Despite Past Mismanagement, Feds Keep Wasting Millions On N.C. Red Wolf Experiment
Meet the Bloomberg-Funded Official Who is Behind the DC AG's Top Climate Initiatives
A senior official behind a number of the Washington, D.C., attorney general office's high-profile climate-related legal actions is funded through an initiative backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg—an arrangement experts say raises serious questions about government independence.
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How California’s crisis could lead to a big political shift
California’s wide range of problems — including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market — shows the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there exists a will to change.
Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents — including about 1.1 million since 2021 — have been fleeing to other states.
California needs a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents, and, most critically, moderate Democrats.
Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.
In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s Republican National Committee member.
New awakenings
Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and, most critically, moderate Democrats.
Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents — billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers — have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.
Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the board of supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.
Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideology-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.
Critically, the liberal elites are not the only ones breaking ranks. Pressure for change is also coming from increasingly conservative Asian voters and Jews — who number more than 1 million in the state and largely are revolted by the anti-Semitism rife among some on the progressive left. Protecting property and economic growth is particularly critical to Latino and Asian immigrants — California is home to five of the 10 American counties with the most immigrants — who are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.
These minority entrepreneurs and those working for them are unlikely to share the view of progressive intellectuals, who see crime as an expression of injustice and who often excused or even celebrated looting during the summer of 2020. After all, it was largely people from “communities of color” who have borne the brunt of violent crime in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Minorities also face special challenges doing business here due to regulations that are especially burdensome on smaller, less capitalized businesses. According to the Small Business Regulation Index, California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.
The shift among minority voters could prove a critical game-changer, both within the Democratic Party and the still-weak GOP. In Oakland, for example, many minorities backed the removal of Mayor Sheng Thao (D), a progressive committed to lenient policing in what is now California’s most troubled, if not failed, major city.
Latinos, already the state’s largest ethnic group, constituting about 37.7% of the workforce, with expectations of further growth by 2030, seem to be heading toward the right. In the last presidential election, Trump did well in the heavily Latino inland counties and won the “Inland Empire” — the metropolitan area bordering Los Angeles and Orange Counties – the first time a GOP presidential candidate has achieved this in two decades.
Back to basics
After a generation of relentless virtue-signaling, California’s government needs to focus on the basic needs of its citizens: education, energy, housing, water supply, and public safety. As a widely distributed editorial by a small business owner noted, Californians, especially after highly publicized fire response failures in Los Angeles earlier this year, are increasingly willing to demand competent “basic governance” backed by a “ruthless examination of results” to ensure that their government supports “modest aspirations” for a better life.
California once excelled in basic governance, especially in the 1950s and '60s under Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The state managed to cultivate growth while meeting key environmental challenges, starting in the late 1960s, most notably chronic air pollution. In what is justifiably hailed as a “major success,” California helped pioneer clean air regulatory approaches that have vastly reduced most automotive tailpipe emissions as well as eliminated lead and dramatically cut sulfur levels.
All of this starkly contrasts with the poor planning, execution, and catastrophist science evoked to justify the state’s climate agenda. Even Pat Brown’s son, former Gov. Jerry Brown (D), recognized that California has little effect on climate. Given the global nature of the challenge, reducing one state’s emissions by cutting back on industrial activities accomplishes little if those activities move elsewhere, often to locations with fewer restrictions such as China and India.
Rather than focusing on “climate leadership,” Sacramento needs to tackle the immediate causes of record out-migration, including sluggish economic growth and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. The great challenges are not combatting global temperature rises but the housing crisis and the need to diversify the economy and improve the failing education system. As these problems have often been worsened by climate policies, there seems little reason for other states and countries to adopt California’s approach as a model.
halbergman via iStock/Getty Images
Fixing housing
California now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High interest rates that have helped push home sales to the lowest level in three decades across the country are particularly burdensome in coastal California metros, where prices have risen to nearly 400% above the national average. The government almost owned up to its role in creating the state’s housing crisis — especially through excessive housing regulations and lawfare on developers — earlier this year when Newsom moved to cut red tape so homes could be rebuilt after the Los Angeles fires.
Current state policy — embraced by Yes in My Backyard activists, the greens, and unions — focuses on dense urban development. Projects are held up, for example, for creating too many vehicle miles traveled, even though barely 3.1% of Californians in 2023 took public transit to work, according to the American Community Survey. As a result, much “affordable” development is being steered to densely built areas that have the highest land prices. This is made worse with mandates associated with new projects, such as green building codes and union labor, that raise the price per unit to $1 million or more.
A far more enlightened approach would allow new growth to take place primarily outside city centers in interior areas where land costs are lower and where lower-cost, moderate-density new developments could flourish. These include areas like Riverside/San Bernardino, Yolo County (adjacent to Sacramento), and Solano County, east of San Francisco Bay. This approach would align with the behavior of residents who are already flocking to these areas because they provide lower-income households, often younger black and Latino, with the most favorable home ownership opportunities in the state.Over 71% of all housing units in the Inland Empire are single-family homes, and the aggregate ownership rate is over 63%, far above the state’s dismal 45.8% level.
Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.
