California Ecology Nonsense

Their environmental policies make gasoline more expensive, their emission standards requiring California to have its own special blend of gas that's put into you know, that's put into your car from the pump, their specific high gasoline taxes. That's the reason why gas prices are high in California. It's not a mystery. It's not some gas companies are greedy, but just in California. For some reason, once you cross the border into Arizona, Nevada or Oregon or something, they all

of a sudden become less greedy. No, it's California's own policies that make gas and all kinds of other things much more expensive. It's California's own policies that make it more difficult to build in California, and I think a phenomenal piece about this. Just read a phenomenal piece about this in the California Globe written by John Fleischman. Now, John Fleischmann is a very interesting writer that I recommend to all of you. You can find him on Twitter.

His Twitter account is at flash Report. Fleischmann used to run Brightbart's sort of California specific web page that was back in the day when Andrew Breitbart was still alive. And he's a very smart guy and a very shrewd

commentator on sacrament on California politics. I got to hear him speak one time about California politics, about Sacramento politics, and like California state politics, not local Sacramento politics, and uh he honestly, like, in one talk I got to fully understand all the dynamics of how politics works in Sacramento, how much the labor unions completely run everything in Sacramento, how they are the driving force in California politics. He's a brilliant guy, and he has a great piece about

California's carbon crusade. California's carbon crusade a reckless assault on prudence. California's leaders let the poor subsidize their eco fantasies, driving misery for minimal gain. California's single state war on human produced carbon emissions is a case study in policy without prudence. From Sacramento lawmakers til tech climate windmills, imposing draconian measures

that harm residents while achieving little globally. The state's cap and trade program, punishing electricity taxes and regulatory over each drive up costs for those least able to afford them, exacerbate the housing crisis, and ignore the irony of wildfires dwarfing their efforts. This column critiques the worst of their policies, highlighting their futility against the backdrop of California's self inflicted woods. So first he talks a little bit more about the

cap and Trade program, which I'll confess I was. I'm not super familiar with it, but it I had not been super familiar with it up to this point, but he kind of explains it a little bit. The Cap and Trade aid program, which is billed as a market based fix for emissions, is a bureaucratic mess. The Cap and Trade program what it does is it puts a cap on total emissions and it lets companies trade allowances to pollute within that limit. Okay, so we have a

certain limit. Companies are allowed to pollute up to that limit, but companies are allowed to trade with each other allowances. In reality, it's a hidden tax inflating costs for businesses that trickle down to consumers. A twenty twenty three study pegged its impact at ten to fifteen cents per gallon of gasoline. So it's another policy decision on California's part that makes all kinds of energy, but including you know, gas at the pump, about ten to fifteen cents more expensive.

So emission standards add this much. Cap and trade adds ten to fifteen cents on the ten to fifteen cents per gallon gas taxes in California add another you know, chunk of money, which is painful in a state with high Cap and Trade impacts the price of gasoline by ten to fifteen cents per gallon, which is painful in a state with already sky high fuel prices, while hiking electricity and heating bills. Small businesses drown in compliance costs,

while corporate giants game the system. For all this, the climate impact is negligible. California produces less than one percent of global CO two, and even zeroing out its emissions wouldn't sway the global trend when nations like China add coal power plants weekly. Yet policy makers cling to this scheme, oblivion to its regressive sting as if symbolic wins trump real world harm. That this is this is why, this

is like a limit of federalism. Why does any state have like emissions regulations like the idea emissions regulations that are designed to help like the global ozone the global trends of carbon based warming. Flash makes this point throughout the piece. California the sixth biggest economy or whatever is

the the stat that Gavenusom always likes to trump. California is like the sixth biggest economy in the world just on its own, if considered separately from the United States, it pretty use is less than one percent of global CO two. So we are killing ourselves with environmental regulation for something that's not really impacting much of anything. I mean, we only we have forty million people. There are eight billion people on the planet. We're not really changing much.

