With months of contentious hearings ahead this summer, state and federal officials this week filed documents laying out their case that construction of two huge tunnels through the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would not harm north state water users. In late July, the State Water Resources Control Board will begin a series of
The easing of California’s drought has boosted the state’s early spring hydropower generation to its highest level since 2011, helping it to recover from a 15-year low reached last year. But hydroelectricity production is not expected to improve much overall this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The West’s four-year drought desiccated many
The state Senate passed a bill to require environmental reviews for a controversial plan to ship coal by rail through Oakland, which has pitted legislators in Sacramento against a developer who is closely connected to Gov. Jerry Brown. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, could be the first major hurdle for the $250
Many major fossil-fuel projects across the U.S., from pipelines to export terminals, have been shelved or significantly delayed because of a confluence of new regulations, grass-roots opposition and a drop in energy prices. Overall, more than a dozen projects, worth about $33 billion, have been either rejected by regulators or withdrawn by developers since 2012,
The number of U.S. jobs in solar energy overtook those in oil and natural gas extraction for the first time last year, helping drive a global surge in employment in the clean-energy business as fossil-fuel companies faltered. Employment in the U.S. solar business grew 12 times faster than overall job creation, the International Renewable Energy
Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created in L.A. County over the next four years, most of them low-paying, according to a report released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. Most of the jobs added in the county by 2020 will pay below the median wage, the group said. Office administration
Guidance from the Legislative Analyst’s Office: Relative to the state’s budgetary position in January, the additional budgetary commitments described above leave the state budget somewhat more vulnerable to the next economic downturn. In the May Revision, the Governor lowered his 2016-17 proposed level of total reserves to $8.5 billion, nearly $2 billion lower than in
As a proportion of personal income, California had the nation’s 11th highest long-term state debt in 2013, a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts says. However, Pew’s three-year-old calculations, like other state-to-state comparisons, suffer from being based on the latest available official data, which are several years old. The state’s debt could be relatively
Gov. Jerry Brown kicked off 2016 optimistic on one policy area: After years of stalling, he said it was time for California to finally start making long-overdue repairs to its freeways and bridges. In his January State of the State address, he told lawmakers they'd have to "bite the bullet and enact new fees and
Independent groups with money from oil companies, grocery workers and apartment owners have unleashed hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent days to take out several members of the California Legislature, breaking with political custom that generally protects incumbents from well-funded challenges from within their party. In Silicon Valley, an outside committee backed by oil