California liberals who snarled about the ethics of Governor Rick Perry’s regular visits to recruit companies to move to Texas are apoplectic over the thought that Perry could cut their funding as President-elect Trump’s Secretary of Energy.
As Breitbart News recently noted, at least 9,000 California companies moved their headquarters or diverted projects to out-of-state locations from 2008 to 2015. Motivated by what managers called the Golden State’s “hostile” business environment, Texas was the preferred location for jobs exiting California.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the national buying power of a $100 bill is only $88.97 in California versus $103.32 in Texas. The biggest reason California has such low buying power is the high costs of taxes and regulations to subsidize sustainable energy and other liberal boondoggles. And that, in turn, explains why California’s electricity cost-per-kilowatt-hour, at 18.22 cents, is almost 40 percent more than the 11.13 cents-per-kilowatt-hour in Texas.
A few years ago, California radio stations actually gave inter-day updates about which companies Perry was visiting on recruiting trips to the state. Perry replied when challenged back at home about the number of companies and their workers flooding into Texas, “Those jobs flee other states because of factors like excessive taxation, punitive regulation and frivolous lawsuits.”
Commenting on Tesla vehicles, built at the company’s state-of-the-arts factory in Silicon Valley, said he’d like it better if they “had a ‘Made in Texas’ bumper sticker.”
Trump has promises to eliminate all “unnecessary” energy regulations and put a moratorium on new regulations not compelled by Congress or public safety.
Perr, too, famously stated as a presidential candidate that he would eliminate the Department of Energy for its unwillingness to open up federal lands for oil, gas and coal development. He also promised to dump the Obama’s administration’s curb on power plant greenhouse gas emissions.
But Perry now seems like the idea of a leading a pro-energy Department of Energy that could approve $1 trillion in new domestic energy projects on federal lands and create tens of thousands of high paying middle-class jobs.
The Barack Obama and Bill Clinton administrations relentlessly stacked the federal bureaucracy with leftist partisans who used funding from the Energy Department’s four national research labs to push for climate change studies and policy.
To understand the scale of that funding, Congress approved an Obama plan to have the Department of Energy spend $7 billion on green energy research and development by 2021, along with another $6 billion on other programs aimed at fighting global warming. Obama promised that when Hillary Clinton was elected president, Democrats would pass a $10-per-barrel tax on domestic oil production to pay for their “green” transportation ambitions.
California’s own U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was ecstatic over the Perry’s nomination, stating: “Under Governor Perry’s all-of-the above energy strategy, Texas outpaced the rest of the nation in the production of crude oil, natural gas, and electricity.”
However, President Trump’s election triumph and Perry’s nomination are seen as an existential threat to the “sustainability” of projects favored by California liberals.
Timothy O’Connor, who works on California climate change policies at the San Francisco headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund, dejectedly told the Los Angeles Times, “We have seen the federal government as a partner in research and development.” But with Rick Perry as the next Secretary of Energy, he moaned, “This may mean we have to do more of it ourselves.”
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