The chorus of global warming deniers has not shrunk. Outcries claiming the entire issue is fraudulent are not going away. Realism also is slowly setting in among some California groups that long tried to wish away the issue by claiming any warming that’s happening is strictly a cyclical natural phenomenon.

For more than a decade, while California has been among the most liberal of America’s blue states, its highest court has been dominated by leftovers from two of its more conservative governors. That is about to change. Two retirements soon will let Gov. Brown change the entire tone of the California Supreme Court, long a bastion of pro-business, anti-consumer decisions and sometimes a brake on movements toward same-sex marriage, loose regulation of marijuana and other social issues dear to activists on the left.

From early in his career, Gov. Brown has had a proclivity for dismissing problems with wisecracks or aphorisms. As early as 1975, in his first term, he mocked university professors’ pleas for pay raises. He said they didn’t need more money. They could make do with “psychic rewards.” He has done the same thing lately as companies like Toyota and Occidental Petroleum announced they were moving headquarters and thousands of jobs out of state, noting that those firms and their jobs are just a fraction of the California economy. True, but the moves are consequential for …

Nothing is more important to California’s large privately-owned utilities than the virtual monopolies they enjoy in most of the state. Those monopolies make it nearly impossible for businesses and residents outside cities with municipal power companies to buy electricity from anyone but companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, also guaranteeing significant profits to those utilities in perpetuity. The big energy companies feel threatened these days by …

A clear message was sent when the state Senate in mid-June first rejected a ban on legislators taking campaign contributions during the last 100 days of each lawmaking session, and then partially reversed itself to finally pass a watered-down version covering a much shorter time period. The message: “We would rather have money than trust.”

As the round of memorial services for the six students fatally stabbed and shot in late May by the psychotic killer Elliot Rodger recedes into memory, a serious public policy question remains even while families and friends are left with their private grief: If the Isla Vista killings can’t spur laws to keep guns away from persons diagnosed as mentally ill, what can?

Democrats and other detractors of California’s “top two” primary system have been whining ever since last week’s primary election that it would be wrong to have two Republicans vie in the November general election for the state controller’s job, considered by many the fourth most significant statewide office. It would just not be right, they say, for only Republicans to have …

Results like those from Tuesday’s primary cause detractors to call California’s four-year-old “top two” election system the “jungle primary” because it often features races with a dozen contestants and completely unpredictable outcomes. For sure, that makes it more fun both to vote and follow election returns – unless you are a …

No candidate campaigned harder this spring than Neel Kashkari, the former federal Treasury Dept. official and ex-Goldman Sachs executive who just become the first Asian-American ever nominated for governor of California. He was someplace every day. His campaign issued a non-stop barrage of press releases. He willingly met with political reporters, who took him seriously even when he was at 2 percent in the polls. Mr. Kashkari also won the endorsements of …

There’s a huge political implication in the big difference between 13.7 billion barrels of oil and 600 million. Similarly, there's meaning in the gigantic difference between 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 6.4 billion (the average California household uses about two to three cubic feet of natural gas per day). Taken together, it’s the difference between fueling the entire United States for several years and …