https://quillette.com/2022/07/11/californias-energy-war-on-t…
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.”
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.
In May, the Los Angeles City Council banned the use of natural gas appliances and heaters in new homes and businesses.That climate leadership comes at a high cost to consumers. Why? On an energy-equivalent basis, electricity costs four times as much as natural gas.
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.
Between 2008 and 2021, the all-sector price of electricity in California increased five times faster than rates in the rest of the continental United States. Last year alone, the all-sector price of electricity in California jumped by 9.8 percent to 19.8 cents per kilowatt-hour.
California residential users are now paying about 66 percent more for electricity than homeowners in the rest of the US.
The state also faces a chronic shortage of affordable housing. Despite the shortage, home prices are being driven up by a myriad of mandates including the requirement that new homes have solar panels on their roofs. Since 2020, single-family homes and multi-family buildings up to three stories high in California must be topped with solar panels.
Jennifer Hernandez claims:“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.”
But perhaps that is the plan. Drive the poor & working class into other more affordable state.