California Senator Wiener has taken Governor Newsom’s recent Executive order to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles and hydraulic fracturing one step further with his introduction of SB 467 to obliterate the California economy. The bill is so broad and ambiguous that the results of its passage would lead to a total production ban in California and increase energy costs upon those that can least afford it.
With California already having the highest cost of fuels in the country, the wealthy and middle class have more tolerance for expensive energy, but poverty kills and having legislatures pass legislation making energy more expensive on the less fortunate, will worsen poverty.
The Governor is proud of California, despite its dysfunctional energy policies making California the only state in the lower 48 states that imports most of its crude oil from foreign countries almost halfway around the world.
California’s dependency on foreign suppliers has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 58 percent today. The imported crude oil costs California more than $60 million dollars a day, yes, every day, being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs, careers, and business opportunities. SB 467 will eliminate in-state production and require the State to increase its monthly imports resulting in expenditures approaching a whopping $90 million EVERY DAY for foreign countries to support the fifth largest economy in the world.
Newsom’s Executive order and Senator Wiener’s SB 467 are forcing increases in our dependency on foreign countries that have less environmental controls than California. SB 467 further reduces oil production by requiring larger setbacks from existing oil production wells, forcing companies to shut down anything within 2,500 feet of a building.
Hopefully, when the bill goes before Senate Natural Resources Committee at a hearing on Tuesday April 13th, it will meet its demise. The bill would result in hundreds of thousands of Californians without jobs, and all 40 million residents being completely reliant on petroleum produced from other parts of the world.
It has been a tough year for everyone during the pandemic, but more so on the lower income portion of the population. As we emerge from an emotionally and financially challenging year, we are seeing that the wealthy and middle-income folks have mostly recovered. The bottom half remain far from it.
This dichotomy is evident in many facets of the economy, especially in employment. Jobs are fully back for the highest wage earners, but fewer than half the jobs lost this spring have returned for those making less than $20 an hour, according to a new labor data analysis by John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University and co-director of Opportunity Insights.
Read the rest of this piece at CA Political Review.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
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