More than anything, California needs a housing policy that syncs with the needs and preferences of its people, particularly young families. Rather than being consigned to apartments, 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences. The vast majority oppose legislation written by Yes in My Backyard hero Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener banning single-family zoning in much of the state.
Investment in the interior is critical for recreating the old California dream for millions of aspiring households, particularly among minorities who are being driven out of the home ownership market in the coastal metropolitan areas. The only California metropolitan area ranked by the National Association of Realtors as a top 10 pick for Millennials was not hip San Francisco or glamorous Los Angeles, but the more affordable historically “redneck” valley community of Bakersfield.
The numerous housing bills passed by Sacramento have not improved the situation. From 2010 to 2023, permits for single-family homes in California fell to a monthly average of 3,957 units from 8,529 during 1993-2006. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% between 2010 and 2023, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%).
A more successful model can be seen in Texas, which generally advances market-oriented policies that have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multi-family housing. This has helped the Lone Star State meet the housing needs of its far faster-growing population. A building boom has slowed, and there’s been some healthy decrease in prices in hot markets like Austin. Opening up leased grazing land in state and federal parks — roughly half the state land is owned by governments — could also relieve pressure on land prices. Until California allows for housing that people prefer, high prices and out-migration will continue into the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, California has room to grow, despite the suggestions by some academics that the state is largely “built out.”In reality, California is not “land short,” either in its cities or across its vast interior. Urbanization covers only 5.3% of the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, while parks, agricultural land, deserts, and forests make up the bulk of the area.
Diversifying the economy
Even Jerry Brown has remarked that the “Johnny one note” tech economy the state’s tax base depends on could stumble. This would reduce the huge returns on capital gains from the top 1% of filers, who now account for roughly half of all state income tax revenues. This overreliance may be particularly troublesome in the era of artificial intelligence, where tech companies may continue to expand but have less need for people. Indeed, San Francisco County, which boasts many tech jobs, experienced the nation’s largest drop in average weekly wages, 22.6%, between 2021 and 2022.
To expand opportunity and, hence, its tax base, California has to make more of the state attractive to employers. The best prospects, again, will be in inland areas.Today, when firms want to build spaceships, a clear growth industry where California retains significant leadership, as well as battery plants and high-tech and food processing facilities, they often opt to go to Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and Texas. Given lower land and housing costs, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, as well as spots on the Central Coast, should be ideally situated to compete for those jobs.
The current economic pattern creates a situation where AI developers, elite engineers, and venture capitalists may enjoy unprecedented profits, but relatively little trickles down to the mass of Californians. Not all Californians have wealthy parents to subsidize their lifestyle, and few are likely to thrive as AI engineers. To address the dilemmas facing the next generation of Californians, the state needs to focus not just on ephemera, software, and entertainment but on bringing back some of the basic industries that once forged the California dream. In this way, President Trump’s policies could actually help the state, particularly in fields like high-tech defense and space.
In the 1940s, California played a key role in the American “arsenal of democracy.” Today, it could do the same, not so much by producing planes and Liberty ships, but drones, rockets, and space-based defense systems. Indeed, there are now discussions of reviving the state’s once-vaunted shipbuilding industry that buoyed the economy of Solano County — something sure to inspire the ire of the Bay Area’s rich and powerful environmental lobby.
Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Improving education
Climate and environmentalism are not the only barriers to California’s revival. No problem is more pressing and consequential than the state’s failure to educate California’s 5.9 million public school children. In fiscal year 2023-2024, California will spend about $128 billion on K-12 public education — an amount exceeding the entire budget of every other state except New York. Despite this level of spending, about 75% of California students lack proficiency in core subject areas based on federal education standards.
Two out of three California students do not meet math standards, and more than half do not meet English standards on state assessments. Overall, less than half of California public school students performed at or above grade level for English language arts (reading, writing, etc.), while only 34.62% met or exceeded the math standard on the Smarter Balanced 2023 tests. The failures are particularly clear among minority students. According to the latest California testing results, only 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency standards for English language arts. Only 22.69% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. Latino students, for example, in Florida and Texas do somewhat better in both math and English, even though both states spend less per capita on education than California.
Not surprisingly, many parents object to a system where half of the state’s high school students barely read at grade level. One illustration of discontent has been the growth of the charter school movement. Today, one in nine California schoolchildren attend charter schools (including my younger daughter). The state’s largest school district, the heavily union-dominated Los Angeles Unified School District, has lost roughly 40% of its enrollment over two decades, while the number of students in charters grew from 140,000 in 2010 to 207,000 in 2022.
In addition to removing obstacles to charters, homeschoolers are part of the solution. California homeschool enrollment jumped by 78% in the five-year period before the pandemic and in the Los Angeles Unified School District by 89%. Equally important, some public districts and associated community colleges, as in Long Beach, have already shifted toward a more skills-based approach. Public officials understand that to keep a competitive edge, they need to supply industrial employers with skilled workers. This is all the more crucial as the aerospace workforce is aging — as much as 50% of Boeing’s workforce will be eligible for retirement in five years. In its quest for relevance, Long Beach’s educational partnership addresses the needs of the city’s industrial and trade sectors.
