Rescuing California Requires Challenging Crony Environmentalism California’s high cost of living is driven by Democratic policies that prioritize environmentalism and government expansion, harming businesses and households while failing to address affordability. By Edward Ring
https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/rescuing-california-requires-challenging-crony-environmentalism/
The Speaker of the Assembly in the California state legislature, Robert Rivas, recently said, “California must not fixate on Trump and forget about affordability.”
Fat chance. California has been under the absolute control of Democrats for a generation. It’s their policies that have made the state unaffordable.
By now, the only people who deny that California’s state government policies are hostile toward working families and businesses, small and large, are the people running the state government. California is run by activist state bureaucrats, the unions that are funded by their membership dues, and the politicians that are elected and controlled by these unions. This is a racket. An entirely legal, yet entirely corrupt and self-serving system that is designed to grow government, harass businesses, kill good jobs, assess punitively high taxes, and elevate the cost of living to the point where people either become dependent on government assistance, flee to friendlier states, or are so rich they don’t care.
Democrats did this. Democrats own it.
The reason this system isn’t successfully challenged and broken is because surrounding this core coalition are commercial and nonprofit special interests that benefit from the status quo. A prime example of this is the homeless industrial complex, a network of state and local bureaucracies, subsidized developers of “supportive housing,” and “nonprofit” providers of services to the homeless. They have collected tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers to implement demonstrably failed policies, and as California’s homeless population continues to grow, they collect additional billions.
But by far the most harmful special interest in California, allied with and benefiting from laws passed by a corrupt state legislature, is what can be broadly described as Environmentalism Incorporated. This is a loosely organized but incredibly powerful network of businesses, litigators, well-funded activist groups, activist judges, lobbyists, PR firms, and captured regulatory agencies and politicians. In the name of protecting the environment, and more recently, fighting the “climate crisis,” they now interfere with every imaginable type of economic activity.
This fact, that environmentalist legislation and regulations have harmed California’s economy, disproportionately affecting low-income households and small businesses, is not to suggest that environmentalism isn’t important. But when it becomes a tool to expand government, harass productive businesses while subsidizing so-called green businesses, and restrict vital economic activity, including home building, farming, ranching, mining, logging, drilling for oil and natural gas, operating refineries, upgrading roads and highways, maintaining a cost-effective shipping infrastructure, or building reservoirs, aqueducts, and water treatment plants, then “environmentalism” must be challenged.
There is no moral imperative used to justify policies in California today that have done more harm to ordinary Californians than environmentalism. It has been corrupted, and it is out of control.
The Democratic leadership in the California Legislature claims they’re concerned about the high cost of living and difficulty doing business in the state. But these politicians have no idea how to make California affordable again. The policies they are likely to come up with will only benefit the machine they serve. More subsidized “affordable housing” projects, another attempt at rent control, promises to “investigate” rising energy costs. New ways to regulate refinery and utility profits to prevent “price gouging.” More “renewables” to achieve “net zero.”
Everything California’s Democrats propose to supposedly deliver affordability is just an extension of failed policies they’ve already tried. The result is only to empower quasi-monopolies that can withstand regulatory assaults while destroying businesses that lack the economies of scale required to comply. The result is managed scarcity with higher prices, a situation where the mega-corporations that are left standing take the demand-driven windfall profits from higher prices and split them with the state.
Crony capitalism. Crony environmentalism. That’s what Democrats stand for in California.
The foundation of affordability is energy, and California’s Democrats have made energy scarce and expensive. Shutting down the San Onofre nuclear power plant, decommissioning natural gas-fired generating plants, and driving oil refineries out of business or forcing them to convert to carbon-neutral “biofuel” were the result of policy choices. All of these energy-producing assets could have been repaired, retrofitted, or replaced, or even just shut down at a more measured pace. Instead, biased analyses and climate crisis fearmongering were used to pressure these accelerated shutdowns and conversions, which is why Californians pay the highest rates for electricity and have the highest-priced gasoline in the lower 48 states.
With expensive energy, everything else ends up costing more. Businesses and households are impacted directly when their electricity bills go up, but everything else they consume also requires energy, driving those costs up as well. From the cost of pumping and treating water to the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel for shipping, higher costs for energy ripple throughout the economy.
It’s not just energy that’s scarce, thanks to environmentalist policies. The price of food is elevated because California’s farmers no longer get enough irrigation water. The price of housing is elevated because environmentalist restrictions against “sprawl” (in a state that is only 5 percent urbanized) prevent most home building outside of existing cities. The price of lumber and aggregate is elevated because environmentalists have all but destroyed California’s timber, milling, and quarrying industries. Everything has to be imported in a state rich in natural resources.
Ultimately, the businesses left in California that need to fight back have to recognize one hard reality. To overcome the overwhelming power of the environmentalist lobby, they have to be willing to challenge the “climate crisis.” For at least 20 years, “climate crisis” has been the rhetorical weapon that has been wielded without a serious challenge to its legitimacy. In private, beleaguered business leaders in California almost universally contend that the whole climate movement is based on overhyped theories used to justify policies that are far out of proportion to their urgency.
It is possible to make California affordable again. But what Democrats are doing today will not help. They will only expand government and empower the largest, most politically connected corporations and nonprofits. The solution is to assert, without reservations, that today’s environmentalism and climate crisis policies are not based on “settled science”; they are often actually harmful to the environment, and they are not economically sustainable. Only from that premise do genuine reforms become politically possible. Only then can competitive productivity and supply-driven affordability be given back to California’s businesses and households.
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