JOEL KOTKIN: CLIMATE ALARMISM AS RACISM.
It’s like they don’t care about poor people or minorities once they have their votes.
No state in the union has been more adamant in opposing President Trump’s policy on immigration than California. The Golden State widely sees itself — and is widely seen in progressive circles — as the harbinger of America’s multi-cultural future, a “sanctuary state” that epitomizes ethnic ascendency.
Yet in reality, the picture is far less pleasing, most of all for racial minorities, particularly the poor and working class. The state policy agenda, dominated by concerns over climate change, has been something of a disaster for the very minorities that state progressives so fervently claim to serve.
This claim is at the center of a new report by David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez, released this week by Chapman University, which spells out the ways the California “boom” has hurt the prospect for historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Latinos.
In the past decade, Democratic progressives have benefited enormously from African American and Latino voters, who support them by wide margins. As California has become dominated by racial minorities, now over 60 percent of the population, it has drifted towards a status of a one-party progressive state.
But, as the report makes clear, Democratic protestations of solidarity have not worked out well on the ground. “The imposition by the state’s Democratic Party leaders of highly regressive climate schemes have engendered disparate financial hardships on middle and lower income workers and minority communities,” they write. This, they continue, “represents a significant departure from more traditional Democratic Party values.”
The authors demonstrate that California’s draconian climate regime — mandating more than twice the actual emissions reductions from 2015 levels by 2030 compared with the European Union under the Paris Agreement — has been blatantly injurious to working class populations. This includes greenhouse gas policy-induced electricity rates that are nearly 60 percent above the national average, the nation’s highest rent and housing prices and a general decline in the blue-collar industries, such as manufacturing that have historically provided the best path to upward mobility.
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