of “the terror tales about broken bathrooms, broken picnic tables, impassable trails due to fallen trees,” but griped most harshly about “the total lack of security due to the paucity of rangers, particularly overnight.”

          It turns out the reader was absolutely correct. For this year, the Parks Department reports, it has 484 peace officer rangers on duty. That’s 72 fewer than in 2012. It’s an average of less than two rangers per park unit, charged with protecting the parks and their visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s almost an impossible task.

          Months before the murder at Malibu Creek, the rangers’ organization, the Resource Protection Peace Officers Assn., complained online about not having enough people to contend with stabbings, domestic violence, jogger assaults, the occasional high speed chase and, rarely, shootings.

          Stopping short of actually admitting it has a safety problem, the Parks Department now says a budget increase it just received will allow expansion of its force to more than 600 peace officer rangers by the end of the fiscal year next summer.

          Reported Gloria Sandoval, the department’s deputy director for communications, “California State Parks is actively taking steps to fill 88 vacant peace officer positions,” pointing to a recruiting campaign launched in April aiming to hire those 88 and another 54 authorized in the new budget. “That would be 626 peace officer positions authorized and expected to be filled by the end of the current budget year.”

          This would still be less than three rangers per park unit. When some parks expand to populations of 8,000 or more on holiday weekends, the parks can’t provide anything like comprehensive patrols and protection.

          But that’s probably inevitable for this stepchild of a state agency, one with enormous responsibilities but very few funds to carry them out. That status is one reason the department depends heavily on volunteer campground hosts in full-fledged state parks and volunteer park hosts in many other locations.

          Says the Parks Department website, “Volunteer host positions are available in over 100 parks. Host duties vary according to each park but generally include providing visitor information, staffing visitor centers and museums, maintenance projects and general housekeeping. Most hosts work approximately 20 hours a week and, in exchange for those services, the hosts are provided with a campsite during their stay.”

          That’s a lot of benefits to the state and its park users for no money at all.

          The volunteers are not equipped to maintain park facilities from picnic tables to rest rooms. So as budgets shrank during the recession and afterward, some parks became decrepit, almost derelict. Not the best way to present California to its millions of visitors.

          The Parks Department insists it has now begun fighting its way back, with a budget almost $200 million higher than six years ago at recession’s end. That and the increased user fees called for in the same budget should see fresh paint and smoother plumbing in many places.

          But the number of peace officer rangers remains woefully adequate, even if all open positions are filled this year.

         

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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

MASSIVE EARLY FIRES SHOW MERIT IN STATE’S TRUMP RESPONSE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “MASSIVE EARLY FIRES SHOW MERIT IN STATE’S TRUMP RESPONSE”

          No state has been more visible than California in resisting the environmental policies of President Trump, filing 38 lawsuits by the beginning of this month. Now the state’s massive early fire season is demonstrating the merit of those legal actions.

          For every authority analyzing the unprecedented level of early summer blazes here and around the world agrees that one major cause is heat – record heat that has beset almost every place in the world from Switzerland to Hong Kong, from San Francisco to parts of Finland north of the Arctic Circle.

          Yes, Finland, where Trump staged his lugubrious July summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has seen temperatures in the 90s this year, for the first time in recorded history.

          Meanwhile, England sweated through a record heat wave, while Greece saw the deadliest fires in its long history and Europe’s worst since 1900. Several prominent waterfalls in Switzerland fed by Alpine snowmelt stopped flowing months earlier than usual.

          And then there’s California, where at one time in July, 19 wildfires burned simultaneously, taking well over 1,000 homes and some lives.

          Scientists at the state universities of Colorado, Nebraska and Nevada (Reno) report regional temperature averages in the West have increased by 2 degrees since the 1970s, resulting in drier and more combustible plant growth. At the same time, NASA scientists say this climate change helped kill thousands of trees and bushes in California’s mountains, providing unprecedented amounts of tinder.

          Rather than act to help mitigate this crisis, Trump’s administration has taken myriad actions appearing to further it. Trump is trying to roll back automotive emission standards. He’s shrunk several national monuments to make way for mining. The President ended NASA’s climate monitoring program, a head-in-the-sand move that allows him to keep denying climate change. He’s cut programs designed to find new renewable energy sources and shut down instruments on existing satellites that measure heat on the earth’s surface.

          He’s loosened regulations on toxic emissions from industrial sources and dropped climate change from the official list of threats to national security.

          California is resisting some of that, but its lawsuits are likely just a delaying action ultimately doomed to failure when they reach the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Trump has nominated two judges long opposed to environmental regulations.

          That can only help things get worse and hotter before they get cooler and better. But victims of the fires who lose homes and businesses and loved ones will not be able to sue Trump or his appointees for helping cause their woes because it’s difficult to parse out a direct link between, say, enabling toxic emissions in Pennsylvania and the degree of fury in a California fire.

          But there is a connection, and virtually every other government in the world besides ours has seen it and agreed to act on it. Even China, long noted for high levels of smog and other pollutants in its cities and countryside.

          If climate change could cause cool and foggy San Francisco to see record heat reach 106 over last year’s Labor Day weekend, then it likely also is one reason there is less snow on the Alps and the Canadian Rockies now than 10 years ago and also why it’s difficult to see a glacier anymore from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.

          The lesson of all this is that if Trump and the West Virginia coal miners who overwhelmingly voted for him in the last election see no harm in greenhouse gases they are creating and furthering, California has no choice but to resist.

          The lawsuits at the heart of such resistance won’t end the far longer fire seasons that have become a regular feature of California life, but they may help the world fend off an even bigger crisis than it faces right now, even if Trump and his many supporters choose to ignore what’s before them daily.

          After all, this is a President who exhorted a crowd the other day, “Don’t believe what you see…” It was reminiscent of the joke about the husband, caught in flagrante and denying anything untoward, asking his wife, “Who are you going to believe: me or your lying eyes?”

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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, go to www.californiafocus.net