Do You Want To Write A 5,000-page Paper That Will Be Rejected Or Would You Rather Move To Another State?

Dig this from the WSJ. It's behind the paywall, so if you don't have a subscription, here are some of the salient facts.

Earlier this month California Gov. Jerry Brown promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050...

The Newhall Ranch project in north Los Angeles County, which aims to provide housing for nearly 60,000 people as well as tens of thousands of jobs at stores, schools and recreational centers, is the most recent target...

Newhall’s (environmental impact) report, which the Department of Fish and Wildlife approved in 2010, was more than 5,000 pages, with hundreds of pages dedicated to analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions as required by recent regulatory amendments to the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The state wildlife agency projected that Newhall would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 31% by 2020 relative to the California Air Resources Board’s 2008 “baseline” model. This was a larger reduction than the 29% cut that the board has mandated statewide.

The California Supreme Court has now rejected the report after suits by a variety of ecowarrior groups. Newhall Ranch is on hold. Here's the real bomb buried in the article.

The (California Supreme Court's) majority nitpicked the report’s methodology, conjecturing that perhaps a greater than 31% reduction in greenhouse emissions from new projects might be needed to meet the 29% statewide mandate because it could be harder to achieve efficiencies from older, already-constructed developments.

That makes sense, but it also makes it insanely difficult to get anything new built in California. If you want to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by n% and you're not going to rebuild everything, whatever gets remodeled or built will have to reduce emissions by 2x or 3x that amount in order for you to hit your target. That's hopeless.

One of our sons just graduated with an EE degree, good grades and plenty of summer experience in the EE field. He couldn't even get an interview with the power companies in California, never mind a job. And that was with plenty of contacts inside SDG&E, too.

On the other hand, why would he expect to find jobs in the power industry? Only a complete idiot would try to do more than maintain their existing power plants and perhaps not even that. Sure, you might build some transmission lines so you could buy power from Arizona or Mexico, but generate more power locally? Ha! Never!

Dude! Saving the planet is like totally righteous!