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  • Why California’s Move to Ban Gas-Powered Generators (and Lawn Equipment) Could Leave Californians in the Dark

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    “Excuse me,” says your landscaper. “The mower’s out of juice. Mind if I plug in?” You look from the immobile machine to your half-cut lawn. “Outlet’s over there,” you tell him. “But let’s knock $20 off your fee? What are we up to now, 25 cents a kilowatt-hour?”

    Welcome to the future. Welcome to California.

    The state, committed to net-zero emissions by 2045, is moving to ban sales of gas-powered landscaping equipment as early as 2024. This is not the first attempt. Politicians tried and failed to do the same in 2003. Since then, though, more than half of homeowners in the state have swapped out their consumer-grade equipment for “zero emission equipment” (ZEE), meaning, battery-powered weed whackers, leaf blowers, hedge clippers, chainsaws, and even lawn mowers.

    Many make the switch because, although lower-powered and less reliable (do batteries ever die at the right time?), battery-powered equipment is less noisy. That’s what prompted Mayor Stewart Welch of Mountain Brook, Alabama to begin switching his town’s tools over to electric. The bellow of leaf blowers disturbed his tennis game with a friend who, as chance would have it, had previously complained about the town’s noisy equipment. The city has spent $18,000 over the last year outfitting its public works crew with electric trimmers, blowers, and more.

    According to Stanley Black & Decker, sales of the company’s electric yard equipment jumped 75 percent between 2015 and 2020. But, although lots of people are making the switch of their own accord, they’re not doing it fast enough, according to California’s legislative assembly.

    The biggest holdouts are those who do landscaping for a living, and for good reason. I searched Husqavarna’s site high and low for battery run time info for its 550iBTX, which one landscaper reviewed as “The best electric blower on the market.” For $469? Not bad, I thought. After lots of web searching about the battery, I gave up and contacted support. Turns out, it does not come with one. The lowest-priced option will cost landscapers an extra $300 and lasts between thirty and sixty minutes. The one the associate recommended, though, costs $969 (yes, more than double the cost of the blower) and “lasts up to 3.5 hours,” he told me. That’s if you run it in “normal” mode, which is half the power of Husqavarna’s $459 gas blower; boost mode saps the power faster and is about 33 percent less powerful than the gas blower.

    Some landscapers make electric work, and not just those whose equipment is paid for by taxpayers, as in Mountain Brook. Chris Regis, owner of Florida-based lawn care company Suntek, is able to charge customers between 10 and 20 percent more for all-electric lawn care. He says, “There are people who don’t care and say, ‘I just don’t want the noise.’” All power to them. That’s exactly how free markets work.

    Given the numbers above, though, it would take a lot of lawns to make up one’s initial investment with only a 10 or 20 percent upcharge. But Regis’s investment is far greater. He has outfitted the company’s vans with solar panels for recharging batteries on the go—each van costing about $100,000. Reflecting on how much longer the same work now takes him, Jimi Layne of Mountain Brook’s crew asked, “Are we looking at dollars and cents?”

    That’s an even more pertinent question in California, where energy prices are the highest in the continental US. (23.11 cents per kilowatt-hour, as of June 2021). Gas is more expensive there, too, in large part because of penalizing policies, but researchers predict electricity prices can only rise in the golden state, thanks to a host of factors. Prices are high, in part, because the size of the state increases transmission costs, as do wildfires on mismanaged public lands that have knocked out critical infrastructure, requiring replacement.

    But the biggest contributor to high prices is the state’s push to adopt wind and solar, which require big upfront investments but nonetheless necessitate a reliable backup for when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

    This problem came to the fore in 2020 when, for two days, California’s three big energy companies instituted rolling blackouts across the state because the grid could not meet demand. It was a self-inflicted wound. Given the state’s environmental restrictions, many coal-fired power plants are being decommissioned, and thanks to irrational fears, they’re not being replaced with clean, reliable nuclear energy, either.

    Instead, taxpayers are being forced to subsidize massive investments in “renewables,” and power companies make up much of the state’s inevitable shortfalls by buying energy from more reliable, fossil-fuel plants in neighboring states. Unfortunately for Californians, on August 14, 2020, when the sun set and solar farms went offline, these companies realized they had miscalculated how big that shortfall would be. Western states were in the grip of a heat wave, and as Californians reached for the AC dials, they lost power altogether.

    Losing power is no minor inconvenience, particularly when you live in what is naturally a desert, and especially when it’s more than 100 degrees outside. It’s not just that people can’t charge their Teslas or their ZEE mowers. One 2020 study concluded that more than 5,500 Americans lose their lives due to extreme heat annually. Climate-related deaths are a key indicator of low climate resilience, the ability of a locale to deal with extreme temperatures and weather. And, of course, climate resilience is directly dependent on plentiful, affordable, reliable energy.

