Progressives can CANCEL anything they want. Biden can repeal anything he can get away with. Democrats can easily cancel your retirement by raising taxes and making it too expensive to retire. One thing none of the totalitarians can do is repeal the law of supply and demand. As supplies are limited and demand go up, so does the cost of things—like gas, food and housing. So when government and radicals stop the building of 39,000 homes in Northern L.A. County, you know what happens to the cost of housing. In Northern California, after almost two decades of trying to get permits for 12,000 homes, and get turned down, you can imagine what the cost of housing will be.
“Even products and services deemed to be “green” are not exempt. Solar power panels and battery-powered cars, for instance, require sophisticated industrial processes and rare minerals such as the lithium, which must be mined or extracted from brine.
That’s why we should be skeptical of politicians who pretend that we can interrupt those supply chains, in the name of environmental protection, without negative consequences.
That was the underlying issue last week when the state Senate’s Committee on Natural Resources and Water took up Senate Bill 467, which was aimed at shutting down much of California’s oil industry by banning fracking and other extraction processes.
It was the unions that stopped this attempt to demolish the California economy—when will the unions realize that IS the goal of the Progressives—to create a new economy based on government command and control. In others words attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand.
A reminder about supplies and demands
by Dan Walters, CalMatters, 4/18/21
In summary
Californians should remember that having abundant goods and services requires raw materials and industrial processing.
We Americans are blessed with abundant — even overabundant — consumer goods and services and often take that fact for granted.
We assume that when we pull into a service station its pumps will dispense fuel, that when we go to a grocery store, we will find full shelves, or that when we flip the switch on the wall the room will light up.
We tend to forget that the goods and services we want or need involve complex supply chains that begin with basic resources, proceed to industrial processes and culminate in delivery on demand.
Even products and services deemed to be “green” are not exempt. Solar power panels and battery-powered cars, for instance, require sophisticated industrial processes and rare minerals such as the lithium, which must be mined or extracted from brine.
That’s why we should be skeptical of politicians who pretend that we can interrupt those supply chains, in the name of environmental protection, without negative consequences.
That was the underlying issue last week when the state Senate’s Committee on Natural Resources and Water took up Senate Bill 467, which was aimed at shutting down much of California’s oil industry by banning fracking and other extraction processes.
The bill’s author, Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, argued, “California cannot continue to have the image of an environmental beacon while we are actively poisoning our citizens and destroying our state.”
Wiener introduced the bill after Gov. Gavin Newsom called for ending the sale of petroleum-fueled cars by 2035 and asked the Legislature to ban fracking. However, now facing a recall election, Newsom didn’t lift a finger to help Wiener move his bill, apparently because labor unions were adamantly opposed, citing elimination of high-paying union jobs.
Without Newsom’s support, moderate Democrats on the committee refused to vote for the bill and it failed. “This one really does go to shut down the oil industry in California,” Sen. Susan Eggman, a Stockton Democrat, said. “We are not getting away from oil or gas in California in the next 10 years.”
She spoke the simple truth that the vast majority of California’s 30-plus million vehicles run on petroleum-based fuels and despite Newsom’s declaration about 2035, that fact will continue indefinitely.
California supplies about half of the petroleum it consumes, importing the remainder from oil-producing nations across the globe. Shutting down production here would make us more dependent on other suppliers, with a massive loss of jobs and exports of consumer dollars.
