California's Energy War on the PoorCalifornia continues to implement policies on energy, housing, and transportation that are anti-poor and anti-working class.
Robert Bryce
11 Jul 2022
A few years ago, author and demographer Joel Kotkin declared that “California is a great state in which to be rich.”
Of course, it’s good to be rich anywhere. But California—the province that for decades has led the United States in cultural issues like fashion, gay rights, and entertainment—has devolved into a state where the American dream is being strangled by a phalanx of energy and climate regulations that are imposing huge regressive taxes on the poor and middle class. And worse yet, the state’s vast bureaucracy is imposing yet more regulations that will further tighten the financial noose on Californians.
Before going further, it’s essential to put California into context. While the state is known for posh spots like Beverly Hills, Marin County, and Silicon Valley, the Golden State has the highest poverty rate in America. Indeed, the poverty figures in the state can only be described as shocking. A 2021 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that “More than a third of Californians are living in or near poverty. Nearly one in six (16.4 percent) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line … All told, more than a third (34.0 percent) of state residents were poor or near-poor in 2019.” Los Angeles, the state’s biggest city, and a magnet for generations of immigrants has one of the highest poverty rates among America’s biggest cities.
California also has the largest Latino population in America. About 15 million Latinos live in the Golden State and they account for about 40 percent of its population. But the PPIC report also found that more than Latinos account for nearly 52 percent “of poor Californians but only 39.7 percent of the state population.”
Despite these numbers, California policymakers continue to implement policies on energy, housing, and transportation that are driving up the cost of living and deepening the state’s poverty problem.
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Perhaps the most obvious casualty of California’s climate policies is the state’s tattered electric grid. Blackouts in the state have become so common, particularly in the Bay Area, that media outlets have largely quit reporting on them. Nearly every day, maps of Pacific Gas & Electric’s service territory show outages across wide swaths of central California. The state’s increased blackouts are coinciding with skyrocketing electricity prices. And those skyrocketing electricity prices are coinciding with the implementation of some of America’s most-aggressive renewable-energy mandates.
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All of these mandates amount to what land-use and civil-rights lawyer Jennifer Hernandez calls “Green Jim Crow.” In an essay published last year by the Breakthrough Institute, Hernandez wrote that her home state:
leads the world in renewable energy and electric vehicle ownership. But its industrial and manufacturing sectors have been decimated … Its climate accomplishments are illusory, a product of deindustrialization, high energy costs, and, more recently and improbably, depopulation. Inequality has hit record levels, and housing segregation has returned to a degree not seen since the early 1960s.
Hernandez is the lead lawyer for The Two Hundred, a group of Latino leaders who have sued the state of California over its climate, housing, and transportation policies. In 2019, she and The Two Hundred filed a 250-page civil rights lawsuit that claims “Entrenched special interest groups, including environmentalists, block meaningful housing policy reforms” and that the state’s housing crisis is “deepening an already severe civil rights crisis.” Hernandez also points out that many of the regulations The Two Hundred is fighting were never directly authorized by the state legislature.
There is no shortage of irony here. California is one of the most liberal states in America. In the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden thrashed Donald Trump in California by a margin of nearly two to one, taking 63 percent of the vote. Although Trump lost California to Biden, the state is key for presidential hopefuls. That helps explain why Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has already begun positioning himself for a White House bid in 2024.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/11/californias-energy-war-on-the-poor/
