Gov. Newsom’s Climate Change Plan is Bad for 60% of Californians
When Gov. Gavin Newsom first took office in January 2019 the economy was booming and the state had a $15 billion budget surplus. Five years later California ranks dead last in US job growth and has a $74 billion deficit. There are several factors that contributed to this disaster, but a key driver has been Newsom’s quest to take the global climate change fight.
The new Governor promised “collective leadership and commitment to break away from ideas that no longer represent Californians’ values” by adopting to a greenhouse-gas-free-future “to change every aspect of how we live, work, play, and travel.”
Under his California Climate Commitment for environmental justice, Newsom has increased taxes to spend $54 billion to fund creation of 4 million new knowledge jobs, cut air pollution by 60%, reduce state oil consumption by 91%, save California $23 billion by avoiding the damages of pollution, reduce fossil fuel use in buildings and transportation by 92%, and cut refinery pollution by 94%.
As a requirement under California law to implement Newsom’s vision, state produced an unbiased Climate Change Scoping Plan report to detail the costs, benefits, and impacts of the policy on communities across the state.
Newsom talks allot about social justice, but buried deep in the report in fine print it was disclosed that in Newsom’s brave new world where “households in lower income groups—which include the 60.2% of all California households earning $100,000 or less per year—will “see negative impacts, while 39.8% of households in higher income groups are anticipated to see positive impacts” from plan implementation.
As for Newsom’s virtue signaling about diversity, equity and inclusion; “more than 60% of households in the race/ethnicity categories of Hispanic, Black, and other minority communities are less affluent, these groups will “experience reduced income.” In contrast, affluent “White and Asian households” will enjoy even higher income.
As Jennifer Hernandez at City Journal writes: “The fine print of the policies undergirding the ballyhooed “energy transition” tend to be inconvenient. Solar, wind, and battery equipment is built in unethical labor conditions, depends on supplies over which China has a stranglehold, and risks shifting mining from overly regulated western countries to such lawless nations as Myanmar, Zambia, and the Congo.”
The Scoping Plan’s thousands of pages contain hundreds of proposed actions to regulate everything from jet fuel, fertilizer, hot water and refrigeration. It appears Newsom will need to hire legions of new high-paid bureaucrats to manage the Nanny State.
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