Ray Ring

Senior Editor

In a fascinating peek behind the political scenery, the McClatchy Newspaper chain profiles the guy who got the ball rolling on California’s Proposition 87 — the attempt to hit giant oil companies with higher state taxes.

Turns out, he’s a “low-rent screenwriter” named Anthony Rubenstein, who has no previous political experience.

Rubenstein tells the McClatchy reporter, Laura Mecoy:

“I’m just a regular guy with a big idea … It’s something I started with a cell phone and a laptop.”

Once he got the idea, Rubenstein doggedly “cold-called” many influential people around the state, trying to get them interested. He explains:

“There were a lot of people in this whole process who blew me off … I don’t have any hard feelings about it because I was a guy out of nowhere.”

Whether or not you like his idea, got to admit, it’s a heckuva Hollywoodish story. He turned his opening act into a campaign, persuading more than a million Californians to sign petitions to put his idea on the November ballot. He’s found backers who’ve shelled out millions of dollars for Prop 87 ads, and provoked the oil companies to open their money spigots for ads against it.

For the McClatchy piece, click here. For more background, check my earlier post on Prop 87.

Message Alert: It could happen anywhere. You could do it.

And in the Help Yourself Department: Rubenstein has also created a job. For running the Prop 87 campaign, so far, he’s collected a salary of $142,800.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

A horde of so-called Africanized bees stung an Arizona man about 300 times on August 20. The victim, age 39, died. The Arizona Daily Star has the basics.

A killer bee expert, Reed Booth, tells the Star “all of the wild honeybees in Arizona are Africanized bees.” By that he means, all the traditional bees have now cross-bred with invading killer bees, picking up the lethal traits. He warns that a hive:

“… is a bomb waiting to go off. It’s not if — it’s when. People don’t take it seriously enough.”

The threat is real, and it’s also hyped up by the killer-bee industry — those who make a profit on controlling the tiny threats. High Country News has the definitive piece on the killer bee industry, exploring the quirky human-bee interactions.

For an updated map of killer-bee territory — showing how far they’ve advanced, stetching from California to Florida — go to Texas A&M’s website and select the “U.S. distribution map” at the top of the list.

For a collection of news stories about recent killer-bee incidents, try the Sting Shield Insect Veil website, where the Sting Shield company also sells defensive gear.

Sample from the Sting Shield archives: Earlier this summer in Arizona, two guys got swarmed while they hiked near Papago Buttes. In their attempt to escape, they fell off a 100-foot cliff. They survived, and left us with a dose of classic killer-bee folklore: Doctors said the hundreds of stings they suffered were more dangerous than the plunge.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Possible good news: A capable Colorado utility named Xcel vows to build the West’s first really, really clean-burning coal-fired power plant.

Xcel — a company apparently named by marketers — says it’ll perfect a technology that not only burns cleaner, but also captures global-warming emissions. The technology is called IGCC — marketers desperately needed! — which stands for integrated gasification combined cycle. The entire nation has only two IGCC plants now, and neither are as clean as Xcel’s goal.

Before we get too heady over it, we better admit the slow-moving reality: Xcel says it’ll spend $3.5 million on initial studies, then $500 million to $1 billion on building the plant, to have it running by … maybe 2013.

The struggle to develop IGCC in the West has been summed up in High Country News.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Rulon Jones used to crash through walls of human flesh, in his 10 years as a pro-footballer, looming on the Denver Broncos’ defensive line. Now he buys ranches and uses them to sell “100% guaranteed” hunts. At his 12,000-acre Broadmouth Canyon Ranch, near Liberty, Utah, according to his website, he charges his customers $5,900 for a trophy elk, $4,900 to take a mule deer, $2,900 to take a buffalo, and $2,900 to take a cougar.

His plan for a similar operation in Idaho indicates how he can guarantee hunters’ success. He’s installing an 8-foot-high fence around his 2,000-acre ranch near Blackfoot, to form an enclosure trapping wildlife, and then he’ll run canned hunts. For background on killer fences, check a High Country News think piece on a movement to reform Western fences.

Jones describes his high-end Idaho hunting opportunity to the Associated Press:

”It’s very much a fair chase thing … It will be a challenging hunt.”

Haw haw haw. Very unfunny, Mr. Jones.

Meanwhile, a couple hundred miles north, the Idaho Transportation Department has begun digging a gravel mine on an unfortunate piece of state land within the boundaries of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. The Sawtooth Rec Area has all the qualities of a top national park — edgy peaks, pure waters, uncanned wildlife — along with traditional-scale ranches on the private land.

In an outraged editorial, the Idaho Mountain Express says the state agency “should be ashamed.”

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This website — High Country News and the GOAT blog — have dug into a libertarian campaign that is trying to get voters to approve property-rights initiatives in Washington, Idaho, Montana, California, Arizona and Nevada. The initiatives would install a “regulatory-takings” regime, so that governments would have to pay landowners for the burden of land-use regulations, or waive the regulations. The initiatives are modeled on Oregon’s Measure 37, which Oregon voters approved in 2004.

My High Country News package on the campaign includes excerpts from interviews of Oregon residents. They talk about their views of Measure 37 and how the regulatory-takings regime is working out in Oregon — lessons for people in the states now targeted.

To help bring home the message, here are podcasts that are excerpts from my interviews with four Oregonians, so you can hear it in their voices:

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Howard “Howie” Rich, a big bankroller of libertarian ballot initiatives in many states this election season, keeps a low profile. He’s based in New York City, but as of this writing, his name has never appeared in The New York Times, according to a search of the Times archives. When journalists manage to track him down, Howie Rich typically responds only by e-mail. But at the end of this intro, you can click into a podcast of excerpts from a conversation I had with Rich several weeks ago.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

How rabble-rousing and ironic are the West’s ballot initiatives this election season?

One rouser so far is California’s Proposition 87. It would merely impose a modest severance tax on oil companies’ production in the state. The resulting gusher of tax revenue — an estimated $400 million per year — would be used to boost alternative energy sources.

Maybe it’s about time. California is the third-leading oil-producer among all the states, and it’s the only major producer that has no severance tax. A story I wrote for High Country News last fall publicized the gigantic but obscure loophole. As I reported, according to some economists, even the states that take tax bites could bite deeper without causing the industry to cut back on production.

(Read on …)