Since the early 2000s, governors and legislators from both parties have signed onto a climate agenda in California that is making energy steadily unaffordable.
Gasoline in California, according to AAA, which tracks national gas prices daily, costs an average of about $4.78, compared with $3.16 nationally. The cost of electricity in the state is now the highest in the continental U.S., at 30.22 cents per kilowatt hour.
You might want to blame the discrepancies on greed — Big Oil practicing price gouging, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has suggested, and utilities lining their shareholders’ pockets. But at the pump and on your light and power bill, California’s high energy prices are better understood as a self-inflicted wound, traceable to the state’s quixotic green energy policy.
The notoriously high cost of gas in the state is the result of a lot of factors — we tax gas to pay for road infrastructure and a less-polluting fuel mix in the summer months. Last year, Sacramento decided to move harder, faster toward its goal of a carbon-less future, adding disincentives for refineries and incentives for EVs that the California Air Resources Board has predicted will add 47 cents a gallon at the pump.
Overall, California’s zero-carbon climate policies — pushing EVs as your next car purchase and heat pumps to cool and heat your house — rely largely on electricity that in turn depends on expensive, and intermittent, energy sources, such as wind and solar. Come hell or high water, California’s leaders are trying to regulate, tax and incentivize their way to electricity that is 100% carbon-free by 2045.
Unfortunately, as green-skeptic energy analyst Robert Bryce notes in books and on his Substack, wherever governments have tried to base their energy supply on a swift shift to renewables — the UK, Germany, California — the result has been huge spikes in energy prices. Germany’s vaunted industrial economy has slowed in part, according to most observers, because of the high cost of renewable energy.
These costs also undermine California’s prosperity in multiple ways. They add to the state’s “energy poverty,” increasing an already extreme divide between haves and have nots, and not just because of how hard it is for low-income Californians to pay their gas and utility bills.
The Air Resources Board’s most recent “scoping plan” — the state framework for achieving carbon neutrality — projects that the shift to renewable energy will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.
“Carbon economy” jobs will dwindle — manufacturing, logistics, oil and gas industry — many of which are well-paying, union jobs. A study by the L.A. Economic Development Commission found that 148,000 direct and more than 350,000 indirect jobs could be threatened by policies aimed at eliminating the industry.
Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Noya Fields, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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