Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The L A Times published a story on May 24th entitled “Gov. Brown tours polluted L.A. neighborhoods to see firsthand where progress lags” which described his clandestine visit with activists who have been critical of the state doing too little to protect the health of people living in these communities.
The Times article explained that:
The visit exposed the large disconnect between Brown’s penchant for prioritizing state resources toward globally directed state climate regulation versus the real world of needs for environmental actions that actually benefit California’s local communities health and living conditions. The Times article notes:
Brown has always claimed that revenues from the states cap and trade (tax) program targeting reduced greenhouse gas emissions would be used to help disadvantaged low-income communities.
Instead the Times article indicated:
Given the unprecedented number of new regulations and policy along with the many tens of billions in expense required for attempting to meet the SB 32 greenhouse gas emissions goals and in view of the trivial global significance of SB 32 emission reductions the justification for the states priorities toward greenhouse gas emissions versus dealing with California’s real front-line pollution issues clearly deserves to be openly challenged and discussed.
As Assemblywoman Garcia noted:
For far too long now Governor Brown has been allowed to misdirect and misallocate the state priorities, resources and expenditures toward globally irrelevant greenhouse gas emissions reductions while ignoring the plight of tens of millions of Californians who receive no benefit at all from the states elitist climate alarmist political agenda.
Its time for California’s climate alarmist elitism to stop and for the state government to instead address and use its resources to deal with the many real and significant issues that are impacting millions of our citizens.
Jerry Brown actually doing something practical? That would break his history of silly proposals and virtue signalling.
“Everybody wants to save the world, but nobody wants to help mom do the dishes.”
+1
Brown gets schooled on the difference between real and fake pollution.
Love it.
Do you mean fake pollution and fake pollution?
This being California, I predict that regulators will force the industrial sites with their blue collar jobs to close and move the businesses. Those that don’t go bankrupt will set up or expand in another state. Then the industrial sites will be turned into high-rise apartments and the now more valuable real estate under the mobile home parks will be sold, displacing the tenants with condo’s. The rent and monthly mortgage payments will likely exceed the household income of the mobile home dwellers so they’ll have to leave the area. Pollution gone, dirty blue collar jobs gone, low income working class gone. 3 problems solved at once.
Disagree. The industrial sites won’t be turned into high-rise apartments. They’ll be declared as polluted Superfund sites and sit idle for years. Judged valueless they’ll be donated to a political charity operated by a descendant of Maurice Strong at the UN. Chelsea Clinton and an Obama grandchild will be on the board. They’ll get in touch with some nephew somewhere of Harry Reid who will employ the godchild of Elon Musk to clean up the site utilizing secret patented technology verified by a niece of James Comey. To secure the technology used (military secrets or something) the site will be tented off during the cleanup operation. Naturally, nothing’s really being cleaned up because nothing really had to be. Once cleaned up the site’s now worth billions and billions of dollars. Amazingly, an ancestor of Bill Gates will be shown to have legitimate title to it going back to the 1600s (yeah, I know nobody was there back then). Bill will donate it back to the UN as a multi-billion dollar charitable contribution. The UN will build low income housing as part of a Shelter for Humanity Initiative. It will be occupied by H1B visa holders employed by Zuckerberg’s granddaughter for $5/hr as systems engineers. Chelsea and Obama will receive clandestine UN bonuses for their help in somehow making this happen. And, it will be discovered that Martha Stewart shot James Comey (I know that doesn’t fit in with the foregoing narrative).
GET. OUT. OF. MY. HEAD!
Well done. Somehow, the word apparatchik comes to mind. They love theory and are hopeless at reality.
perfect..you work for govt?
you have the way n means down pat 😉
This is one of my biggest reservations about “Climate Change”. It squeezes out all other narratives, even environmental narratives which are far more significant than Climate change.
Unless, of course, those disciplines kow tow to the Climatocracy and give appropriate blame to climate change.
Why ‘clandestine’ tours? Isn’t Gov. Brown safe in LA? Compton? Watts?