This approach contrasts with the state’s big push to make students take an ethnic studies course designed to promote a progressive and somewhat anti-capitalist, multicultural agenda. They will also be required to embrace the ideology of man-made climate change even if their grasp of basic science is minimal. A “woke” consciousness or deeper ethnic affiliations will not lead to student success later in life. What will count for the students and for California’s economy is gaining the skills that are in demand. You cannot run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics, or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.
More to come
Conventional wisdom on the right considers California to be on the road to inexorable decline. Progressives, not surprisingly, embrace the Golden State as a model while ignoring the regressive, ineffective policies that have driven the state toward a feudal future.
Yet both sides are wrong. California’s current progressive policies have failed, but if the state were governed correctly, it could resurge in ways that would astound the rest of the country and the world. Change is not impossible. As recent elections showed, Californians do not reflexively vote for progressives if they feel their safety or economic interests are on the line.
If change is to come in California, it may not be primarily driven by libertarian or conservative ideologies but by stark realities. Over two-thirds of California cities do not have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other expenses. Twelve of the state’s 15 large cities are in the red, and for many, it is only getting worse. The state overall suffers $1 trillion in pension debt, notes former Democratic state Rep. Joe Nation. U.S. News and World Report places California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states. This pension shortfall makes paying for infrastructure, or even teacher salaries, extraordinarily difficult at the state and local levels.
Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable, even if a handful of people get very rich and the older homeowners, public employees, and high-end professionals thrive. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.
This can only happen if the state unleashes the animal spirits that long drove its ascendancy. The other alternative may be a more racial, class-based radicalism promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies. They have their own “cure” for California’s ills. We see this in debates over rebuilding Los Angeles, with progressives pushing for heavily subsidized housing, as with the case of the redevelopment of the Jordan Downs public housing complex, while seeking to densify and expand subsidized housing to once solidly affluent areas like the Palisades.
California has survived past crises — earthquakes and the defense and dot-com busts — and always has managed to reinvent itself. The key elements for success — its astounding physical environment, mild climate, and a tradition for relentless innovation — remain in place, ready to be released once the political constraints are loosened.
Fifty years ago, in her song “California,” Canada-reared Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of our remarkable state, not just its sunshine, mountains, and beaches, but also how it gave its residents an unprecedented chance to meet their fondest aspirations. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer grayness of life elsewhere, she wrote, “My heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Why California’s ‘model state’ is a warning, not a goal
California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood — a topic that has resurfaced with President Donald Trump’s presidency, as it reflects, in the words of one New York Times columnist, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”
Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third-highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — live in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another one in five live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.
Barely one in three state residents consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.
“California” is a model that no longer delivers. Sure, California has a huge gross domestic product, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment, with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals — notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.
The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents — and only one in four younger voters — now consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.
‘San Francisco gentry liberalism’
The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption.
“Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.”
Ironically, the state’s corruption and decline have been expressed through policies long touted as symbols of progressive enlightenment and virtue — the odd marriage of oligarchal wealth and woke political consciousness some describe as “San Francisco gentry liberalism.”
Under this regime, personified by Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), progressivism has lost its historic embrace of upward mobility and replaced it with an ideology obsessed with race, gender, and climate. It has produced a political leadership class that, for the most part, is largely made up of longtime government or union operatives. In the legislature, the vast majority of Democrats have little to no experience in the private sector. The failure may have been accelerated by the secular decline of the once-powerful Republican Party over the past two decades. This decline removed the incentives for Democrats to concern themselves with moderate voters of either party.
This development represents a distinct break even with California’s pro-growth progressive past, which helped make the Golden State a symbol of American opportunity, innovation, and prosperity. The late historian and one-time state librarian Kevin Starr observed that under the governorship of Democrat Pat Brown in the late 1950s and early 1960s, California enjoyed “a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent nation-state.” In 1971, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described the state government as run by “a proud, competent civil service,” enjoying some of “the best school systems in the country.”
This may seem something like ancient mythology to most Californians today. If the builder Pat Brown was an exemplar of “Responsible Liberalism,” California’s government today has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to the tax burden. Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, the Democratic governor from 1975 to 1983 and then again from 2011 to 2019, and his successor, Gavin Newsom, epitomize the triumph of ideology over effectiveness. Theirs is a kind of performative progressivism that shrugs about things like roads that are now among the nation’s worst, a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns, and a failure to boost critical water systems in a perennially drought-threatened state.
In exchange for all this, the progressive regime has stuck ordinary Californians and businesses with some of the nation’s highest taxes and greatest regulatory burdens. California’s business climate is rated at or near the bottom in most business surveys. The Tax Foundation’s 2019 State Business Tax Climate Index, which evaluates taxes in five categories, also lists California at No. 49, with only New Jersey trailing.
These policies have made California exceptionally expensive for both businesses and households. Indeed, according to current estimates, only Hawaii and Massachusetts have a higher cost of living. California has the highest average housing costs, the second-highest transportation costs, and the third-highest food expenses in the country. Much of this is invisible to the top 20% and 5% of California households, who enjoy median incomes of $72,500 and $129,000 — greater than their national counterparts — but is widely felt in the state’s less affluent areas.
