All that climavirtue signaling, all the taxes, fees, and mandates, and this is what you get (besides skyrocketing energy prices, cost of living)
Environmental group gives California a poor grade on climate change
The group’s recent report gave California’s political leaders their first “D” letter grade for 2021 over what it called “inaction” in addressing the climate crisis last year.
The group said the state failed to pass significant climate legislation in the past three years and is not on track to meet the state’s own stated climate goals.
A statement from CEO Mary Creasman, singled out “climate delayers” in the State Senate, specifically 18 Democrats, who received failing grades on the group’s legislative scorecard along with all of the Republican senators. Many Republicans received scores of less than 50.
Creasman complained that the legislators, “talk about climate change but don’t back up those words with action.”
The group, since there seems to be a bit missing, is Envirovoters, who should all be asked if they’ve traded their fossil fueled vehicles for EVs and stopped taking fossil fueled flights. If they’ve moved into tiny homes, hand wash and line dry their clothes, given up meat, and so forth. Which leads to
The runaway cost of virtue-signalling
(Batya Ungar-Sargon discusses many things, particularly the gaslighting from Joe and his Dem Comrades on gas, before getting to)
Take the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have connected the Alberta tar sands in Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but was blocked by Biden on his first day in office. On Friday, the president pooh-poohed the idea that his cancellation of the pipeline has impacted the price of fuel. ‘The Keystone Pipeline was two years away’, he said. ‘It had been two per cent finished. Give me a break.’ It’s a facetious argument, though. In shutting down the pipeline project, Biden sent a message to the oil industry – that its investments were not secure. This then translated into a market reality.
With a commodities market intentions will be read, and can positively, or negatively, affect those commodities, like oil.
It’s not just the pipeline, either. The fracking industry, which progressive environmental torchbearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation to ban, also offers jobs that provide significant upward mobility for those employed in it. The fracking boom has massively reduced income inequality in places like North Dakota, while a national ban on fracking would cost upward of 14million jobs that provide security and a middle-class lifestyle to millions of Americans.
The elites do not care
If you want to see how environmental policy furthers inequality, look no further than California, which is the state most committed to decarbonising its energy supply. It is now the most energy efficient state – as well as the state with the highest poverty rate in America. Twenty per cent of Californians live in poverty, and a growing number of academics have been tying that poverty to the cost of living – including to the cost of energy. Since 2011 the cost of electricity in California has increased five times as fast as the rest of the US.
Rising electricity prices in California have disproportionately impacted low-income families. In practice, this means that black and Latino households are spending 20 to 40 per cent more of their household incomes on energy than white households, the esteemed environmental lawyer Jennifer Hernandez found in a 2021 paper titled ‘Green Jim Crow’. In 2020, nearly four million California households – or 30 per cent of Californians – faced energy poverty. Meanwhile, more than two million households were forced to spend between 10 and 27 per cent of their total income on home energy.
Can you imagine how bad this would be if California got a grade higher than “D”?
‘Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices. But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices’, President Biden tweeted last week. Electric cars have become the ‘Let them eat cake’ of 2022.
It’s easy for the rich to buy an EV, because they want to. For most Americans, they can’t make that choice. Did the Envirovoters make a choice to get one themselves?
Anyone who does not comprehend these two sentences should not breed or vote. Operating dangerous machinery, how ever, is highly encouraged.
Biden’s message to the oil industry is a driving force in why we aren’t seeing a faster growth in production. Drilling is expensive and people aren’t interested in risking too much money.