We're a relative I mean, if you're looking at the globe as a whole, we're a relatively small part of this continent. The idea that we are saving the environment by killing our businesses by regressively putting the costs for environmental compliance on lower income people paying the tax of the pump. You know this is it's the the idea

of a regressive versus a aggressive tax. Okay. A progressive tax system is where people at the higher end of the wealth spectrum pay a greater percentage of their wealth. Why well, if someone who only has ten thousand dollars has to spend ten percent of their wealth on taxes. So someone only has ten thousand dollars left to their name, they're not They're not in good shape. Okay. If they have to give the government one thousand dollars in taxes,

that's a huge blow to them. If someone with a billion dollars has to give even fifty percent of their wealth away to the government in taxes, well, they've still got five hundred million dollars. They're fine. Their quality of life has not been impacted. There are no basic necessities that they are being shortchanged out of, even though they are being taxed at a much higher percentage. So that

is a progressive taxation system. And I don't think it's supposed to carry like progressive is a very positive sounding word. I don't think that's the idea. It's just that as you gain more money, you progress in your rate of how much you pay. That's a progressive tax system. A regressive tax system would say everyone pays forty percent. Okay, well again, someone with a billion dollars paying forty percent

is really not going to be hurt very much. But someone who's only making, you know, fifty thousand dollars a year, they need that forty percent much more badly than the guy with a billion dollars. Flat taxes, one could a flat tax where everyone's tax at the same rate can be deemed regressive. And sales taxes, taxes on basic necessities like gas or food, those are regressive because it's more burdensome for someone on the lower end of the income spectr.

I mean, everyone has to drive, or most people anyway, have to drive for their work. People who only make forty thousand dollars a year have to drive to work just the same as you know, a fancy schmanaged lawyer who makes two million dollars a year. High gas costs impact the guy making forty thousand dollars a year worse than it does the lawyer making two million a year driving his corvette. You know, even if the guy with the corvette is pumping in premium gasoline and has a

car that gets terrible gas mileage. In fact, i'd given how much remote work is being done by a white collar workers nowadays, I'd venture the lower income guy probably is has to drive more than the upper income person, all things being equal. So this is that's sort of the inegalitarian aspect of what California does. We lump so many of our costs on. We have all these costs associated with our environmentalism that are disproportionately burdening the middle

and lower socioeconomic classes. Rich people in the Bay Area are fine with it. Rich people in you know, Beverly Hills or whatever, they're fine, but not lower income people who have to you know, on whom those burdens are far heavier. Small businesses drown and compliance costs, while corporate giants gain the system. For all this, the climate impact is negligible. California produces less than one percent of global CO two, and even zuring out its emissions won't sway

the global trend. Yeah, I mean we're killing ourselves to one hundred percent of all new car sales in California by twenty thirty five are going to be electric vehicles. Meanwhile, China's just polluting like crazy, just dumping, you know, producing coal power plants, just dumping more pollutants into the environment than we even know about it. Said, I'd be like, what is the point of us breaking our back if India and China are going to be these massive polluters.

Electricity prices already crushing showcase California's disdain for affordability, at thirty two cents per kilowatt hour in twenty twenty four, which is double the national average. The state's rates stem from relentless regulations in taxes. Mandates for wind and solar, which demand costly grid upgrades for their intermittency, and the phase out of reliable natural gas plants have triggered blackouts like those in twenty twenty and twenty twenty two. Low

income households suffer the most. A twenty twenty four California Public Utilities Commission report found one in four families struggle with electric bills, many facing shutoffs. One in four families wow prudence would balance green goals with keeping the lights on, but California's leaders let the poor subsidize their eco fantasies,

driving misery for minimal gain. This war on carbon also fuels California's housing crisis, a catastrophe of affordability made worse by reckless policy, stringent environmental regulations layered atop emissions goals in flight construction costs. The California Environmental Quality Act my favorite, often weaponized to block development, delays projects for years, adding legal and compliance expenses estimated at one hundred thousand dollars