Pell-mell into climatism
California progressivism today embraces many causes — undocumented immigrants, transgender kids, reparations for slavery — but nothing has shaped the state’s contemporary politics more in recent years than a commitment to what Newsom described in 2018 as “climate leadership.”
In embracing the catastrophism that defines climate change as an existential threat to life on the planet, Newsom has left behind the old progressive notion of focusing on materially improving people’s lives by embracing inherently uncertain computer models predicting danger.
In California, experts from what Bjorn Lomborg, a leading skeptic of climate catastrophism, calls “the climate industrial complex” provide the justification for staggeringly expensive, socially regressive mandates based on the conjured models. The state mandates greenhouse gas reductions but leaves implementation in the hands of state agencies closely aligned with the green lobby.
This allows the legislature to look the other way as state climate policies knowingly increase poor and working family costs and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modeled carbon emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate. Indeed, in 2023, the California Air Resources Board belatedly disclosed that current state climate policies would disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.
Newsom’s dogged emphasis on climate change — and achieving “carbon neutrality” by 2045 — has meant massive subsidies for wind and solar, mandates to reduce personal car use by nearly three times the temporary cuts caused by pandemic lockdowns, electrification of home appliances at a cost of many thousands of dollars per household, and even cuts to dairy and livestock emissions with technology mandates, accelerating the relocation of these food producers to other states and increasing food prices.
To justify the pain, state regulators estimated that paying for these changes today would prevent future climate damage, all of which depends on highly uncertain projections spanning, in some cases, hundreds of years in the future. The problem is that even if damage projections are remotely accurate, California’s climate law recognizes that the state cannot affect the global climate unless everyone else in the world follows suit. In fact, global emissions are rising, especially from China, which exported over $120 billion in goods and services, notably manufactured goods, often produced with coal, to California in 2023.
Also based on “expert” opinion, the state has embraced a policy to force people to buy electric vehicles by 2035 — a policy increasingly questionable amid slowing demand for these vehicles. Once again, state officials relying on speculative projections proclaim that the policy will benefit the state’s consumers and the environment — although this seems questionable, given, as Volvo suggests, the energy demands of building such cars may take years to have a positive impact.
Photo by David McNew/Getty Images
The price of climate delusion
The recent fires that incinerated a swath of Los Angeles revealed the shortcomings of the current climate-obsessed regime. To be sure, Trump’s claim that water policies created the conflagration is largely false, but the lack of attention to water delivery and forest maintenance, a consistent aspect of the Brown-Newsom era, clearly contributed to the intensity of the blaze.
In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure allocating $2.7 billion to increase state water storage capacity, including the building of new reservoirs. These facilities would not only improve an aging water system neglected for decades but also capture and store precipitation that may occur in less frequent, more intense storms. Yet even government apologists concede that 10 years later, progress has been too slow, with deeply entrenched bureaucracies issuing permits only at a “glacial” pace.
Rather than building on the achievements of Pat Brown, state officials spent a quarter of a billion dollars helping environmental groups destroy dams and hydroelectric generation along the Klamath River in Northern California. While this effort may yet improve fish habitat as intended, its initial results are sobering. Most of the river’s existing fish, crustaceans, and other organisms were killed by toxic sediment as the dams were removed, and unanticipated tar-pit-like mud exposure trapped large mammals, including protected wild horses. In March 2024, fish that state biologists confidently released into the restored river perished in a mass “die-off” within two days.
These misplaced priorities are also mirrored in Los Angeles, where reservoirs were left empty, leaving water unavailable and water hydrants without pressure. Both the state and local governments have failed to sufficiently fund fire-fighting operations — except for approving lavish pensions.
The climate catastrophists may promote fires as a sign of the coming apocalypse, but still consistently oppose effective fire management, as the Little Hoover Commission found as far back as 2018, discouraging such things as controlled burns and brush clearance. Policies of controlled burns, practiced by Native Americans and in areas like Western Australia, have been largely ignored.
Even as he rails against “misinformation,” Newsom blamed the recent Los Angeles fires, as he has regarding earlier blazes, on climate change. This claim has been widely debunked by scientists like Steve Koonin, Roger Pielke, and the U.S. Geological Service. Undaunted, Newsom’s neat solution appears to be to sue the oil companies for fires made far worse by Newsom’s own policies.
The greening of decline
Charred landscapes and burned houses reflect one legacy of California’s progressive obsessions. The impact of taxes and climate regulations on the overall economy has been more widespread, particularly for minorities and working- and middle-class households, who were once the focus of traditional liberalism.
This shift has been bolstered by the ascendancy of public employee unions and the remarkable growth of the state bureaucracy. California, under Pat Brown, largely avoided public employee unions, but Jerry Brown and other governors reversed this policy. Since 2022, even with budget shortfalls, California has among the highest rates of government sector growth in the country. Today, they are widely seen as a dominant force in Sacramento. Particularly powerful has been the 310,000-member California Teachers Association. Their numbers have continued to swell, even amid budget shortfalls, at a faster rate than private-sector employment.
