California’s Climate Hypocrisy

Golden State bureaucrats admit that their plans to regulate carbon emissions will immiserate lower-income and minority residents.

By Jennifer Hernandez. She has practiced environmental and land-use law in California for nearly 40 years and is a senior fellow of The Breakthrough Institute and an adjunct professor at USC Law School. Excerpts:

"California’s new carbon-neutrality plan proudly promises to change “every aspect” of how people “live, work, play, and travel.” Blessed by what its authors call their “collective leadership and commitment to break away from ideas that no longer represent Californians’ values,” the plan conjures a future of new technology in pursuit of a greenhouse-gas-free future. Yet the plan offers not a single remedy for its own projections that climate policies will enrich the wealthy and hurt the state’s less affluent, heavily minority households.

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In keeping with this pattern, California policymakers have opted to pursue a far-reaching, multidecade climate blueprint for the state—one they admit will disproportionately harm people whom they deem disadvantaged. In text added just before the final plan’s adoption, bureaucrats disclosed that “households in lower income groups”—which includes all households earning $100,000 or less per year—will “see negative impacts, while households in higher income groups are anticipated to see positive impacts” from plan implementation. Even worse, the plan projects that since “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,” compared with mainly “White and Asian households” in higher income groups."