per housing unit in some cases. Wow estimating here. I guess some people are estimating. He's citing them that SEQUA. I've talked about SEQUA a bunch of times on the show before. The idea with SEQUA is basically, anybody can sue someone starting some kind of construction, real estate project, real estate project, any kind of business, construction project on

the grounds that it's environmental impact study is insufficient. And it's been used a lot by these left wing nonprofits to stop construction they don't like on some kind of environmental grounds. I thought the craziest example of this was back in December when they stopped construction of a hydrogen power plant, a zero emissions green energy hydrogen power plant that Gavin Newsom is like desperately hoping we can build

more of these in California. That was going to be built in Pixley on the grounds of what Pixley For those of you who don't know, maybe you're in the North Valley and you're not familiar with Pixley. Pixley is basically a pit stop on the ninety nine, kind of in between where you would turn off on one ninety eight to go to Icelia. In between there and Bakersfield. Pixley is a tiny little town. It just kind of

straddles the ninety nine. They stopped construction of this green energy hydrogen power plant on the grounds that well, it would lead to more trucks coming into Pixley to drop off I guess the raw hydrogen, liquid hydrogen or something. More trucks coming into Pixley and would lead to more truck pollution. Pixley is nothing but truck pollution. Then ninety nine goes right through the The whole town just kind

of straddles the ninety nine. The whole town is there's no part of the town that's more than like, I don't know, half a mile away from the ninety nine. That's all Pixley is. It's the ninety nine. You know how many gazillions of trucks go through Pixley every year, every every day, Oh but a few will park at a power plant every day. That's that's what's gonna change the whole environmental outlook of Pixley to make a green energy power plant. That's the kind of insanity we're talking about.

All of these housing construction projects that can get stopped with one jerky lawsuit that some left wing nonprofit wants to file to make a name for itself. All right, we'll keep going through this piece again. You can find it at my Twitter account, Twitter dot com, slash president Johnny at President Johnny next on the John Girardi Show. A great piece in the California Globe, a website i'd like to recommend to you, by the way, I just stumbled across. It seems to be kind of a conservative

leaning California news and opinion site. John Fleischmann has a great piece in it. John Fleischman is Everyone should follow him. Go to Twitter, go to x I can't call it X. I just I'd rather have Elon Musk own Twitter than the people who owned it before. But I hate the X brand. I think it's so dumb anyway, But you know, he's got several hundred billion dollars more than I do, so maybe he knows what he's doing. Anyway. Go to Twitter dot com, look up at flash report. That's John Fleischman.

He's a great commentator on California political stuff. Used to be Andrew bright Bart's main guy for California stuff. Check him out, or just go to my Twitter account and I've got the story retweeted. He's talking about California environmental law and the variety of ways in which California just completely fails the test of prudence, Like, Okay, you want to help the environment, but you're putting all these costs on people in California. You're making California just incredibly difficult

to live in to what benefit. Meanwhile, he writes, so after going through all these different ways, you know, the cap and trade system, gas prices, SEQUA, and how SEQUA could add one hundred thousand dollars of costs per housing unit in some cases. He then goes on to address wildfires and the fact that because we've had so many wildfires, it's basically completely undone whatever benefit accrued from all the state's environmental policies put together, wildfires mock the state's efforts,

spewing carbon far beyond what regulations curb. In twenty twenty, Do y'all remember the summer of twenty twenty when basically, uh, it was COVID, so everything was a bunch of stuff was closed. And then we had all the wildfires and the whole San Juaquin Valley basically looked like Mordor for a solid month. You got outside and the sun was glowing and the evil orange in your car. If you parked your car outside, it was covered with ash. Yeah,

that was fun or or whatever it was. In twenty twenty, fires released one hundred and twenty seven million metric tons of CO two equivalent, triple California's annual industrial emissions. Decades of forest mismanagement, including restricted burns and logging bands so bands on restricted burns and logging have left landscapes primed to blaze. Yet instead of tackling this, Sacramento fixates on