Public employees, or their union representatives, constitute a powerful part of California’s emerging class hierarchy. Increasingly, their livelihoods are tied to an agenda of ever more regulation and taxes. Public workers, of course, also share these costs, but more regulation also engenders more jobs for the bureaucracy.
Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Californians, particularly the working class, do not enjoy such benefits. In assessing the impacts of climate policies, environmental and civil rights attorney Jennifer Hernandez has dubbed these policies “the Green Jim Crow,” linking the state’s climate regulatory effort to the impoverishment of millions. California has the highest energy prices in the continental U.S., double the national average, which has exacerbated “energy poverty,” particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.
In 2023, Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahalo found that the tech and information sector accounted for close to two-thirds of state GDP, compared to 8.5% in 1985. Virtually every sector associated with blue-collar employment — manufacturing, construction, transportation, and agriculture — has declined while most others have stagnated.
Consider California’s once-vibrant fossil fuel industry. The state’s last major oil firm, Chevron, recently moved to Houston. In 1996, California imported less than 10% of its crude oil from foreign sources. In 2023, foreign suppliers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia accounted for over 60% of the state’s supplies. This continued shuttering of the state’s fossil fuel industry will cost California as many as 300,000 generally high-paying jobs, roughly half held by minorities, and will devastate, in particular, the San Joaquin Valley, where 40,000 jobs depend on the oil industry.
Other blue-collar industries — construction, manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture — are also suffering under California’s climate policies. Over the past decade, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment, ranking 44th in 2023. Its industrial new job creation has paled in comparison to gains from competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan, and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the U.S. top 10 in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom 10.
But not all the damage has been limited to “the carbon economy.” Progressive climate, labor, and tax policies have chased a broad range of companies out of the state, including an array of leading companies tied to professional services and engineering: Jacobs Engineering, Parsons, Bechtel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Charles Schwab, and McKesson. Even Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs, and recently, In-N-Out Burger — the state’s widely beloved fast food chain — announced it is planning a move to Tennessee. California is increasingly losing ground both in tech and high-end business services to sprawling, low-density metro areas like Austin, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh.
California, once the land of opportunity, is the single worst state in the nation when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average, while it is at the top of the heap in creating below-average and low-paying jobs. The state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, the state has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs. In the past three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California from lower-than-average-paying industries versus 61% for the nation as a whole.
The only sector that has seen big growth in higher-wage jobs has been the government, which is funded by tax receipts from the struggling private sector. Public sector employment is growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but over the decade at twice the national pace. The average annual pay for those public sector government jobs is now almost double that of private sector jobs.
The housing crisis: Middle-class kill shot
The lack of well-paying jobs meshes poorly with high living costs, notably in terms of housing. Here again, climate politics play a critical role in driving high housing prices in California. In the late 1960s, the value of the typical California home was more than four times the average household’s income. Today, it’s worth more than 11 times. The median California home is priced nearly 2.5 times higher than the median national home, according to 2022 census data.
A key driver of this price hike is climate policy restraints on suburban development and single-family housing, supposedly to cut residential emissions. These restrictions push putting new housing close to transit in a state where barely 3% of employees use it to get to work, according to the American Community Survey. Perhaps more to the point, these policies are not what most Californians want. One recent Public Policy Institute of California survey has found that 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, and oppose legislation, written by state Senator Scott Wiener (D), that banned single-family zoning in much of the state.
The state has tried to sell its density dream as a means to boost production as well as lower prices. It has not worked out. From 2010 to 2023, California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9%, lower than the national increase of 10.3% and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%). These states are also the primary beneficiaries of California’s out-migration. An unusually large pool of affluent households is “stuck” and bids up prices in urban rental markets.
Today, home ownership is becoming rarer among California residents. The state now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate, at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High prices impact young people, particularly on the home ownership rate.
Home ownership for Californians under 35 has fallen by more than half since 1980 and is plummeting even among people in their 40s and 50s. These initiatives particularly impact minorities. Based on census data analyzed by demographer Wendell Cox, the state’s African-American home ownership rate is 35.5% — well below the national rate of 44% — and the state’s Latino home ownership rate ranked 41st nationwide.
Alessandro Biascioli via iStock/Getty Images
From surfboard to walker?
If you think of California’s wealth-creation machine as a conveyor belt, continually providing generations with a stake in society through their homes, that belt has now stalled. Reduced economic opportunity and lack of affordable housing have created something once thought impossible — population growth well below the national average. In virtually every survey exploring why residents are leaving the state, housing costs are at the top of the list.
Increasingly, California’s demographics resemble the pattern of out-migration long associated with Northeastern and Midwestern states. Since 2000, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California. Since 2020, the pace has picked up, with almost 1.5 million domestic migrants in just four years.
Many leaving the state are in their 30s and 40s, precisely the group that tends to buy houses and start businesses. In 2022, California lost over 200,000 net migrants older than 25, the bulk of whom had either four-year or associate degrees. The groups showing the biggest tendency to leave, according to IRS numbers, are those in their late 30s to late 50s, which includes people who tend to have families.
