2020 Year

Raising questions about how to accommodate growth, a new report forecasts that the population of a six-county Southern California region will increase about 43%--to about 22.35 million--by 2020. The population of Orange County is expected to reach 3.24 million during the period, an increase of 25%. A continuing strong birth rate in the region, particularly among Latinos, will be the main cause of the growth, forecasters said.

It is becoming an annual tradition: Every year we plead for a bill that would wean the state's utilities off dirty electricity generated from fossil fuels, a politically popular measure that nonetheless has hit a wall in Sacramento. Once again, a key renewable-power bill — a priority for environmental advocates and green businesses statewide — is making its way through legislative committees. Like the riots that follow Lakers championship victories or the ruinous wildfires that plague our hillsides every fall, the bill's yearly failure is a ritual we'd happily put to rest.

ROSEMEAD, Calif. -- Southern California Edison says two solar-powered plants will be built east of Los Angeles to supply the utility with enough energy for 170,000 homes. Edison announced Tuesday that it's made a deal with Arizona-based First Solar, Inc. to build plants near Desert Center in Riverside County and Stateline in San Bernardino County. When the plants are completed in 2015, they'll provide up to 550 megawatts of electricity. Edison says the projects also would create several hundred construction jobs.

Raising questions about how to accommodate growth, a new report forecasts that the population of a six-county Southern California region will increase about 43%--to about 22.35 million--by 2020. The population of Orange County is expected to reach 3.24 million during the period, an increase of 25%. A continuing strong birth rate in the region, particularly among Latinos, will be the main cause of the growth, forecasters said.

It is becoming an annual tradition: Every year we plead for a bill that would wean the state's utilities off dirty electricity generated from fossil fuels, a politically popular measure that nonetheless has hit a wall in Sacramento. Once again, a key renewable-power bill — a priority for environmental advocates and green businesses statewide — is making its way through legislative committees. Like the riots that follow Lakers championship victories or the ruinous wildfires that plague our hillsides every fall, the bill's yearly failure is a ritual we'd happily put to rest.

The Pacific Business Forum, a group of business people advising the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, stressed a need to "get things done" at the end of a two-day meeting Saturday. "We're a group of business people and we want to see things happen," Les McCraw, a forum co-chairman and chairman of Irvine-based Fluor Corp., told a news conference.

Orange County overestimated the demand for passenger service in its plans to convert El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a commercial airport, according to a draft Southern California Assn. of Governments report. Airport opponents said Thursday the report raises questions about whether the county exaggerated figures to appease special interests behind the project. But others said the association's figures still support the need for a second airport in Orange County.

The overseers of the government's two biggest domestic programs estimated Wednesday that Social Security was one year closer to financial crisis than they had figured a year ago, but that Medicare was one year further away.

WASHINGTON - When Abraham Lincoln allowed the Treasury to print money for the first time in the depths of the Civil War, it was a major innovation born of a pressing reality. The Union was broke. Now, 150 years later, in admittedly less dire circumstances, Congress is preparing itself for the next big thing when it comes to money - a future in which payments are made with a wand-like wave of a phone rather than the exchange of wrinkled pieces of paper. "We are, I think, on a precipice of some fundamental change in the way money is exchanged between consumers and businesses," Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)

In 2006, taking a brief hiatus from the usual Sacramento gridlock, the Legislature passed and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 32, a pioneering law designed to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. This year, a proposition that aims to kill the law was put on the Nov. 2 ballot by two Texas oil companies with a lot at stake. The cynical, misleading argument the companies are using to make their case is that AB 32 will deter job growth at a critical moment in the state's economic recovery.

The chief booster for a new airport at the mothballed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station says Orange County's Board of Supervisors must immediately cut the project in half to have any chance of ever getting the long-planned project off the ground. Businessman George Argyros, who has pushed the hardest, spent the most and dug the deepest for the new airfield, said the capacity of the airport currently conceived by the county is so large it wouldn't be exhausted for another 100 years.