Perhaps there are much more immediate issues (drugs, gangs, violent crime, etc.) in these poor communities that need to be addressed?
Probably an attempt to avoid a dog-and-pony show. Probably got one anyway but at least it was a different kind of dog-and-pony show.
“Perhaps there are much more immediate issues (drugs, gangs, violent crime, etc.)…need to be addressed” Stopping the underground market (drugs, gangs, violent crime, etc.) will not be addressed. Why? Too much blood money flowing into Cal’s local and state political system.
In an earlier post I suggested the need to look into pollution [air, water, land and food] that is harming human health instead of wasting public money on carbon dioxide. Some body said pollution is not an important issue in USA. This article shows the reality.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Pollution is not an important problem in the US. Here we have a case of one person (councilwoman Garcia) going to one place (southeast L.A.) pointing at one thing (trucks) and intoning the magic Word of Power, “Pollution”. This hardly indicates a systemic pollution problem across the country.
Dr Reddy – I agree.
Dr. Reddy. Pollution is an important issue. It’s no longer a critical issue, and we are hitting significant diminishing returns in our actions, but it’s still something that is affectable. I’d much rather the government focus on something with a small benefit and actual end-goal than an endless project with no potential benefit.
The fact that small, localized areas are polluted, is not evidence that the US has a pollution problem.
If fact there was no evidence of small local areas of pollution.
The watermelon are spending huge amounts of tax dollars setting up portable sampling stations to find a smoke gun (no pun intended).
No smoking gun.
I agree, too.
We are well aware that agricultural runoff and sediment runoff from construction projects are orders of magnitude more important to coral reefs than climate change is. Yet, people cry “climate change” and “ocean acidification” as though that somehow changes reality.
If people really cared about coral reefs, they would focus on the primary causes. If people really cared about extinctions, then they would focus on over-fishing/over-hunting rather than climate change. If people really cared about hurricane damage, they would focus on better construction techniques. And, if people really cared about the number of people who die during heat waves, then they would focus on providing free air conditioning and cold water.
To me, it’s very simple. If you focus on the problem, then you can develop cost effective solutions. If you start with a “solution”, and then let’s figure out how we can rationalize it. Then nothing will be fixed at high cost.
Dr. Reddy
you obviously do not regard CO2 as pollution. Unfortunately the US has spent billions on the “belief” that CO2 is pollution – dragging those billions away from other real pollution control opportunities. I wonder how useful it would be if our professionals with similar insight attempted to convince their professional colleagues that the billions spent on attempts to curtail the production of CO2 are wasted.
Too bad we can’t fast forward tectonics and put that part west of the San Andreas fault 15 km under the N American plate overnight.
Dream on. Sadly, the Pacific Plate on which the coastal elites dwell is sliding northward relative to the North American Plate. A fast forward would put the elites closer to Alaska. At least the elites would not have to endure the global warming experienced by the North American Plate residents left behind. Details:
http://geology.com/articles/san-andreas-fault.shtml
There is evidence that colder temps have the effect of reducing crime.
Unfortunately Sacramento isn’t on the Pacific Plate. It lies east of the San Andreas Fault.
Eventually, though maybe not soon enough, wouldn’t they be subducted under the NA plate just South of Alaska before they “polluted” Alaska? Or maybe collide with the Juan de Fuca plate, and hang out off the Washington/Oregon coast, further Californicating both of those states?
The liberal left in California will not see it this way. Cap and Trade, or some form of “carbon control” has been a Holy Grail of the left for two decades. Now that such a scheme has been achieved, it will not be given up just because it is utterly pointless and ruinously expensive. Real pollution problems will be addressed by adding burdensome regulations and increasing costs until companies close and leave the state. For many on the left, this is a feature, not a bug, of govt. regulation.
The solution of course, is to just keep raising taxes. That way the government will have enough money to solve all the problems at once.
/sarc for the economically illiterate.
