 |
| Maurizio Gambarini/dpa via AP,file |
The Los Angeles Times asserted at the beginning of the Biden administration that our nation’s new leaders would be looking to California for forward-thinking policy ideas. Our vice president, speaker of the House, and secretary of Health and Human Services all hail from the state. California also has the largest state caucus in the House. It has an outsize influence on policy, to be sure, and many commentators expected that to increase during the next four years.
So, how is it going in the Golden State? Is California implementing what Americans really want to see as national policy? You could place a fair wager that the answer to that question is no just from watching the viral videos of criminals emptying the shelves of retailers like Walgreens and Neiman Marcus. Then there is the problem of out-of-control homelessness. And don’t forget the annual purge of accumulated woodland undergrowth by raging forest fires rather than reasonable conservation policy.
But wait, there’s more. Thanks to aggressive climate policy, California is on the brink of rolling blackouts again. Last summer, solar and wind energy proliferation could not keep up with the heat during a period with no significant wind. According to the Los Angeles Times:
California suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years because energy planners didn’t take climate change into account and didn’t line up the right power sources to keep the lights on after sundown, according to a damning self-evaluation released Tuesday by three state agencies.
California suffered its hottest heatwave in 35 years, according to the article. Somehow, the Times blames this on climate change without ever explaining what happened nearly four decades ago. Of course, the climate cabal never does. It doesn’t help their case that the state is on the brink again. On July 9, 2021, the state issued a stage-2 power-grid emergency, the last step before rolling blackouts. --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| Krasyuk/Getty Images |
Like ancient Egypt, California is beset by plagues, most of them self-inflicted — homicidal summer wildfires, a crime spike, electricity blackouts, the end of the internal-combustion engine, failing public schools, water shortages, highest-in-the-nation taxes, a COVID response that gutted the economy and did little to contain the virus, metastasizing homelessness, critical race theory, official confusion about obvious differences between men and women, Governor Gavin Newsom, and, of course, University of Southern California head football coach Clay Helton. With all that, it’s hardly surprising that many Californians are fleeing for other states, crossing the Colorado River in a kind of exodus that’s also remindful of Bible stories: For the first time since William McKinley captured the White House, the state’s population is falling.
Even so, it’s a little surprising that the next plague may well be hunger — not actual corpses-in-the-streets famine, but a bacon shortage in which some of the living may envy the dead.
And not just bacon. State regulators are set to block, in January, the sale of chickens, veal calves, and pigs raised in conditions prohibited under 2018’s Proposition 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. You can’t blame this on Newsom or the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority. Instead, blame California voters, two-thirds of whom believed that they could suspend the laws of economics and that nobody would have to pay for it.
They were wrong, of course. The bacon shortage — newspaper shorthand for a shortage of all pork products — may be unintended, but it was utterly predictable. Pork producers in Iowa and other midwestern states, and poor people all over the U.S., will pay more so that most California voters can feel less bad about themselves. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
What caused California’s rolling blackouts? Climate change and poor planning
California may spend nearly $1 million on men’s menstrual products
California Faces Potential Bacon Shortage
New California pig law could lead to 50% price spike for pork: Producer
Will looming blackouts during California’s wildfire season seal Newsom’s recall fate?
If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment