When people from more normal states ask me about living in California, I tell them all the good things and the weird things people hear are true.
When it comes to science, though, it's all weird. We charge more for cars that help nothing in emissions, we have 100,000 cancer warning labels on everything from coffee to corkboards, and we have to get exemptions from EPA to have unlimited natural gas pollution because we mandate and subsidize solar that doesn't work. We can't allow rich people in Malibu to have brownouts but want to have poor people pay for their solar.
But legally declaring that bees are fish is next level kooky, even for America's most anti-science state. Yet activists were able to pull that off, over the objections of the science community, by going to court and declaring that science is more like a state of mind than anything empirical.
California has its own endangered species law, and like Hawaii's it is made-up nonsense, but so poorly written that even though the the 1970 act explicitly protected “fish”, because other bizarre courts in California had thrown in snails as fish the environmental lawyers argued before the appeals court it also means...bees. Or any terrestrial invertebrate. They can all be considered fish under California law.
And it worked.
“Accordingly, a terrestrial invertebrate, like each of the four bumble bee species, may be listed as an endangered or threatened species under the Act,” the 3rd district California Court of Appeals Associate Justice Ronald Robie ruled. That means activists can now sue anyone over anything that they believed can cause them to be killed. Like farming. And that is the real goal. Activists are in a war of extinction against science and they hate farmers most of all.
The good news for activists in California is that this crazy unscientific ruling means nearly anything else can be sued over too - because California has decided 80 percent of animals on earth meet the state's definition of "fish."