tailpipes and power plants. It's like mopping the floor in a fl blood resources squandered on optics while forests burn. Prudence would fund fire breaks and brush clearing, but California's carbon tunnel vision prevails. Contrast this with the Trump administration's pragmatic energy policies from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one

and resuming in twenty twenty five. Trump prioritized domestic production oil, gas, coal, and cut red tape, lowering electricity costs and boosting self sufficiency. You know, that's the thing California. I've heard this point maybe before. California has a bunch of oil. We have oil that we can get, We have ways of generating power just from our own state, but we refuse to take advantage of it. And as a result, we then have to get oil and other sources of energy from abroad,

from like Saudi Arabia and stuff. And last I checked, oil doesn't get from Saudia Arabia to here in a carbon zero fashion. There are no green shipping cruiser, you know, the the enormous shipping vessels that have you know, eight hundred like truck, you know the big things that the big rectangle things that eighteen wheelers are carrying those things, the big truck containers. Yeah, they're that are carrying you know, a thousand of those at a time. Yeah, those guys

go through a lot of gas. Got it takes a lot of gas to get from Saudi Arabia to California. Go through the Panama can I don't even know what route they take. Did they They go through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic. They go through the Panama Canal. I guess up up to California. Yeah, that's a long trip. You're burning a lot of gas to do that. California's lead. Let's see emissions now, that's the thing. Trump was president twenty seventeen to twenty one.

Emissions still dropped. Emissions dropped driven by market shifts to natural gas, not by mandates. This balance growth and affordability highlights California's folly. California's leaders, with Governor Gavin Newsom atop the pack, lack the humility to see their limits. Their anti carbon crusade ignores the state's poverty, housing woes, and global insignificance. Again, less than one percent of emissions. Cap

and trade burdens the poor for no climate gain. Electricity costs, crushed families to fund, shaky renewables, housing grows unattainable under the weight of regulations. Wildfires expose the absurdity of it all. Prudence demands focus on what works, affordable energy, fire prevention homes people can buy, and not on a quixotic quest

to save the planet alone. Because that's the thing. There's this attitude of, well, everyone has to do their part, and so we Californians, we're doing our partns Like, yeah, but if only you were doing your part separate from like, at the very least, a nationwide federal policy, then it's pointless.

It's pointless if the United if if California alone adopts some kind of super rigorous uh, you know, in green environmental policy, if Texas and Oklahoma and Nevada and Wyoming and idahoa blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, don't follow suit. What's the point again? We are you look at a globe, California is a blip, all right, it's really not very much land mass. We're not saving

the planet with these regulations. And if anything, our environmental regulations have contributed to more environmental harm given their responsibility, you know, no control burns, no brush clearing. They're the responsibility of those policies for so many of the wildfires we've had. All Right, when we return, I'm not sure. I think we're gonna talk a little bit about planned

parenthood's bad financial state. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about Harvard University losing its money or potentially losing its money. I might talk about that, is Harvard gonna lose its money? Should Harvard lose its money? Next on the John Growardy Show. All Right, President Trump made some news. He's basically right now in this little fight with Harvard. Harvard University has been resistant to Trump administration desires that it cut out

some of its DEI stuff. Harvard has faced some accusations over how Jewish students were being treated based on the toleration that was given to pro Hamas align well some possibly Prohamaca line protesters on Harvard's campus, and the possible violation of federal civil rights laws that may have ensued on Harvard's campus as a result. So one of the aspects of federal civil rights law when it comes to universities is basically, if students are being hindered in their

ability to walk around on campus. And if a campus is tolerating such kinds of conditions, there's a lot of existing federal civil rights law to say, hey, that's no good. Universities, if they're going to take public money, cannot gage in race based discrimination. They cannot allow students of race or religion, of a certain race or religion or ethnic backroom whatever

to be subject to those kinds of mistreatment. Okay, let's think about again, a lot of federal civil rights laws coming out of the South, and our experience, the experience of African Americans, not our experience, I'm not the experience to African Americans. Our American experience, if you will, Where African Americans finally were allowed to be admitted to certain kinds of historically all white schools and may have been subject to mistreatment, threatened, made to feel like they can't

