Overcast right now this Monday morning as the culprit-fog burns off after moisturizing the landscape.
The NWS claims today is supposed to be ‘mostly sunny,’ but currently the environment is damp and gloomy.
Not so for down south (via the LA Times): ‘Temperatures Sunday reached 100 degrees in downtown Los Angeles, San Fernando and Burbank, breaking decades-old records in each city. Records were also broken in Long Beach, with a high of 99 degrees, and at UCLA, where the temperature topped out at 97, breaking a 1971 record, according to the National Weather Service.’
The Bay Area, too, “…but nothing terribly ominous.”
(Illustration: Tessa Hunt-Woodland‘s ‘Solar Flare,’ found here).
As California wades through a four-year drought, which supposedly made worse by climate change, maybe intensifying it by 15-to-20 percent, Gov. Jerry Brown signed-off on some important environmental bills last week, which although all good, should have been enacted years ago.
Twenty-three total, with the ace being coal-hearted:
Perhaps the most high-profile bill Thursday was another clean energy and global warming bill by de Leon, the leader of the Senate: SB 185.
The measure requires the massive California Public Employees Retirement System, known as CalPERS, and the California State Teachers Retirement System, or CalSTRS, to sell off all stocks in companies that derive more than 50 percent of their revenue from mining coal by July 1, 2017.
The two pension funds have a combined $299 million in such investments.
…
Also Thursday, Brown took action to limit plastic pollution from rivers, bays and the ocean.
The Democratic governor signed AB 888, by Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, which bans plastic “microbeads” in facial scrubs, toothpastes and other personal care products sold in California by Jan. 1, 2020.
The plastics wash down the drain, and pass through sewage treatment plants.
A study last month by the San Francisco Estuary Institute found 3.9 million tiny pieces of plastic washing into San Francisco Bay every day, many of them microbeads, from eight large sewage treatment plants.
The bill, which was opposed for much of the session by large cosmetics and toothpaste companies, is the toughest ban in the nation, outlawing even “biodegradeable” plastics.
Our state, I guess, appears easier to handle than most others — Brown took us well-above US overall-norm. Along with the pension-fund coal divestment, the governor also signed off on making assisted death legal here for the terminally ill, and okaying the nation’s toughest gender pay equity protections.
We’re the example against the political meltdown in DC. The situation lauded Saturday by an op/ed in the Sacramento Bee — crucial keynote:
But the appalling gridlock in Congress, along with the retrograde foolishness that has passed for debate so far among Republican presidential contenders, has created an especially stark backdrop for the machine-like efficiency with which California has churned out nationally influential legislation.
Of course, ‘…Brown and the Democrats who control the Legislature have the luxury this year of operating in a virtual one-party state,’ but yet if the entire other side of the aisle is suffering from a vile, and terminal, mental illness…