ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL BLOGS

SB 827 IS LAW

    Governor Schwarzenegger has signed the bill into law (on Sunday, October 11).  See post below for a discussion of the bill.

AQMD-RELATED RELIEF IS ON THE GOVERNOR'S DESK

SB 827 is on the Governor’s desk

    Readers may remember that, recently, I wrote about the problem for many businesses and government entities as a result of a State Court ruling holding that the AQMD’s issuance of “offset” credits violates the California Environmental Quality Act, or “CEQA” and imposing a moratorium on the issuance of such credits.  Since such credits are, as a practical matter, required in order for such places to operate under California pollution laws, and since with the moratorium the only place to obtain such credits would be on the open market at incredibly expensive prices, the continued operations of several thousand facilities within the AQMD jurisdiction was threatened.

    I also noted that Senator Roderick D, Wright (D-Inglewood) had introduced legislation that would, despite the Court ruling, provide at least interim relief (while the long-term effects of the Court ruling are sorted out) by re-authorizing the AQMD offset credit allowance.  The legislation has passed both houses of the Legislature and now awaits the Governor’s signature.

    As you may be aware, however, the Governor has threatened not to act on the approximately 700 bills awaiting his decision by a Sunday, October 11, 2009 deadline unless the Legislature first deals with the State’s water supply crisis.  So the fate of SB 827 is far from certain as this column is published.

This post is adapted from a portion of my most recent weekly column for The warner center News, The Valley vantage and The Las Virgenes Enterprise, a group of local papers published in the San Feranndo Valley, California.

EVEN BBC IS NO LONGER SURE ABOUT "GLOBAL WARMING"...

Although political correctness has held that the debate over global warming is over (man is warming up the planet), increasingly there is evidence that we are actually in a period of global cooling.

The only thing really warming up may be the continued debate over this evidence. In an article entitled "What happened to global warming?" published on October 9, 2009 by the BBC, the BBC's climate correspondent notes:

 For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

...

...last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

    The man-made-global warming advocates, the article points out, are still convinced of their science; but the author indicates the issue is no longer free from doubt.