Green Jim Crow!

California, the land of trendy natural gas bans, has led here in America with its version of the German Energiewende and the Green New Deal. It has been a complete disaster:

California’s energy policies disproportionately hit low- and median-income communities of color coming and going, raising household energy costs while limiting opportunities for employment in the well-paying, often-unionized, energy-intensive sectors of the state’s economy.

Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43 percent more of their household incomes on energy than White households… Between 2011 and 2020, the state’s home “20150724-NRCS-LSC-0498” by USDAgov is marked with CC PDM 1.0 rose by 66 percent, while falling by 10 percent in the rest of the nation.

California has the highest electricity and highest gasoline costs in the nation, with electricity prices 50 percent higher than the national average…

The state’s generous net metering policies for rooftop solar panels are already making these inequities worse, as the costs of these programs are ultimately paid for predominantly by the state’s less-wealthy homeowners and renters…

But unaffordable utility bills are only half the story. California climate policies also require the elimination of hundreds of thousands of conventional energy jobs, and will adversely affect millions of other jobs in energy-dependent and related industries. These sectors provide stable, higher-paying employment for less educated residents, the majority of whom are workers of color and recent immigrants…

An analysis of 2017 data by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) found that “across all levels of education, earnings are higher in oil and gas industries compared to the all industry average.”^[43]The energy sector provides over 152,100 direct and 213,860 indirect and induced jobs in California that pay higher wages and benefits for individuals with lower levels of education. This workforce is ethnically and racially diverse, and about 63 percent of all employees have less than a bachelor’s degree…

California climate advocates have utterly failed to provide a convincing explanation for how workers of color employed in existing energy and energy-dependent sectors will support their families once these industries are gone. Many, like the fantastically wealthy, famously haughty John Kerry, now the nation’s “climate envoy,” airily suggest that green employment will replace job losses in the fossil fuel sector. Even the staunchly progressive Washington Post conceded that this was unlikely, noting that rapid growth in the wind and solar industries over the next decade could plausibly replace at most 20 percent of the workforce of the coal industry alone.

Trade unions and their Democratic political allies aren’t buying what California’s climate cognoscenti are selling either. “Career opportunities for renewables are nowhere near what they are in gas and oil, and domestic energy workers highly value the safety, reliable duration and compensation of oil and gas construction jobs,” North America’s Building Trades Unions said in July 2020 after conducting two studies of the industry…

California’s oil consumption continues, slowing only with the pandemic, while progressive climate elites see no irony in forcing California’s minority communities out of jobs while importing more oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries not known for adherence to progressive labor, gender, environmental, or civil rights values…

State climate leaders appear determined to continue to impose regressive and racist deindustrialization schemes on aspiring communities of color.

Read the whole thing. It’s provides a thoroughly devastating takedown of California’s “Green Jim Crow” environmental and energy policies.

Hat Tip: G.M.

And, for the Pitch Perfect Example of the Green Jim Crow…

The Sierra Club, which views natural gas as gauche, is an association of the privileged if there ever was one, and conveniently provides us precisely the kind of haughty patronizing rationalizing that is “Green Jim Crow” with this:

When Congress returns from its annual summer recess, much of the action on Capitol Hill will turn to the Democratic majority’s efforts to pass an ambitious “reconciliation bill” that offers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tackle climate change and the United States’ vast social and economic inequalities. The legislative blueprint promises to make significant investments in renewable energy, address many of the racial inequities that have existed since the country was founded, and get to the root of environmental injustices, making it a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris administration’s goals to “build back better.”

I find this moment of brilliant possibility inspiring, a unique opportunity for us to create healthy and safe communities together. But it’s also a reminder of how much work there is to be done and how much it will take to repair the chronic lack of investment in communities of color. In many communities of color, there is little hope for meaningful change and improvements in quality of life—a lack of hope that comes from a long history of being left out of prosperity…

To overcome such huge issues as systemic racism and climate change will, of course, require a plan for full economic recovery focused on the goal of a fossil-fuel-free economy and anchored in principles of fairness. Thankfully, one part of that plan is in place. It’s called the Justice40 Initiative, and it is President Joe Biden’s commitment to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments go to historically disadvantaged communities. Additionally, the initiative tracks performance toward that goal through the establishment of an Environmental Justice Scorecard. The Sierra Club will be working with environmental justice leaders in the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform and Forum to ensure that this executive order is implemented during this administration.

The Sierra Club pretending to be an advocate of the historically disadvantaged, is like Harvey Weinstein putting himself forward as feminist and just as despicable.

Hat Tip: D.S.