Many Leftivists really do seem to think the State can tax its way to wealth. A sort of perverted Robin Hood complex where instead of robbing the rich and giving to the poor, the socialists rob (tax) the middle class, give a lot to the rich, and a little to the poor, just enough to keep them voting for the socialists and not rioting in the streets. Government-backed money laundering on a grand scale.
Moving lots of money around does create a powerful illusion of growth, but that doesn’t make it any less illusory. Eventually the market sees through the Keynesian sleight-of-hand and bubbles start bursting.
Nonsense, cap-and-trade is consistently advanced as the conservative way to deal with [pollution] problems because it relies on market forces instead of regulations to get the job done.
Even in 1 BC Jerusalem had a Ghetto and no diesel trucks.
And Governor Moon Beam’s Hunger Burns … in the Ghetto, and a young man dies.
How many trucks does it take to choke a freeway? Everything has to be said in a melodramatic embellishment of urban vernacular with onomatopoeia whenever convenient.
“Just the facts Ma’am” – Joe Friday.
Of course, routine maintenance of the highways might do something to alleviate that conngestion, but Moombeam wants to discourage drives so he lets the roads deteriorate.
The sad part is that with about a 90% probability these low income and disadvantaged communities voted for this jackass.
Even sadder that they believe CO2 pollution is what’s causing their problems.
My mistake- CO2 pollution was never said by Ms. Garcia. Appologies.
Worse still they haven’t a clue as to what they ask for. They merely, and understandably, want the pollution (freeways, industry) located in somebody else’s neighborhood. Sounds good until you realize that wherever the freeways or pollution sources get moved to will see the real estate prices plummet and the urban area that has been cleaned up and renovated will see property values rise and “gentrification” begin. The newly blighted zone will then become the new low income neighborhood.
So, after much time and treasure has been spent the low income individuals will still be living in the crappy part of town.
A rising tide will lift all boats, yet it will never turn a dinghy into a yacht.
I can see why the Gov would want to keep a low profile in those neighborhoods. You don’t want word getting out and the “boyz from da’ hood” gathering in the streets to get “wound up”.
How can this be? I was out mowing today and at least two places on my lawnmower were warnings the device contained chemicals, etc, known to the state of California to be harmful to health. I am sure no one sells these horrible devices in California. Since I see the warning on many of the things I buy, how in the world can California be anything other than a paradise free from horrible chemicals and other man-made killers? What in the world are all those warnings for if not to exclude these things from the residents of the great state of California?
The labels say: “found to be harmful to health in the State of California”. Whenever I see one of these labels, I immediately give thanks that I am not in the state of California, where everything apparently kills you. I want a label that warns that reading warning labels is harmful to health in the State of California. That one would have some truth to it.
I once said to a Health and Safety inspector at work that a blizzard of health and safety signs was far more dangerous than just one or two for the most serious risks, they agreed but said if the signs weren’t there someone would use it as a reason to sue if they had an accident. So everyone just walks by without looking at any of them.
Ho Hum.
James Bull
James, It’s called Alarm Fatigue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
WARNING: “California Truths” can be harmful or fatal if swallowed
“California Proposition 65 Warning: WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”
Mine came on a:
Corona 8-inch Folding Pruning Saw
… made of steel, wood handle, red painted name
{other handles are of red plastic}
Actually, if you cut through your jugular veins you likely will not reproduce. You might get a Darwin Award.
California gets about 25% of the illegal immigrant population, totally about 2.8 million people in 2012; far more than any other state.
California also has a large number of sanctuary cities, though not so many as Oregon (which does not appear among the top-10 immigration states).
One of them is Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia’s Bell Gardens: http://www.conservapedia.com/Sanctuary_city.
I don’t want to seem heartless here, but could the problem of poor people living near freeways, etc., be related at all the the large demographic of impoverished in-migrant ICE-clients? People who need to live off the grid and so can’t improve their conditions?
One wonders: is AW. Garcia being unforthcoming about the source of the problem? Could she actually be causally responsible for the very problem that disturbs her sleep?