actually exercise their ability to be students on campus. So there's federal civil rights law on the books to basically say, hey, universities, you can't allow that right if you want to, all of you are getting federal money of some sort. If you want to keep getting federal money, then okay, that's fine, but you got to play by our rules. You can't engage in various kinds of race based discrimination. You have

to follow various kinds of federal civil rights laws. And between that and then affirmative action, between that affirmative action and dei, Harvard, I think is not in a great spot. So Harvard was like the subject of the big Supreme Court case that ultimately decided it was Harvard and University of North Carolina. They were the subject of this big Supreme Court case that was just decided a year ago saying, hey, no more affirmative action in admissions. Okay, you can't positively

weigh people just on the basis of their race. And the twenty years ago sort of cut the baby in half solution devised by Sandrade O'Connor. We're getting rid of that. So Sandrede O'Connor was such a Santade O'Connor is basically responsible for the pre twenty twenty four from about two

whenever those decisions came down. In the early two thousands, we were living under Sandrade O'Connor's basically legal regimes surrounding affirmative action for the last twenty years and O'Connor's viewpoint was schools can't have a crude point system where it was the Grutter and Grats cases, where basically they were looking at the University of Michigan's undergrad admissions system and

their law school admission system, which were slightly different. So at that time, University of Michigan, just if you were a minority, a racial minority, and you wanted to go to the University of Michigan, they basically scored all their applicants with a kind of points system, and if you were black, you got automatically a certain number of points just by virtue of being black. And O'Connor said, now you're not allowed to do that. You can't have quotas,

you can't have a point system like that. University of Michigan's law school, though, had a system where there wasn't a points system, but admissions advisors could take into account raised as part of a broad reaching review of students. And then there are genuine benefits, educational benefits that diversity affords to lawyers. And that so what O'Connor wound up approving, and she was kind of the determinative swing vote on the court for this, and what O'Connor wound up approving

was basically the worst possible system. As crude as the points based system was for affirmative action, it at least left a paper trail, you know, it was at least measurable, so you could see when the university was discriminating. And basically what all these universities did was they would just have, you know, these broad based assessments solve an applicants, so strengths and weaknesses. That would always result in at African American students, who on average had lower SAT scores getting

in over and against in particular Asian students. Asian Americans were the most disadvantaged by this whole system. And if it had been a straight, you know, objective assessment looking at your test scores, where we're we're not actually considering your race, one Iota, Harvard and Stanford and a lot of these elite institutions would have just been huge number, even even greater numbers of Asian American students would have gotten into those schools. And then you have the whole

DEI system. The whole idea of DEI seems frankly to me to be contrary to the federal Civil rights regime. The whole idea of federal civil rights law is that you will not allow discrimination on the bays of and then it gives a list of categories race, sex, ethnic origin, religion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Colleges and universities have to abide by a lot of those provisions, as both

both public and private universities have to do that. Public universities have to do it as kind of a constitutional mandate as government institutions. Private institutions have to comply with it by pretty much the exact same standard on the basis of the fact that they receive federal money. If they want to keep receiving federal money, they have to

abide by those standards. And we sort of allowed to have the dei regime be imported into so many colleges and universities and the court into corporate settings in spite of the fact that I think it's very clearly violative of the whole broad concepts of the civil rights sect Okay, this was the importance of the Civil Rights Act. The idea was that hey, your business, this government institution whatever like,

take it in the context of a private business. Okay, you run a grocery store, if you just say, well, we don't serve black people, you know, they can go to a different groceryutton. But it's my private business. Now, I'm not going to let black people out. Well, all right, Grocery stores are this kind of business that provides a

kind of basic service. People need food, and it's a massive hindrance to just living and existing in society if you have to like carefully curate which businesses to go to that will legally allow you to come in the door on the basis of something so meaningless as your skin color. And as a result, you know, African Americans in the South both faced this with other kinds of

basic services like restaurants and hotels. In fact, that there was a movie the Green Book, big O Mortensen and herschel Ali were in it, and it's The Green Book was basically this travel guide for African Americans traveling in the South to let them know, Okay, well you can go to in Okay, if you're traveling to this city in Louisiana, you can go to this restaurant, this restaurant, restaurant.

