Central Valley farmers embrace solar panels // L.A. fire union boss earns $540,000 in a year

Good morning. It’s Thursday, May 1.

Central Valley farmers embrace solar panels.
Judge accuses Apple executive of lying under oath.
And L.A. fire union boss earns $540,000 in a year.

Statewide

1.

Solar panels carpet the San Joaquin Valley. (George Rose/Getty Images)

Central Valley farmers are embracing a lucrative new crop: solar panels. A study published in April found that farmers who installed solar panels realized energy savings and revenue that added up to $124,000 per hectare, 25 times the value of growing crops. Agricultural leaders have noted that solar cannot replace food; we need to eat. But it’s not an either-or proposition, said Jake Stid, a study author. Some farmers are even finding ways to grow berries and greens under their panels. “The conversation shouldn’t be as much about solar or agriculture, but solar and agriculture,” he said. Grist | Yale Environment 360

2.

Kamala Harris spoke at the annual gala for Emerge in San Francisco. (Camille Cohen/AFP via Getty Images)

Former Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday delivered her first major speech since leaving the White House, urging supporters in San Francisco to fight against what she cast as President Trump’s assault on democracy. A few quotes:

Trump’s agenda, she said, is “a narrow, self-serving vision of America, where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves — all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world.”
She likened the president to a “vessel” for a larger conservative project. “What we are, in fact, witnessing is a high-velocity event, where a vessel is being used for the swift implementation of an agenda that has been decades in the making.”
“Straight talk — things are probably going to get worse before they get better. But we are ready for it. We are not going to scatter. We are going to stand together.” Politico | S.F. Chronicle

3.

“We did so many dumb, pointless things on behalf of kids back then, all the time, knowing that they were dumb and pointless, on the premise that it might help a little, or at least it wouldn’t hurt, or it wouldn’t hurt too badly, all things considered.”

California was among the last states to reopen schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, denying kids in-person instruction for more than a year. The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter reviewed a pair of new books on what we got right — and wrong.

Northern California

4.

Apple “thwarted” a court order to loosen its App store restrictions, and a company executive “outright lied under oath” to cover up plans to bypass the injunction, a federal judge in California ruled on Wednesday. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers took the extraordinary step of referring the iPhone maker to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation. “Apple willfully chose not to comply,” she wrote. “That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination,” she added, “was a gross miscalculation.” Wall Street Journal | The Verge

5.

A tax on sugary drinks took effect in Santa Cruz on Thursday in defiance of a state law barring local taxes on groceries. In 2018, the beverage industry strong-armed state lawmakers into backing the tax moratorium under threat of a potentially costly ballot fight. The Santa Cruz tax is the first to be enacted since then. Local leaders said they are prepared to go to legal war to defend their measure. “It’s about democracy and standing up to special interests,” said Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, the city’s vice mayor. A.P.

6.

Shasta County’s conservative Board of Supervisors named a Florida lawyer to the county’s top elections post on Wednesday. While Clint Curtis has no experience running elections, his background as an election skeptic and associate of MyPillow founder Mike Lindell made an impression in Shasta County, the epicenter of the state’s election denial movement. A 2006 article on Curtis in Orlando Weekly said critics regarded him as a “nut job.” He has said one of his priorities as head of the county elections office would be to retrain the staff. Redding Record-Searchlight

7.

A musical about Luigi Mangione is opening in San Francisco this summer. According to the show’s creators, “Luigi the Musical” is “a wildly irreverent, razor-sharp comedy” in which the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shares a prison cell with Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean Combs. Chris Peterson, a theater writer, said the musical crosses a line: “The case is still fresh. … Families are still reeling. And this team is busy choreographing dance breaks to go with the bloodshed.” S.F. Chronicle | OnStage Blog

Southern California

8.

Freddy Escobar has said the fire department doesn’t have enough money to keep the city safe. (Robert Gauthier/L.A. Times via Getty Images)

After the January wildfires in Los Angeles, Freddy Escobar, president of the city’s firefighter union, complained about funding. “It’s a damn shame, and excuse my language, that it took this incident, the Pacific Palisades, to finally bring attention to our grossly understaffed, underfunded Fire Department,” he said. But even as he has denounced budget cuts, Escobar collected about $540,000 in city and union earnings in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available, a review found. Los Angeles is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall. L.A. Times

9.

The number of Chinese freight vessels headed to the ports along the California coast is dropping sharply as U.S. tariffs sap demand. The world’s five leading ocean carriers said bookings for eastbound trans-Pacific shipments are down by at least a third, while the Port of Los Angeles said it expected arrivals to be down 30% this week. “This is the most unpredictable period we’ve ever been to,” said Nils Haupt, a spokesman for German carrier Hapag-Lloyd. “It’s worse than Covid when logistics chains took months to recover.” Wall Street Journal

10.

Acyn Torabi at his home in Los Angeles. (Philip Cheung/Washington Post via Getty Images)

@Acyn is one of the most influential progressive accounts on social media. The man behind it, Acyn Torabi, scans press conferences and TV news panels for potentially viral moments, packaging them into short clips and propelling them across the internet, where they are endlessly cited and shared by journalists, news junkies, and politicians. Yet Torabi himself, of Los Angeles, is almost entirely unknown. The Washington Post profiled “the 40-something single dad shaping liberal media from his laptop.”

11.

A Democratic candidate for California governor sued a rival over the use of the phrase “proven problem solver.” Stephen Cloobeck, a billionaire entrepreneur, applied for a trademark to the phrase “I am a proven problem solver.” Arguing that the phrase had “become famous” as part of his campaign, Cloobeck filed a lawsuit against Antonio Villaraigosa after the former Los Angeles mayor included the phrase in his own communications. A legal scholar called the claim flimsy. Representatives for Villaraigosa called it “ludicrous.” L.A. Times

12.

Earlier this year, a diver descended 115 feet in the waters off San Diego and encountered the body of a baby gray whale. Other divers followed to see for themselves. Then in late February, an underwater photographer went to the location and found only barren seabed. The calf was gone. “How does an 18-foot-long, 2,000-pound carcass just disappear?” The New York Times investigated.

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