Eco-Nuts Torture California Businesses with “New” Pollutants/ Butterfly May Stop Power Plants

Environmental groups “emboldened” by California “cap and trade” law to litigate
$500,000 federal grant resulted in 86 butterflies

The drive to designate “nitrous oxide” and “nitrogen” as “pollutants” needing regulation……

You might think with that astounding drain of tax dollars and jobs leaving the state in just one year, California would “wise up” and try to be more welcoming to companies and industries and, of course, you would be wrong.

Be sure to read my article from a few weeks ago and then come back here:

“193 Businesses Leave California in 2010 — 4 Times the Previous Year.”

In 2011, the environmentalists in California feel “emboldened” and “mandated” because of the vote in November to allow the state’s 2006 “cap and trade” law go into full effect starting this year. If there was an “exodus” of jobs and companies in the past, it will be a stampede this year.

Not satisfied that it has enough control over development yet, wildlife groups and “green agencies” are designating “new” pollutants to be regulated and controlled in California. Don’t laugh. California is where these groups “experiment” with all their nutty new ideas, and then take the successful ones nationwide.

Here are just a few examples of the ways California environmentalists are torturing business:

Demonizing “nitrous oxide” from fertilizer

The California Fertilizer Industry has had to pay “bribes” in the form of “research grants” to study whether farm fertilizers are contributing to global warming. This is all part of California’s “cap and trade” legislation, passed in 2006, which is now beginning to reach its regulatory tentacles into every business and/or industry in the state. The [dreaded enviro-Nazi ] California Air Resources Board, (CARB) is now trying to make “nitrous oxide” gases from fertilizer into yet another “dangerous” emission in need of government controls:

“During a meeting on Sept. 18, the Fertilizer Inspection Advisory Board, which advises the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), recommended approval of a $150,000 research project to measure emission rates of nitrous oxide gases from fertilizer applications. Nitrous oxide is a major greenhouse gas that reacts with ozone in the stratosphere. The project would be administered by California State University, Fresno.

Additionally, the Board approved an additional $180,000 to fund extra staffing within CDFA to augment the department’s efforts to pro-actively address the issue of global warming. Both items will be solely funded by contributions from the fertilizer industry.”

Being the most ec0-friendly natural gas-fired electric plant in the country is STILL NOT ENOUGH

A much-needed new electrical power plant near the fast-growing far-flung San Francisco suburb of Antioch, California miraculously dodged all the environmental slings and arrows for years and is now [finally] in operation. When Gateway Generating System broke ground in 2007, it was the first new power plant by Pacific Gas and Electric in 20 years. It was touted as “state-of-the-art” environmental technology, which wouldn’t use as much of the nearby Delta water to cool its generators. It won the Power Engineering Magazine “Gas-Fired Plant of 2009” award for its substantial efforts to meet ever-more-stringent California environmental standards.

Gateway Generating Systems plant, PG&E — Antioch, CA

Two more nearby plants are in the pre-approval planning stages. But here come the green goons and their lawyers for ANOTHER ROUND of litigation (which can end up being funded on both sides, eventually, by the ratepayers.)

Because they couldn’t stop the projects a few years ago, by golly, the environmentalists have now dreamed up yet another “new pollutant” that needs to be restricted and regulated: Nitrogen. They are trying to make the case that nitrogen kills the Lange’s Metalmark butterfly, an “endangered” species which lives nearby in the Antioch Dunes.

Lange’s Metalmark butterfly is about the size of a quarter

While it has long been known that burning fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it creates a greenhouse effect, federal government scientists during the past five years have only just started to understand the harmful fertilizing effects of nitrogen that’s also released when the fuels are burned.

Nitrogen released from power plant smokestacks and vehicle exhausts fertilizes nutrient-poor soils that dominate parts of the Bay Area. The nitrogen promotes the growth of invasive weeds, which choke out local species, including plants that provide food and habitat for native butterflies and other animals.

[…]

“This is knowledge that we’ve only gotten on top of in the last three or four years,” [San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex spokesman Doug] Cordell said. “Even if the lawsuit is unsuccessful, we have made our concerns known to the EPA about this issue. We would like to work with them and we would like to work with PG&E. We’ve done that elsewhere.”

Read the whole ridiculous thing here at the Bay Citizen.

Pacific Gas and Electric is disputing the findings of the Wild Equity Institute, which is trying to bottleneck the power plant permits in federal court, and to require expensive, extensive “study” and “review” of the plant’s “nitrogen” emissions and the effects on nearby wildlife.

Someone defund these people!!

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there were 45 Lange’s Metalmark butterflies living in the Antioch Dunes in 2006. This is a ONE-INCH butterfly.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported last spring that the population of the butterfly was bolstered in the past four years by a $500,000 federal grant, which brought the butterfly numbers to 131 in 2008. Taxpayers have just spent $5,813 per butterfly!! Apparently, now that THAT money has run out, the environmentalists are back for more….a “study” on how nitrogen makes the weeds grow. This is an outrage.

Thousands of bay area residents may have more expensive electricity, and rationing might occur if the new power plants can’t be built to serve the rapidly-expanding Eastern Contra Costa County area, which has some of the more affordable housing in the Bay area. Who knows how much in legal fees will be expended? And it’s all due to nutty control-freak environmentalists who survive as parasites of government bureaucracies…..in behalf of : bugs which end up on windshields and car grills anyway.

Cross-posted on UNCOVERAGE.net

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