JOEL KOTKIN: Jim Crow Returns to California: The Golden State’s climate policies have enforced racial segregation.

California’s leaders might see themselves as a vanguard of progressive and eco-friendly values. But in reality, their draconian climate policies have created a racially segregated state more akin to the pre-Civil Rights era South. As Attorney Jennifer Hernandez puts in a startling new report for the environmentalist Breakthrough Institute, California has been plunged into “a new Green Jim Crow era”.

The “soaring environmental rhetoric of the state’s affluent, largely white technocratic leadership”, she concludes, is “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice”. Certainly, the impact is stark. California now suffers the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate; and according to the United Way of California, more than 30% of California residents lack sufficient income to meet basic costs of living, even after accounting for public assistance programmes. Those struggling families include half of Latino and 40% of black residents.

There are two main factors driving this “new Green Jim Crow era”. The first, and most obvious, is California’s energy policy, which has made the state’s electricity and gas prices the highest on the mainland, with electricity prices 50% above the national average and gasoline costs that exceed even import-reliant Hawaii in the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from “clean energy” investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.

California needs to build big nuclear plants. They could solve their water issues with big desalination plants, too.