At the same time, international migration, long a source of demographic vitality, has lagged behind other key states, notably Texas. As the Brookings Institution has noted, from 2010 to 2018, the foreign-born population of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, and Orlando increased by more than 20%, while San Francisco’s foreign-born population grew only 11% and New York’s by 5%.
The state retains by far the nation’s largest foreign-born population, but even the massive movement allowed under Biden’s open-border policy since 2021 failed to reverse population declines in big California cities. With the border now effectively closed, this last source of population growth is likely to decline.
By losing immigrants and younger people, the state is effectively consuming its “seed corn.” The state’s total fertility rate, long above the national average, is now the nation’s 10th lowest and falling faster than the national average and than its key competitors. Los Angeles and San Francisco rank last and second to last in birth rates among the 53 major U.S. metropolitan areas. In California, only the Riverside and San Bernardino metroplex exceeds the national average for births among women between ages 15 and 50, according to the American Community Survey.
Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past. From 2010 to 2018, California aged 50% more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to the American Community Survey. As of 2022, 21% — or 8.3 million people — were over the age of 60 in California, and according to the California Department of Aging, this population is expected to grow by 40% in the next 10 years.By 2036, seniors will be a larger share of the population than kids under the age of 18. California is gradually ditching the surfboard and adopting the walker.
Needed: A new California agenda
Newsom’s response to the state’s decline, rather than a call for major reform, has been for “Trump-proofing” the state, spending tens of millions on lawsuits. Such gestures do not address how California can maintain its status as the epicenter of “the new economy” and address the vast divides between the elite and highly educated and the vast mass of our residents.
Rather than fight the president at every turn, California can find ways to take advantage of the new regime. After all, hanging on to the climate agenda is doing very little good for Californians or the planet. California has reduced its emissions since 2006 at roughly the same rate as the rest of the country. The fires have largely erased even these gains, as does the fact that when people or companies flee the state, their carbon signature tends to increase.
Oddly, Trump could force needed policy changes in order to bring in federal help — something Newsom has already done in regard to water policy. The notion that California has a better model — the rationale for the Newsom-led “resistance” — does not sell in the rest of the country, much less at the White House. In a national 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15% of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39% said the state was not a model and should not be emulated; 87% said the state was too expensive; and 77% would not consider moving to California.
Yet for all its problems, California is far from hopeless, and its promise is not extinguished. It remains uniquely gifted in terms of climate, innovation, and entrepreneurial verve. Sitting at the juncture of Asia, Latin America, and North America, it can once again become, as Kevin Starr noted, America’s “final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Tennessee Valley Authority gets a Trump-style reckoning
President Donald Trump has made the Tennessee Valley Authority a key front in his America First energy agenda. With the authority to appoint and remove TVA directors, Trump hasn’t hesitated to fire those who promote globalist “green” schemes that ignore the needs of the region’s residents.
This month, Trump ousted two Biden-appointed directors, including the board’s chairman. Their offense: trying to turn the TVA into a vehicle for the radical left’s anti-carbon agenda.
The future of reliable energy across the Tennessee Valley — and much of the South — still hangs in the balance.
Trump took similar action during his first term, firing several directors, including a previous chairman, after they approved outsourcing 146 American tech jobs to foreign workers on H-1B visas.
These firings are critical to ensuring that the Tennessee Valley Authority continues to produce abundant and reliable energy for the seven states it serves.
A call for reform
Last month, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) published a joint letter voicing their concerns about the agency’s distracted leadership. They stressed the need for the energy provider to expand nuclear projects, especially small modular reactors, which utilize existing fission technology on a smaller, more deployable scale than the massive projects of decades past.
As to the incapable leadership of the existing Tennessee Valley Authority board, the senators wrote:
As it stands now, TVA and its leadership can’t carry the weight of this moment. The presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed TVA Board of Directors lacks the talent, experience, and gravitas to meet a challenge that clearly requires visionary industrial leaders. The group looks more like a collection of political operatives than visionary industrial leaders. The current TVA board focused on the diversity of its executives ahead of job creation for hungry workers in the region it is supposed to serve.
Shortly thereafter, Trump fired two of the agency’s six current directors.
A critical purge
Trump fired Michelle Moore on March 27, followed by TVA board Chairman Joe Ritch on April 1. Both were Biden-appointed green energy enthusiasts bent on turning the Tennessee Valley Authority into a utopian solar-and-battery experiment.
Had they succeeded, the consequences for the region’s energy reliability would have been disastrous.
Moore founded and runs Groundswell, a “sustainable energy” company whose mission statement boasts a “people-centric approach to developing community solar projects.” I’m not sure what that means — but I know I’d rather depend on coal, natural gas, or nuclear power than on some feel-good solar scheme when temperatures plunge below freezing.
Ritch, originally appointed to the TVA board by President Obama, returned under Biden’s nomination to serve as chairman. In his Senate confirmation statement, Ritch promoted transitioning the agency away from its current mix of coal, nuclear, hydro, and gas toward unreliable green alternatives — convinced, somehow, that it would help the environment and boost the economy.