    But, increasingly, that is what California is doing away with in favor of expensive, unreliable energy. Unsurprisingly, the poor suffer the most. Research done in 2020 shows that many in Los Angeles can’t afford air conditioners, and many who have them can’t afford to run them because electricity prices are so high. In fact, accounting for cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, in large part because energy prices are so high. This, not in spite of the state’s adoption of “cheap” and “reliable” renewables, but because of it—because solar and wind are not cheap nor reliable and require a backup that is.

    Yet, with startling shortsightedness, the state assembly has sent Governor Gavin Newsom a bill that will effectively eliminate a go-to backup: gas-powered generators. The bill (AB-1346) lumps gas-powered generators in with the offending landscaping equipment and all other “small off-road engines,” referring to them as SOREs. It “encourages” the California Air Resources Board (the state’s own sort of EPA) to “adopt cost-effective and technologically feasible regulations to prohibit engine exhaust and evaporative emissions from new small off-road engines” and to consider “expected availability of zero-emission generators.”

    Such generators do exist, but they are far more expensive, generate far less power, and most need to be recharged after just a few hours. Consider the GOAL ZERO YETI 3000X. It costs $3,400, and an additional $250 kit enables you to use it as a battery backup for your home. After all that, you can power a single refrigerator for less than 2.5 days, and that of course drops if you want to power, say, a few lightbulbs. By contrast, a Duromax XP10000HX can power your whole home—lights, appliances, and A/C system—continuously, running on either gasoline or propane, and it costs $1,400.

    When the power went out last August, says Collin Blackwell of Eldorado Hills, California, “We went out and bought an $800 generator, so that way we could have the fridge powered up in the garage at least and be able to have food and everything in the house.” Mark Galloway of Cameron Park said he lives in a mountain community where losing power is fairly common. “You should have something, so having the backup generator and things like that—I think it’s on you to really take care of that,” he said. “It’s not like it’s something that you can’t plan for.”

    But, if AB-1346 is signed into law, going out and buying an $800 generator will no longer be an option.

    California legislators have not only cut ties with reality—failing to see that they’re heading for ever more blackouts—they also want to cut their citizens’ last lifeline to reliable power when these blackouts inevitably occur. California is committing energy suicide, and given that people rely on energy for just about everything, we shouldn’t be surprised by the toll this will take on human life.


    Jon Hersey

    Jon Hersey is managing editor of The Objective Standard, fellow and instructor at Objective Standard Institute, and Hazlitt fellow at Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Local Kroger Stores Close as California ‘Hero Pay’ Ordinance Backfires

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    A new “Hero Pay” mandate in Long Beach, California has inadvertently cost some frontline grocery workers their jobs. 

    “Ralphs and Food 4 Less, both owned by the parent company Kroger, announced Monday that they will be closing 25% of their stores in Long Beach after the city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour,” local news outlet Fox 11 reports. Two stores in the area will be shut down.

    A company spokesperson directly cited the city council’s ordinance mandating higher wages as the reason they are closing down. 

    “The irreparable harm that will come to employees and local citizens as a direct result of the City of Long Beach’s attempt to pick winners and losers, is deeply unfortunate,” the spokesperson said. “We are truly saddened that our associates and customers will ultimately be the real victims of the city council’s actions.”

    The ordinance was passed with the stated intention of rewarding hard-working grocery store employees who have kept a vital service running throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia was a key proponent of the measure and signed it into law. He argues it is justified because grocery store workers “have been on the frontlines of this pandemic and deserve this support.”

    Similarly, Garcia and other supporters of the mandated wage hike argue that companies are just being selfish by closing down rather than paying their workers more. They point to the fact that Kroger has seen high levels of profit this year.

    In truth, whether the company is being selfish and whether it’s really flush with cash (Kroger says these specific stores were already financially struggling) are both beside the point. This mandatory wage hike “honoring heroes” was passed by politicians eager to spend other people’s money and claim the credit. But like any minimum wage law, it was always going to have the unintended consequence of eliminating some jobs altogether.

    The minimum wage in Long Beach is already $14 per hour for employers with 26 or more employees. A $4 increase would therefore be $18 an hour, a nearly 30 percent raise for every employee. This amounts to an enormous spike in a grocery store’s labor costs, which are already one of the biggest expenses an enterprise usually faces. 

    Whether do-good politicians feel workers “deserve it” or not, the reality is that some grocery store employees don’t provide labor that is worth $18 an hour, and some stores cannot afford to pay such an artificially high price. The basic laws of supply and demand tell us what comes next: the government’s supposed benevolence will leave a significant number of workers unemployed. 