If impoverished in-migrants are the problem, then Governor Brown certainly is responsible for it, and not because he’s throwing money at climate and bullet trains. It’s because he has actively supported illegal in-migration.
Maybe we should bill him for treating the asthma of these people along with the heart disease, cancer and other catalogued health problems (a catalogue probably generated by extrapolation of garbage linear-no-threshold epidemiological models).
But he has a pretty choo choo train that runs so fine…..in his mind….
surprised he didn’t just ban trucks
Bill Whittle has a few ideas which might explain Gov. Moonbeam, his Train To Nowhere, and his battle against Climate Change. WUWT regulars will be familiar with a few of the characters presented.
Loved this. Thanks for sharing!
+10
I love me some Bill Whittle from time to time. His Graduation Day speech that should have been, is one of the finest primers on economic reality that I can imagine. But most brainwashed little snowflakes and dewdrops (dewdrop=snowflake that has melted due to global warming) will never hear it, because, well, they’ve been brainwashed. And now here they are, graduating all over this country and world, thinking they’re the next phalanx of experts who are qualified to take over and run the world.
https://www.billwhittle.com/afterburner/real-world-commencement-speech
“Diesel exhaust contributes to………”. In reality, Diesel exhaust in actual concentrations, does none of these things. What a crock of garbage.
That strongly depends on the engine. “Diesel’ contains no smoke at all and it certainly doesn’t contain any particulates. It is an inhomogeneous fluid typically containing a range of paraffins from C16H34 to C22H46.
eck – “Several epidemiologic studies have demonstrated a consistent association between levels of particulate matter (PM) in the ambient air with increases in cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity. Diesel exhaust (DE), in addition to generating other pollutants, is a major contributor to PM pollution in most places in the world.” See http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/ajrccm.159.3.9709083 or search for “diesel exhaust” on Google Scholar
I’d suggest reading this and the references too.
https://junkscience.com/2016/09/fact-sheet-particulate-matter-in-outdoor-air-does-not-cause-death/
Nigel — that fact sheet is nonsense. Fine particulate matter most certainly affects health. The articles referenced in the “fact sheet” do not say that fine particulates are harmless. They are discussing appropriate limits. Like every limit, it is tough to prove that 25 ppm is good, but 26 ppm is too high. The EPA still is required to set limits based on the best available evidence.
Tobacco companies must love you.
If you can smell it, it’s pollution and will harm you.
Is that really the position you want to defend?
“Smoke” is basically nonoxidized carbon (soot) and particulate impurities which are carried by the exhaust. Diesels most certainly contain all of these things.Diesel engines do not burn with perfect efficiency and refined diesel fuel will pick up impurities before it arrives at the engine (even if the refineries were perfect.)
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/dieselexhaustparticulates.pdf
Many hydrocarbon vapors are odorless, and only have a smell because bitterants were added to them, so you would actually notice a gas leak. The mustardy smell of acetylene, for example, comes from such additives.
Also, carbon monoxide.
Electric cars and solar subsidies are for rich people – the plebs just don’t seem to get what they are supposed to do. They should reuse, recycle and reduce, and virtue-signal as much as they can. And pay higher prices for everything because of the subsidies to the rich.
This is not difficult to understand. Just follow the money. You are not getting any.
/Without a hint of sarcasm
I thought they were just supposed to die without reproducing, so the elites can have more space ?
To understand the reality of pollution will somebody from this group present the city-wise pollution levels in different parameters [highest, mean, lowest] for the air?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
The NAAQS site is your friend, Doc.
https://www.epa.gov/air-trends
T “Bone” Pickens once said we need to save natural gas for the trucks. We aren’t doing that. In California we use natural gas mostly for electrical generation. Natural gas has only 60% of the energy (read Carbon content) of diesel, yet diesel’s “Carbon efficiency” is 17% lower than natural gas because natural gas combustion benefits from the release of energy stored in Hydrogen bonds.