You can't go to this restaurant, this restaurant this restaurant, you can stay in this hotel, this hotel, this hotel. You can't stay at this hotel, this hotel, at this hotel. So here's this massive way in which African Americans had to like kind of totally recalibrate where they could go. It made certain parts of town basically off limits to them, or you know, it was this huge hindrance to their

day to day existence. These sorts of private actors engaging in racial discrimination put real social limits on how far African Americas could advance in society. Well, this hospital doesn't hire black doctors. You know, we just don't want to hire black doctors. This law from Oh, we just don't want to hire black lawyers. This college, you know, we just don'tt accept black applicants. And so the civil rights law said, no, you just are not allowed to consider that.

You know, I always laugh at businesses that have a sign up that says we reserve the right. I don't know what reserving the right is. I just went to law school. I'm not exactly sure what reserving a right means. But businesses who hang up a sign that say we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason. You realize that that sign is completely meaningless. It affords you no power, like nothing magical happens when you put that sign up, and you still can't reserve the right.

You don't have the right to refuse someone's service for any reason. I mean, imagine how silly that would be. We reserve the right to refuse anyone's for any reason, especially the Blacks and the Jews. Like, no, you can't do that. That's against the law. You're not allowed to refuse someone's service because they're Black, or because they're Jewish, or because they're Chinese or whatever. It's a violation of federal civil rights law. And I think it's generally it's

a good legal regime. It makes sense. Well, Harvard has basically been in violation of that, and they get two billion dollars from the federal government. So President Trump tweets out, perhaps Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and be taxed as a political entity if it keeps pushing political ideological and terrorist inspired supporting sickness. Remember, tax exempt status

is totally contingent on acting in the public interest. Now, when we return the woosy libertarian response to this tweet from President Trump, that's next on the John Gerardy Show. Libertarians and libertarian leaning conservatives are always very concerned with pro cess, a bad process that they think could set a bad precedent, And they're so obsessed with process that they often lose sight of the actual end goal of politics,

which is actually attaining your desired goals. Here's President Trump looking at Harvard that is basically refusing to comply with federal civil rights law, doesn't want to get rid of its DEI regime. And again, the whole idea, I didn't get to this in the last second, but the whole idea of DEI runs counter to the whole idea of federal civil rights law. The whole idea of federal civil rights law is, don't discriminate pro or content pleas or

minus whatever on the basis of race. Don't disadvantage people on the basis of race or sex or this or that, whatever these other categories are that we're protecting. The whole idea of DEI is affirmatively to discriminate in favor of whoever is deemed at the moment to be a historically disfavored group. By the way, Latinos, if you keep voting for Donald Trump, you are going to be out of the DEI lottery. You guys are gonna be no longer

treated as an oppressed minority group. The liberals are already rumbling about that, so, uh, you know, just be warned. Trump tweets out about Harvard. You know, hey, perhaps Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and be taxed as a political entity if it keeps pushing political ideological and terrorists inspired supporting sickness. Remember, tax exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the public interest, And all these

libertarian leaning conservatives are like, oh, that's not a good idea. Well, imagine what would if if liberals applied that standard to conservative nonprofits or religious nonprofits. Oh, that would be terrible. They already did that, do you guys not remember Lois Learner, the IRS head under Barack Obama, who initiated all kinds of audits and all kinds of spurious legal action again conservative nonprofits for no reason. They've literally already done this before.

Why should we be afraid of breaking a precedent that Democrats have already broken? And by the way, none of those conservative nonprofits were violating federal civil rights law and letting Jewish students get harassed for no reason. That'll do it. John grolready show see you next time. I'm power Talk