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Home prices in Los Angeles have never been higher, and rents are increasingly unaffordable for many residents. Sadly, a new report from the UCLA Anderson Schoolf of Management predicts the situation is unlikely to change in the near future. The report finds that three of the six most unaffordable cities for homebuyers nationwide are in Southern California and that Los Angeles is the single most unaffordable city for both renters and buyers. Though the cost of housing is higher in other cities, median income in LA is low enough that more residents will struggle to make monthly rental payments or save to buy a home.

Market-rate development has outstripped the supply of affordable units. And “regressive” zoning and environmental regulations, combined with California’s reputation as a tech behemoth are leading to the “hollowing out of the middle class,” Shulman said. “President Trump wants to keep people out by building a wall. California is more sophisticated – it uses zoning and development laws to keep people out, but they have the same effect,” he said.

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent trip to China reflects the massive disconnect inherent in the progressive establishment worldview. The notion that the country that is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, emitting nearly twice as much as the United States, and is generating coal energy at record levels, should lead the climate jihad is so laughable as to make its critics, including Trump, seem reasonable. All this, despite the fact that the U.S., largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas, is clearly leading the world in greenhouse gas reductions. Paris is good for China in that it gets it off the hook for reducing its emissions until 2030, while the gullible West allows its economies to be buried by ever-cascading regulations. The accords could have cost U.S. manufacturers as many as 6.5 million industrial jobs, while China gets a basically free pass. President Xi Jinping also appeals to the increasingly popular notion among progressives that an autocracy like China is better suited to address climate change than our sometimes chaotic democratic system.

Consider the Paris agreement’s preamble, which states that signatories will work to keep the rise in average global temperature “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and even suggests that the increase could be kept to 1.5 degrees. This is empty political rhetoric. Based on current carbon dioxide emissions, achieving the target of 1.5 degrees would require the entire planet to abandon fossil fuels in four years.

But the treaty has deeper problems. The United Nations organization in charge of the accord counted up the national carbon-cut pledges for 2016 to 2030 and estimated that, if every country met them, carbon dioxide emissions would be cut by 56 gigatons. It is widely accepted that restricting temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius would require a cut of some 6,000 gigatons, that is, about a hundredfold more.

The Paris treaty is not, then, just slightly imperfect. Even in an implausibly optimistic, best-case scenario, the Paris accord leaves the problem virtually unchanged. Those who claim otherwise are forced to look beyond the period covered by the treaty and to hope for a huge effort thereafter.

. . . Acknowledging the Paris treaty’s flaws does not mean endorsing the Trump administration’s apparent intention to ignore climate change. Real progress in reducing carbon emissions and global temperatures will require far-reaching advances in green energy, and that will mean massive investment in research and development—an annual global commitment of some $100 billion, according to analysis by the Copenhagen Consensus. When green energy is economically competitive, the whole world will rush to use it.

Once upon a time, diesel fuel was going to be the future. It was seen as more efficient, on a mileage-per-gallon basis, than other fossil fuels, and for that reason was also thought to be less polluting. About two decades ago, acting on those beliefs, policy makers in Europe—where high energy prices already made mileage a more-pressing issue than in the U.S.—made a number of rules that incentivized the growth of diesel over gasoline for use in passenger cars, moving past its traditional role in trucking and construction. These policies were remarkably successful at meeting their goals, and diesel-powered cars soon accounted for half of the cars sold on the continent. Car companies poured resources into developing diesel-related technology. But the result of this success has been not greener, friendlier, cheaper motoring, but the creation of toxic clouds over major European cities. At the end of 2016, Paris was choked by its worst episode of smog in more than a decade, lasting longer than two weeks, according to the city’s pollution-watching agency Airparif, and prompting the city to enact emergency measures that included restricting car use. It was not the first time. During a March 2015 pollution event, Paris was briefly the most polluted city in the world, surpassing famously smoggy Beijing. London shared in the ignominy when it too beat out Beijing for the first time in January of this year.

It’s a playbook environmentalists used effectively when they lobbied for a ban on plastic bags. Year after year, the Legislature rejected a statewide ban on plastic shopping bags. So the green campaign went local, eventually persuading so many California cities to adopt some type of plastic bag ban that by 2014, the Legislature was compelled to act.

Suddenly grocery stores that previously opposed a statewide plastic bag ban made a deal to support it by collecting 10-cent fees for paper shopping bags, arguing that the hodgepodge of local rules made business difficult for store owners and confusing for shoppers.

“It was intentional to create a patchwork of local policies as a means of motivating opponents to come together and find a statewide solution,” said Mark Murray executive director of Californians Against Waste, an environmental advocacy group that backed the plastic bag ban.