So you get 17% less CO2 per unit combustion, but you must burn 40% more…
Gymn, the “per unit of combustion” is “per MMBTU of heat generated”. The energy density is in energy per pound. Those two numbers aren’t multiplicative since the -17% already includes the 60%.
Energy is formed in two ways in fire: creating CO2 and creating H2O. Since methane has the highest Hydrogen to Carbon ratio 4:1, it creates a 1:1 ratio of CO2 and Water. Diesel has roughly two hydrogens per carbon, so it generates a 2:1 ratio of CO2 to Water.
However, since forming CO2 (390 kJ/mol) generates a bit more than twice the amount of forming water (170 kJ/mol), this means that the heat content per cubic foot is sharply negative with the size.
These mostly cancel each other out, which leaves you with burning methane creating slightly less (17% sounds about right and I can’t be bothered to do the math myself right now) CO2 per unit of energy produced.
Thanks, I was having second thoughts myself after posting.
“Energy is created two ways in fire: creating CO2 and creating H2O.”
Very profound sentence, and food for thought.
I got the 17% from some government website a while back. Let’s suppose it is correct, and you are correct that it already includes the Carbon differential.
What is Jerry to do? I am just enough of a mechanic to wonder how methane works in a (billion dollar?) standing stock of high compression diesel engines.
Brown is right on the button and deserves no critcism whatsoever.
Under his watch, California will ultimately be clean, green and unpopulated.
Already I understand that there is a migration to other more fortunate states and pretty soon now we shall see a reverse migration to Mexico, (if it hasnt started already.)
Keep up the good work Governor Brown. This is going to impress the IPCC and the Agenda 21 initiatives. Land with no people means “sustainability” – (unless you are a normal businessman or tax payer).
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Criticizing Brown is just shooting fish in a barrel. There’s nothing at all right in that man’s head. I don’t know if it was drugs, rock and roll, or just way too much Dad in his life, but the guy is completely disconnected and he’s never coming back.
California will need to “hit rock bottom” before it can recover an I’d like to think it has to be just around the bend, but I’m the guy who predicted we’d have computerized navigation systems in rental cars by 1995; I was off by ten years.
No doubt Brown is pathological. This too will pass.
To Christina Garcia,
None of the poor people in the world have roof top solar panels.
They never will have them because they do not have the money to afford them.
They will never have the money to afford them BECAUSE they are paying ridiculous subsidies so middle and upper class people can have them (and wind turbines).
Ms Garcia,
You and Mr Brown are absolute donkeys [there I go, insulting donkeys].
“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard
Live in northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft
Travel, accept certain inalienable truths
Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old
And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young
Prices were reasonable, politicians were noble
And children respected their elders”
Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen) – BAZ LUHRMANN
School bans sunscreen as child melanoma rates rise
Link
John F. Hultquist
Astonishing!
The Europe Court of Human Rights states that the person ultimately responsible for a child’s welfare is their parent or official carer. It’s roundly ignored, of course, by schools who Imagine they are anything but merely momentary carers ‘in loco parentis’.
We must, however, allow for the usual media sensationalism in this case.
Having said all that, I’ll direct you to the blog of Dr. Malcolm McKendrick. Amongst many well considered opinions, statins being his particular speciality, he criticises the over use of sunscreen as it inhibits our generation of vitamin ‘D’.
He maintains, not without evidence, that Vitamin ‘D’ deficiency is a major contributor to Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). He also maintains an animal fat rich diet has nothing whatsoever to do with CHD as a remote African tribe was found to have the largest intake of animal fat on the planet, and the lowest incidence of CHD on the planet (I paraphrase).
He also point out that statins are the most profitable drug ever invented, there was even a proposal to add them to our water supply, yet people routinely complain of debilitating side effect, with a life expectancy increase of an average CHD sufferer (and again I paraphrase) of some 4 days.
The guy is a serious sceptic!
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org
Governor Brown will probably get over his dose of reality pretty quickly. Those inconvenient poor people wont sway him from further virtue signalling and “saving” the world.
Those poor people don’t contribute to political campaign funds.