    This specific instance of wage mandates backfiring is just one example of a much broader trend. On the national level, the “Fight for $15” movement demanding a $15 federal minimum wage ostensibly seeks to help workers. In reality, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that this policy would eliminate 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs. A wealth of economic research similarly shows that minimum wage hikes cause unemployment.

    The moral of the story is clear. 

    Sweeping government price controls and labor market interventions will always have vast unintended consequences, no matter how noble the stated intentions are or how sympathetic the intended beneficiary may be. Indeed, unintended consequences are an inherent feature of big government programs.

    “Every human action has both intended and unintended consequences,” economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explain. “Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.” The more complex the underlying situation and the more sweeping the rule or regulation, the more pronounced the unintended consequences will be.

    Long Beach lawmakers may truly have hoped to help front-line workers by mandating higher “Hero Pay” under the law. But their naïve good intentions will mean little to the grocery store clerks left unemployed as a result.

    Is this any way to treat heroes?

    Brad Polumbo


    Brad Polumbo

    Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • How California Politicians Created a Homelessness Crisis

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    California has more homeless people than any other state, with large homeless tent camps occupying the sidewalks of many of its streets. California also has the second most expensive housing of all states, lagging only behind Hawaii.

    Writing at the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney wonders to what extent the state government’s regulatory environment is contributing to both problems.

    Land-use regulations make housing more expensive. The Los Angeles metro area ranks as the 15th most restrictive in land-use regulation.

    People who own houses in housing-restricted places often don’t want to deregulate. They like the space. They fear the traffic. And they know that adding more housing could harm their home values. Of course, preserving scarcity in housing to keep your housing investments valuable is not really something most people want to admit to, so they make other arguments.

    They suggest that the regulations drive up home values not by curbing supply but by giving people what they want: green buildings, safe buildings, adequate parking, and uncrowded neighborhoods.

    But the one study that has looked into this finds that more than 90% of the price effect of regulation comes not from making the homes more desirable but from limiting supply. So regulation is affecting the market mostly by preventing homes from being built.

    That finding raises a question. How many regulations has California put in the way of building homes?

    According to QuantGov, last year the state government of California imposed on businesses and residents a total of 395,503 restrictions, as defined by the number of times that words like “must”, “shall”, “required”, “prohibited”, and “may not” appear within the online version of the California Code of Regulations (CCR).

    Those regulations haven’t come about by accident—they are the result of years of effort on the part of California politicians and regulators.

    Not only is that number more than any other state, it is nearly 88,000 more than the number of similar government-mandated restrictions imposed by New York’s government agencies, the state that ranks second in this measure.

    Within the CCR, California’s Building Standards Code (Title 24) contains more restrictions than any other section, totaling no fewer than 75,712 restrictions. At the same time, the section for Housing and Community Development (Title 25) contains 12,204 restrictions, the tenth largest of all sections (or titles) contained in the CCR.

    Combined to total 88,186 regulatory restrictions, these two sections that effectively dictate what housing may be built in California account for over 22 percent of the total regulatory burden set by all the state’s government agencies.

    How does that compare with New York? QuantGov’s 2017 report for New York suggests the Empire State imposes far less of a regulatory burden on homebuilders, but since the state’s building code contains fewer than 12,474 restrictions, it doesn’t even make the list of the Top 10 contributors to that state’s regulatory burden.

    It occurred to me that California’s building code might be more restrictive than a state like New York because much of the state is prone to natural disasters like earthquakes, mudslides and wildfires. So I looked at my former home state of Washington, which is prone to similar disasters. Its building code does make the top ten in QuantGov’s list of the state’s biggest contributors of restrictive regulations for 2019, where the state’s Building Code Council (Title 51) ranks ninth by accounting for a total of 4,585 restrictions.

    California has over 19 times that number of restrictions limiting what housing and other structures may be built within the state. Those regulations haven’t come about by accident—they are the result of years of effort on the part of California politicians and regulators.

    If you remember the sky-high oil and fuel prices of a decade ago, the political slogan of many seeking to bring the runaway prices of that day was “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

    These advocates recognized that increasing the supply of oil was the only effective path to bring oil and gas prices back down to more affordable levels, so they worked to remove regulatory barriers to producing more supply. It may sound corny, but it worked.

    If California’s politicians and bureaucrats ever want to get serious about building a larger supply of affordable housing, they need to start demolishing the artificially restrictive environment they have built and that has produced the opposite outcome they claim they want. The right slogan for California to improve the lives of the state’s neediest residents is “Build, Baby, Build.”

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Independent Institute.


    Craig Eyermann

    Craig Eyermann is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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