A historic blunder
This utopian obsession with “sustainable energy” isn’t just naïve — it’s deadly. In December 2023, a hard freeze struck the Tennessee Valley Authority’s service area. The cold snap wasn’t historically extreme, but the consequences were.
For the first time in TVA history, the agency failed to produce enough electricity to meet demand. Rolling blackouts swept the region. Why? Because the TVA lacked enough baseline reliable energy. On those near-zero nights, solar energy produced exactly zero kilowatts.
That’s the future TVA customers would face under the fantasy energy plans pushed by climate zealots like Michelle Moore and Joe Ritch: blackouts in the dead of winter and no backup.
TVA leadership has failed in other ways too — most notably by outsourcing American jobs. In 2020, CEO Jeff Lyash tried to replace over 100 U.S. tech workers with foreign nationals on H-1B visas. While gutting working-class jobs, Lyash collected nearly $8 million a year, making him the highest-paid federal employee. One longtime worker said employees were expected to train their foreign replacements before being shown the door.
Trump responded immediately. While he couldn’t fire Lyash, he could — and did — remove board members who refused to act. When the board wouldn’t fire Lyash or cut his pay, Trump fired them instead.
Soon after, Lyash ended the outsourcing plan. Following Trump’s 2024 election win, Lyash saw the writing on the wall and resigned.
Protections are still needed
The Tennessee Valley Authority remains vital to the economic strength of the upper South. Trump’s removal of Obama-Biden-era appointees has played a key role in preserving the agency’s reliability and focus. But the threat isn’t gone.
The TVA’s service states — especially Tennessee — face a serious vulnerability: Any future Democrat president could again install green energy ideologues, fire current directors, and impose Green New Deal policies. The result? An energy-starved Tennessee Valley plagued by blackouts and foolish political experiments.
Trump’s stand against the radicalization of TVA energy policy deserves recognition. His pushback has protected millions of residents from rolling blackouts and economic self-sabotage. But the fight isn’t finished.
The future of reliable energy across the Tennessee Valley — and much of the South — still hangs in the balance. The region cannot afford to treat Trump’s changes as a lasting victory.
Out of touch and out of orbit: Hollywood’s hypocrisy hits new heights
It’s a familiar pattern. Wealthy, self-righteous elites who crisscross the globe by private jet turn around and shame others for doing the same — so long as it’s done with less glamor and more purpose. The latest target of their selective outrage? Six women who took a private spaceflight last week aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket.
You’d think such a moment — an aerospace engineer, an entrepreneur, and other accomplished women making history on a suborbital mission — might warrant celebration. Instead, it drew scorn. According to Hollywood’s self-appointed moral authorities and their Instagram followers, this was a grave offense against the planet and the poor.
These flights are more than joyrides. They’re test beds for innovation, job creation, and future scientific breakthroughs.
What the climate elites ignore — again — is that progress for women, on Earth or in space, depends on one thing they take for granted: energy.
Access to reliable, affordable energy is the cornerstone of women’s liberation in the developing world. It means light to study at night, clean water, safer childbirth, personal security, and a future that doesn’t begin and end with gathering firewood. The freedom to dream big, like flying to space, starts with the freedom to flip a switch.
Classic virtue-signaling
Gayle King, one of the passengers and a trailblazer in journalism, rightly called the backlash “elitist and sexist.” But she left something out: it’s not just sexist. It’s sanctimonious, selective, and suffocating. These are the trademarks of climate virtue-signaling.
Here’s how the game works in today’s inverted moral order: Jet to Davos or Cannes to lecture the public on climate change and you’re hailed as enlightened. Board a rocket as a civilian scientist or entrepreneur, and suddenly you’re a villain — a carbon criminal with the wrong pedigree.
Leonardo DiCaprio can bounce between islands on a yacht to “save the seas,” and no one complains. John Kerry can cross the Atlantic alone in a jet to accept a climate award, and the hypocrisy goes unmentioned. But let six women go to space without the blessing of the green aristocracy, and the mob lights its torches.
Companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX aren’t just about space tourism. They’re pushing technological boundaries that benefit everyone — from global internet access to environmental monitoring. These flights are more than joyrides. They’re test beds for innovation, job creation, and future scientific breakthroughs.
And here’s the larger truth: Abundant, affordable energy is the single most powerful engine of human progress. Societies with the highest energy access are the ones where women thrive. Education, health care, and economic opportunity all expand when energy is plentiful. When the climate movement demonizes innovation and blocks energy development, it’s not saving the planet — it’s stunting the dreams of billions, especially women and girls.
But the climate elites aren’t interested in nuance. Their worldview leaves no room for liberty or aspiration — only guilt, rules, and control.
No apologies
What makes this worse is their arrogance. As if launching six women into space is somehow a threat to “equity.” These women didn’t beg permission from the climate commissars. They didn’t issue carbon apologies. They didn’t buy indulgences from Greenpeace. They flew — because they could. That’s what really infuriates their critics.
The same people who shame Americans for driving pickups or heating their homes sip imported oat milk and scold others from first-class lounges. They claim to speak for justice, but their double standards always circle back to their own comfort.