So many confounding factors…
Poor people – why do so many (in my experience) smoke? Cigarettes and other 5hit
How are they heating their homes – are they burning wood, esp stuff that may have been chemically treated or full of glue like chipboard/laminate/plywood or unseasoned wood cut from trees. Is it ‘The Particles’ that cause upset or what they may be coated with, such as creosote, tar, dioxin, aromatics & cyclics and god knows what organic chemical nasties,. Aren’t we always told that (even) cigarette smoke contains 4000 such things.
What about other stuff off the road – tyre & brake dust, pollen & other stuff the trucks have picked up elsewhere – see how plants travelled England along the railways as they were built.
Then there’s fine (tar encrusted) dust off the road surface itself. Not just trucks make that. There’s tar again, THE major baddy in cigarette smoke…
Finally for now, why were (poor) East German kids, living in a smoke filled h3ll-hole of pollution, so much less asthma prone that their clean living (rich) West German. How’s about that Christina, maybe you’re not so badly off as you make out. And I’m sorry for this but, girls always do that don’t they? They always want more. And boys, in the hope of getting their ends away, will (try) to deliver that ‘more’
Its actually the definition of ‘romance’ = the giving (by boys) of gifts (=stuff) in exchange for babies. Or at least the attempt at making babies.
Maybe, just maybe, all those rich & clean-living West German kids had a ‘good & balanced diet’ = one containing many different fruits and esp vegetables. All the myriad chemicals plants use to defend themselves are what sets off asthma. Its an affliction of rich people.
“Garcia said it was too soon to proclaim Brown’s visit a success.
“It went well,” she said, “if we get something in the budget or we get some bills signed.” “
gov. Brown. And no Teslas distributed. Freely.
One way for Gov. Brown to meet his CO2 emission goals is to cause a drastic reduction in the population of California so that it is at least 40% less than it was in 1990. Making it almost impossible for businesses to make a profit in this state will help. Eliminating all transport by truck woild make life virtually impossible for most Californians and they would be forced to move to more livable states. If all CO2 emissions were totally eliminated in California it would have little effect on the total of greenhouse gases in the state which is dominated by H2O. The governor needs to pay more attention to science. From an evaluation of the paleocliamte record and the work that has done with climate models, on can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind, even Gov. Brown, has no contorl..There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on science and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is really zero. Hence an effort to cut CO2 emissions will have no effect on climate and is a total waste of money. Even if Gov. Brown could somehow stop the Earth’s climate from changing it would have no effect upon extreme weather conditions and sea level rise because such is part of our current climate. So there is nothing to be gained by Gov. Brown’s efforts.
Out of curiosity, if the other states selling california power simply stopped doing so, would that impact Moonbeams targets much ?
States can’t refuse to sell electricity to CA. Something in the Constitution about not establishing trade barriers between states. How that plays out with limited resources can get tricky though.
If Calexit ever became reality, the Interstate Commerce Clause would no longer apply. A good reason why Calexit is unlikely to become reality.
It does not matter where the power is created because climate is a global climate. Most of the greenhouse gases in the atmopshere over California originally came from out of state. The Gov. needs to find a way to close California’s borders to the flow of greenhouse gases the majoriety of which is H2O. The Gov. also needs to find a way of keeping the greenhouse gases in California that condense out of the atmosphere from reintering the global atmopshere again.
https://youtu.be/Jx3PzJp8mf8
Isn’t it interesting that the Tesla Gigafactory did NOT get built in California!
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Tesla+Gigafactory/@39.5399574,-119.4376746,3393m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x80991fc240ba30b9:0x7e66b0fa4fe55cd8!8m2!3d39.5380042!4d-119.43904?hl=en
https://youtu.be/U1lQJ4Oc_VY
Offenbach wrote that to warn Napoléon before to attack Russia. And to fail.
Napoléon did not listen.
