The old adage that “as California goes, so goes the nation” has never been more true now that wagon loads of California businesses and families are heading for Texas and other red states.
Mirroring caravans of “undocumented immigrants” crashing through America’s now-open southern border to escape oppressively impoverishing regimes, these and other blue state flight mass migrations are occurring for similar reasons within the nation — New York tax and regulatory refugees fleeing to free market opportunities in Florida, for example.
This trend will be accelerated by sweeping new Biden administration policies that apply the failed California model everywhere.
As a lead April 1 feature in the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reported, “The White House is pushing an infrastructure bill that effectively transforms the relationship between the government and the private sector, making radical changes to key sectors of the economy.”
The article warned that the plan “could reshape the discussion around capitalism as it seems to reestablish the federal government as a primary driver of how the economy should grow and function … it would redefine classic infrastructure projects to include investments in workers and families paid for by tax hikes.”
A centerpiece of this agenda is a comprehensive Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure framework that will require corporations to comply with government-mandated woke workforce diversity and environmental legislative “environmental justice” standards.
As stated by acting SEC Commission chair Allison Herren Lee, “climate and ESG are front and center for the SEC.”
This government overreach is backed by legislation proposed by leading socialist activists including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and other members of the Democrat-controlled Congress.
Such a “radical transformation” of the entire U.S. economy won’t be painless or cheap.
President Biden wasted no time implementing that agenda with a war on fossil fuel.
During his first day in the Oval Office, Biden issued executive orders to cap the Keystone XL pipeline and ban fracking on public lands and waters which account for 25% of oil, and about 10% of natural gas production.
The proposed Democrat $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan — a rebranded Green New Deal plus much more — will cost American households $1,400 each year. Something north of $180 billion of that money would be spent each year to end a so-called “climate crisis.”
However, when asked in a 2020 American Energy Alliance poll how much respondents would be willing to pay each year to address climate change, “the median answer (which had been trending towards 50 dollars for a number of years) was 20 dollars, with 32% of respondents answering ‘zero.'”
According to plan, hundreds of billions of dollars in additional refundable tax credits will be provided for renewable energy (imagine the Obama-Biden administration’s Solyndra scam on steroids), which will sharply increase taxes on oil and gas producers that rely on that fracking which has finally made America energy independent.
The Biden administration and Democrat-led Congress now plan to impose national environmental regulations, many even exceeding, those in “woke” California.
Under this regulatory agenda, along with EPA, every federal agency becomes a climate regulator: The SEC will enforce climate-related investing; the Treasury Department will mandate banks to incorporate carbon reduction into lending portfolios; the Department of Agriculture will be empowered to cut emissions through farm and forestry policy; and every federal agency will suddenly have an energy portfolio.
Every state would get a zero-emission target which they would enforce through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade … just like California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) did in 2006.
In addition, CARB was given blank-check authority to mandate zero-emission vehicles, create a low-carbon fuel standard, and move to ban the sale of automobiles with internal combustion engines in 2035 — all without specific authority from the legislature.
Following California’s lead, expect the Biden administration to ban the use of natural gas in homes and commercial buildings to meet a fantasy goal of going 100% renewable energy by 2045.
For a preview of coming attractions, recall fossil fuel cutbacks when evening power blackouts that rolled across California cities and towns during a 2020 mid-August heat wave offered a warning glimpse of dire consequences we can absolutely count on occurring with enactment of Democratic plans.
Under “typical” circumstances, California had historically relied heavily during shortfalls on power imported from neighboring states as well as natural gas-fired plants capable of starting up quickly when needed. This time, however, neighboring Western states were also realizing rises in usage due to extreme heat, with less excess electricity to spare.
Also, recall last February when a big Texas freeze sent a very chilling message to the rest of the nation about what to expect your life to be like with radical Democrats efforts to save the planet from overheating. An unusual Arctic blast spread across the state from the tip of the Panhandle all the way to the Rio Grande Valley that froze wind turbines, hobbled dozens of power plant operations, and left millions of homes and businesses here without electricity.
This isn’t supposed to be California, after all, where over-dependence on wind and solar power destabilized the grid during the 2020 heat wave.
Hey y’all … this is Texas, a land of far more savvy dudes in a state rightly famous for being awash in huge petroleum and natural gas resources.
Texas isn’t a place where we who live here ordinarily worry about freezing to death due to a lack of reliable fossil and nuclear power to heat our homes … unlike northern latitudes that routinely get really cold with iced-up failing power lines.
So, in addition to record low “climate crisis” temperatures, what happened to change that?
I guess we Texans got a little too woke also.
This article originally appeared at Newsmax