The recession took a big bite out of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. But since then, the state has found ways to keep emissions from rising to pre-recession levels even as its economy grows. It helps that a significant portion of the recovery comes from the technology industry. Living and working in the state now uses less carbon than before, and emissions per gross domestic product and per person have been falling continuously.

There are serious reasons to consider cutting the U.S. corporate income tax. However, many of the best arguments for cutting the corporate income tax apply most strongly to permanent cuts, not temporary ones. A temporary corporate income tax cut is less likely to promote growth and less likely to benefit workers than a permanent corporate income tax cut. A tax reform effort should hope to boost incomes for all, and a corporate income tax cut could be a means to do it. However, a large but short-lived reduction in corporate income taxes may be largely a windfall for investors, pension funds, and retirement accounts, with precious few broader benefits to the economy at large.

A diaspora of tech talent, driven by Silicon Valley’s tumbling job market and sky-high rents, has pushed tech job seekers to some surprising places.

Job search site ZipRecruiter recently analyzed its database of more than 8 million active jobs, and ranked the 20 fastest-growing tech markets based on year-over-year data. Job growth for engineering, software, and IT roles may be losing steam in the Bay Area, but smaller cities are picking up the slack, the company says,

. . . Many of the cities on ZipRecruiter’s list are in the Midwest — Kansas City, Kan., Cincinnati, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Ind. are three standouts. The South also had a strong showing, with Nashville, Tenn. and three cities in Florida (Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa) all making the cut.

Barrera credits government policies, like tax breaks that attract entrepreneurs and business startups for much of this growth. But the main impetus, she says, is the skyrocketing cost of living in coastal tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.

It starts at the corner gas station. California’s cap-and-trade program requires fuel wholesalers, along with other big industrial firms, to purchase emissions allowances in order to generate carbon. In addition, fuel producers – from giant oil refiners to ethanol manufacturers – must purchase a separate type of credits to comply with the state’s “low carbon fuel standard,” which penalizes companies that spew lots of carbon during the production process.

Those costs get passed along to motorists. The total impact is about 15 cents a gallon, according to figures compiles by UC Berkeley energy economist Severin Borenstein.

The state’s emissions in 2015 dropped just 0.3 percent from the prior year, according to data released Wednesday by the California Air Resources Board. The board’s detailed annual greenhouse gas inventories are issued more than a year after the fact. While emissions from electrical plants fell in 2015, driven down partly by the rapid growth of large solar facilities, the amount of greenhouse gases spewed by cars and planes rose. That may be due to low fuel prices and an improving economy, both of which typically entice people to drive more. Transportation accounted for 39 percent of the state’s emissions in 2015, making it California’s largest source of greenhouse gases.

California voters overwhelmingly oppose a recent tax and fee package pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democratic-dominated Legislature to pay for road repairs, a new poll finds.

The gas tax law, which ushers in a 10-year program to raise more than $52 billion for transportation projects, is so unpopular it could backfire on Democrats in upcoming elections. IGS Poll: Gas tax More than half of California’s registered voters oppose the new state law raising taxes on gas and vehicle registration fees. Chart of poll results Source: Berkeley IGS Poll Fifty eight percent of voters oppose Senate Bill 1, including 39 percent who say they strongly reject the legislation, according to the survey from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. Only 35 percent favor the law, which raises taxes on gasoline and diesel and hikes vehicle registration fees to fix roads and highways.

In yet another sign of L.A.’s growing poverty and lack of low-income housing, local officials are preparing for a torrent of applications when they open up the wait list for federal housing aid later this year.

The city stopped taking applications for Section 8 housing over a decade ago because there were too many people already waiting for the limited rental assistance vouchers.

Last time L.A.’s waitlist opened, in 2004, about 300,000 people applied. When the process opens for a two-week window this year, officials are expecting at least twice that number. As a result, only a fraction of people who apply will make the cut.

An environmental policy so broad, costly and complex that it fails under its own weight will mean lost jobs, a suffering economy and losing our position as a global climate policy leader. A smart cap-and-trade system will support farmers, dairymen, shift workers at the refineries and average Californians who want clean air.

Using a statewide carbon market with tools like offsets and free allowances for exposed businesses will increase compliance, reduce emissions and ensure that people stay employed in California’s backbone industries, such as manufacturing, construction and farming. These measures contain the cost to consumers and businesses to allow the market to reduce emissions over time. Cost containment, allowance price stability and continued legislative oversight will work together to ensure the program’s long-term efficacy and success.

Roughly three million potential first-time home buyers have been shut out of the market over the last decade, according to a new study, suggesting the market’s recovery of the past few years could have been stronger.

Tight lending standards and acute shortages of affordable housing in many markets have reduced the pool of potential buyers, particularly among young people, reducing a key component of housing demand.