Power must roughly balance economics, reliability and environmental concerns. If the balance gets to far out of whack as regards any of these components feedback loops will work against the original aims. If you develop a costly electric system that “over values” the environment over economics, less costly and less clean options to electrical consumption will take root. In much of the third world building an expansive “dirty” electric supply would be vastly superior from an environmental perspective than building a limited “green” supply accompanied by the poor burning massive amounts of dung, cardboard and twigs.
“Diesel exhaust contributes to asthma, heart disease, cancer…”
…as “proven” to the state’s satisfaction with one fraudulent study by a fake PhD who happened to be a state employee under orders by the Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols.
Credibility abounds.
The rules imposed by the CAGW crowd always end up attacking the poor and working poor.
Speaking of trailer parks abutting industrial sites, that is easy to explain. The that is where the people in the trailer park work. If you force the trailer parks away from the industrial sites, the result will be that people who have been getting by walking to work, will have to buy cars, or have to start paying for bus passes.
+2
Indeed. It’s increasing the “cost of employment”. And transportation is just part of it.
Instead of minimum wage hikes, which just make it harder for businesses to offer jobs, there should be pushes for policies that reduce the cost of employment, so the working poor keep more money from the same wage.
On topic(ish): Bike lanes are racist
https://www.amazon.ca/Bike-Lanes-Are-White-Advocacy/dp/0803276788
“The number of bicyclists is increasing in the United States, especially among the working class and people of color. In contrast to the demographics of bicyclists in the United States, advocacy for bicycling has focused mainly on the interests of white upwardly mobile bicyclists, leading to neighborhood conflicts and accusations of racist planning.
In Bike Lanes Are White Lanes, scholar Melody L. Hoffmann argues that the bicycle has varied cultural meaning as a “rolling signifier.” That is, the bicycle’s meaning changes in different spaces, with different people, and in different cultures. The rolling signification of the bicycle contributes to building community, influences gentrifying urban planning, and upholds systemic race and class barriers.
In this study of three prominent U.S. cities—Milwaukee, Portland, and Minneapolis—Hoffmann examines how the burgeoning popularity of urban bicycling is trailed by systemic issues of racism, classism, and displacement. From a pro-cycling perspective, Bike Lanes Are White Lanes highlights many problematic aspects of urban bicycling culture and its advocacy as well as positive examples of people trying earnestly to bring their community together through bicycling.”
“The visit exposed the large disconnect between Brown’s penchant for prioritizing state resources toward globally directed state climate regulation versus the real world of needs for environmental actions that actually benefit California’s local communities health and living conditions.”
Why does this disconnect need to be exposed. It is as intended. Being a world leader for globally directed climate policies by necessity means that Californians are paying money to help the world in their own small way. The benefit to Californians, rich or poor is to help people across the globe in 50+ years. Will the poor of California suffer disproportionately? Only if the State government does not ease their burden, so yes they will.
Having high morals can be costly you know, perhaps not so much for the rich, but absolutely for the poor.
Meanwhile China builds artificial islands with weapons in the so called rising seas of the South China Sea.
Probably going to try to inforce Their Perceived Rights to the Methane Calthrate energy sources in that vast area
Wow, poor people are forced to live in substandard homes within the less desirable areas… who could have guessed?
Governor Moonbeam is (again), demonstrating that he holds the American people of California in disdain. My company has approached the Governor offering truly world-class green energy production technology capable of actually satisfying the green fuels mandates that he championed. The response was rather tepid. No help with acquiring any capital, from ANY source public or private. Site selection and permitting assistance was the only help available because the state is so broke.
For Governor Brown to have recently spent tens of millions of state tax money paying those millions for the Attorney’s fees for any illegal aliens who want to fight federal deportation in federal court is felonious on it’s face. To be too broke for Governor Brown’s office to substantively help us create an ongoing supply of good paying, renewable fuels mandate satisfying, and income tax paying jobs for Californians, yet somehow think that through taxes I am going to pay illegal aliens legal bills to enable them to continue breaking the law means that Governor Brown is mentally and psychologically unfit to remain in office.
This betrayal cuts deeply.