Instead of condemning these women, we should be applauding them. In an age where pessimism is the norm and grievance is currency, their boldness reminds us of what ambition without apology looks like.
We should be asking: How can we empower more women — not just to fly to space, but to lead in science, business, and technology? The answer is energy. The free market — not fearmongering — will launch the next generation of pioneers.
This was a win for human achievement. No amount of Hollywood hand-wringing can diminish it.
To the ladies of Blue Origin: Don’t let the sanctimonious elites pull you down. While they stare at the sky, you’ve already touched it.
6 Ways Repealing The EPA’s Intrusive ‘Endangerment Finding’ Will Make Americans’ Lives Better
Great News for Humanity: Depressed Liberals Are Increasingly Suicidal Due to 'Climate Anxiety,' Study Finds
Depressed liberals are increasingly at risk of suicide due to so-called climate change, according to a group of European and French-Canadian scientists. The alleged findings, while morbid, could signal a bright future for the human race. A world with fewer annoying people would make life more tolerable for the rest of us. The species would grow more resilient, and the planet might also (somewhat ironically) benefit from the decline in population, assuming it isn't a hoax.
The post Great News for Humanity: Depressed Liberals Are Increasingly Suicidal Due to 'Climate Anxiety,' Study Finds appeared first on .
The media’s Great Barrier Reef hoax is bigger than the reef
The coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is as expansive now as it has ever been recorded, with coverage nearing 40%. In fact, the coral cover has nearly tripled in the past dozen years. Despite this record expanse of coral off the coast of Australia, the climate community and mainstream media outlets unrelentingly push the narrative that the Great Barrier Reef is dying.
For example, CBS News ran one of its periodic pieces on the reef a few months ago with this terrifying headline: “Parts of Great Barrier Reef dying at record rate, alarmed researchers say; ‘worst fears’ confirmed.”
Reports of the Great Barrier Reef dying or being in peril are false, dishonest, and deliberately misleading.
The Guardian has been relentless in its apocalyptic coverage of the reef’s supposed imminent demise. More than a decade ago, the outlet essentially delivered the reef’s last rites, insisting that only a drastic reduction in carbon emissions could save it. A 2014 article, headlined “Great Barrier Reef damage ‘irreversible’ unless radical action taken,” warned: “The Great Barrier Reef will suffer irreversible damage by 2030 unless radical action is taken to lower carbon emissions.” Since that article was published, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen roughly 30%.
A coral apocalypse?
Despite the Great Barrier Reef doubling in size since then, the Guardian has doubled down on its doomsday narrative. Since the coral has not died as predicted, “coral bleaching” has emerged as the new man-made catastrophe in its reporting. These stories get distributed throughout the climate community and widely disseminated throughout its advocacy networks.
In January, the Guardian published this headline: “Catastrophic: Great Barrier Reef hit by its most widespread coral bleaching, study finds.” Just a few days ago, it followed up with, “Ningaloo and Great Barrier Reef hit by ‘profoundly distressing’ simultaneous coral bleaching events.”
From these headlines, one might assume the reef is dying. However, bleaching does not equate to death. Coral bleaching does not create a chunk of white, dead coral sold at a beach town shell shop. Instead, it occurs when the coral has lost the algae living on it, often due to a variety of stressors, including fluctuations in light or changes in water temperature. This process causes the living coral to turn white but does not necessarily kill it.
Misleading statistics
With record-high coral cover, it is mathematically probable that there will be more instances of bleaching simply because there is more coral overall. If a farmer triples the size of his apple orchard from 100 to 300 trees, and the number of trees suffering from blight triples from five to 15, that does not indicate a catastrophic increase in blight. Blaming climate change for an expected proportional increase in blight would be misleading. Yet, when it comes to coral, the media and climate activists ignore this logical correlation.
It is worth noting that when “the imminent death of the Great Barrier Reef” became a major climate story a dozen years ago, the reef had indeed shrunk dramatically. Some areas saw up to 85% of the coral cover disappear — not due to overheated ocean waters or excessive CO2, but rather due to a natural occurrence: a tropical cyclone.
A Queensland, Australia, map shows that the Great Barrier Reef runs parallel to the northeast coast. In 2009, Tropical Cyclone Hamish took a path parallel to the coastline. Instead of crossing the reef perpendicularly, it churned directly over it, causing immense damage. A few months after Hamish, the Australian Institute of Marine Sciencepublished research on the extent of the damage:
Damage ranged from "exfoliation," where the reef matrix was removed along with all that grew on it, leaving bare limestone, to "scouring" that essentially stripped all living tissue from living corals, to coral breakage in which massive coral heads as well as more delicate branching corals broke off.
Nature’s recovery
That 2009 analysis stated that it could take up to 15 years for the Great Barrier Reef to regrow to its pre-Hamish level of cover. The climate community dishonestly blamed the loss of coral cover following the cyclone on global warming, predicting a continued decline and an inevitable death. Fortunately, the reef has avoided any significant cyclone damage since 2009 and has not only returned to its prior coverage level but has continued to grow.
Reports of the Great Barrier Reef dying or being in peril are false, dishonest, and deliberately misleading.
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