Economy
San Francisco gas-furnace ban will gouge residents and strain vulnerable electric grid
Progressive California is digging itself deeper and deeper into a literal energy crisis. Last week, twenty members of the Air Quality Management District “approved the plan to phase out and ban gas-powered systems that emit nitrogen oxide, or NOx, and that contribute to air pollution. Three board members were absent, and one member abstained” writes National Review.
The ban will phase out the sale of new gas furnaces and water heaters in Northern California. As a result, it will “be costly for residents, will further burden an already stretched electric grid, and will have minimal environmental impact” energy experts and economists told National Review.
“The move is emblematic of California’s approach to energy, which involves ramping up the demand for electricity while gutting the state’s ability to meet its electricity needs,” they said.
Specifically, it is “a regressive policy that’s going to increase costs in a state that is already unaffordable, it’s going to do minimal in terms of reducing [greenhouse-gas] emissions, and it’s going to stress a problem that we already have no plan of addressing, which is [that] our grid is going to be unable to provide reliable electricity,” said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow in business and economics at the California-based Pacific Research Institute who is studying the state’s electricity shortfall.
Winegarden said California already has a major housing-affordability problem. “And now we’re going to make it even less affordable,” he said. While there are state and federal incentives and subsidies for people to purchase and install electric heating systems, Winegarden, an economist, called it a “shell game.”
“Subsidies don’t get rid of the costs,” he said. “They just redistribute the costs.”
The board’s vote did not address natural-gas stoves because it doesn’t regulate indoor air pollution, notes National Review. However, earlier this year, the Biden administration’s Consumer Product Safety Commission was considering restrictions, and possibly a ban, on natural-gas stoves.
Economy
CO leaders stating they won’t use any city money to support migrants or to alleviate the crisis in Denver
In February 2018, Denver city leaders sent a valentine to foreigners interested in relocating to the progressive mountain city and a message to any elected officials looking to stop them:
Draped on Denver’s City and County building was a large, blue banner: “Denver ❤️ Immigrants.”
Then-mayor Michael Hancock event posted on social media that it was a statement of “love” to let immigrants know that Denver is “an open and welcoming city.” However, six years later, Denver residents are facing an uphill battle of repercussions from the liberal leaders’ actions. Amid a crisis that has seen more than 40,000 migrants arrive in the city since late 2022, Denver leaders have a new message: If you stay in Denver, you will suffer.
“The opportunities are over,” an official with new mayor Mike Johnston’s office told a gathering of migrants in Spanish inside a city shelter in late March, according to a video obtained by a local television station. “New York gives you more. Chicago gives you more.”
On Monday, Douglas County filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado and its Democratic governor Jared Polis in Denver District Court over the issue.
The lawsuit is challenging the constitutionality of two state laws passed by Democrats in the Colorado legislature: a 2019 law that restricted the ability of local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials in civil cases, and a 2023 law that prohibits local governments from entering or renewing detention agreements with ICE and that prohibits them from funding immigration detention facilities owned or operated privately.
“The nation is facing an immigration crisis. The nation, the state, and local governments need to cooperate and share resources to address this crisis,” the lawsuit states, adding that the 2019 and 2023 laws in question “prohibit the necessary cooperation and create dangerous conditions for the State and migrants.”
Teal contends that “the state doesn’t have the inherent authority to limit the ability of a local jurisdiction to work with any agency, regardless be it local, state, or federal.” By doing so, he said, “the state is inhibiting the local communities, the local jurisdictions from providing for the safety” of their residents.
“We are seeing what is going on in Denver, and we do not want that coming here to Douglas County. It is not safe,” Douglas County commissioner Lora Thomas, a former state trooper, said during a Monday morning press conference announcing the lawsuit.
Douglas commissioner Abe Laydon said on Monday that the lawsuit “is about putting America first and about putting Coloradans first.” As a Latino, he said, he recognizes “the plight of those seeking refuge and asylum here in the United States,” but he added that “Douglas County is a place where quality of life comes first.”
National Review reports on the mile-high city’s crisis:
In January, the city was housing and feeding almost 5,000 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, in hotel shelters. Other migrants slept in tents on sidewalks and in parking lots, adding a new wrinkle to Denver’s ongoing struggles with panhandling and squalid homeless camps.
At intersections throughout Denver, migrants with water bottles and squeegees head into traffic to try to make a few bucks washing drivers’ windshields.
To address a migrant-driven financial crunch, the city is now cutting hours at local rec centers, slashing park programming, and freezing hiring in some departments. To save a little money, the city has decided against planting flowers in some of its parks and medians this spring.
The migrant crisis has cost the Denver region at least $170 million, according to a conservative estimate by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute, which looked at city spending as well as school and hospital costs, and is almost surely an undercount.
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MaineIdea
March 22, 2023 at 6:53 pm
What these dolts don’t understand is that every speck of green energy being produced is already in use. The rest is produced by fossil fuels (and nuclear if you don’t consider that green). Every gas, natural gas, or diesel piece of equipment that you convert to electric causes great harm to the environment and CO2 emissions. Not only the metals that have to be extracted for batteries from places that don’t do it cleanly, but every new item that gets converted to electric causes a power plant somewhere to burn a little more fossil fuel. And guess what…. directly turning natural gas into heat by burning it on your kitchen range is way more efficient than burning that gas to make heat to produce steam to drive a turbine to produce electricity to be transmitted 100’s of miles to power a resister (stovetop burner) to make heat. There is an efficiency loss at every step so for every pound of gas you would burn on your stove to boil water, a power plant will have to burn 1.3lbs?? to boil the same water on an electric stove. Even worse for electric cars that have to charge batteries and then turn that back into electricity. Ugh…
BillInOK
March 23, 2023 at 7:56 am
Not to mention the expense to homeowners who will need to add the wiring for powering any and all replacement units. One for stove, one for water heater, one for dryer, one for furnace… It just won’t be possible.