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People can’t afford to be poor in Portland, Oregon. Nearly half of the households that rent in the Portland metro area pay too much. Almost one-quarter (24.3 percent) of these households are severely cost burdened, meaning half of their household income goes to keeping a roof over their heads. The median income of Portland metro homeowners is nearly twice that of renters: $81,900 versus $41,600, per a new Harvard report on housing. Oregon has decided to do something to boost affordable housing in the state. A new law before the legislature has opened unexpected fault lines in the already fractured political debate over housing costs. The bill represents something of a mixed blessing for affordability boosters: it’s designed to remove barriers to new construction, but at the cost of local authority.

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.

Apart from being impractical, since four of our nation’s Fortune 500 companies are in the energy industry, divesting from fossil fuels would be a stunningly poor investment strategy, according to a new report conducted by Professor Daniel Fischel of the University of Chicago Law School and economists Christopher Fiore and Todd Kendall. The report found that for eleven of the country’s largest public pension funds, combined losses would be in the trillions of dollars.

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.

New California government workers will hear from union representatives almost as soon as they start their jobs under a state budget provision bolstering labor groups as they prepare for court decisions that may cut into their membership and revenue. Unions would gain mandatory access to new employee orientation sessions in schools, cities and in state government through one of two labor-friendly provisions that lawmakers inserted into the state budget last week without much debate. The second provision bans public agencies from releasing the personal email addresses of government workers, creating a new exemption in the California Public Records Act. Those email addresses are basic information that could be used in anti-union campaigns.

In a pair of affluent coastal California counties, the canary in the mineshaft has gotten splayed, spatchcocked and plated over a bed of unintended consequences, garnished with sprigs of locally sourced economic distortion and non-GMO, “What the heck were they thinking?” The result of one early experiment in a citywide $15 minimum wage is an ominous sign for the state’s poorer inland counties as the statewide wage floor creeps toward the mark. Consider San Francisco, an early adopter of the $15 wage. It’s now experiencing a restaurant die-off, minting jobless hash-slingers, cashiers, busboys, scullery engineers and line cooks as they get pink-slipped in increasing numbers. And the wage there hasn’t yet hit $15. As the East Bay Times reported in January, at least 60 restaurants around the Bay Area had closed since September alone.

California will increase jobs and incomes more slowly than expected this year, mainly because President Trump’s big spending plans don’t seem to be coming to fruition yet. That’s the upshot of the latest forecast from economists at UCLA, released Tuesday, that predicts employment in California will increase by a modest 1.4% and personal income will grow by 3.1% this year. Earlier projections were more optimistic.

Southern California has experienced a boost in trade and logistics employment in the last decade, but policy and labor challenges lie ahead, according to a new economic report.

Trade-related jobs increased nearly 10% from 2005 to 2015, more than double the overall regional employment increase of 4.2%, the report released Monday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. found.

. . . The average trade industry worker still made more than $63,000 in 2015, about 14% higher than the average wage for other industries in the area.

Price obviously matters—it always does—and Denmark’s experience should serve as a warning against reading too much into the progress of green industries (like solar power or, in this case, electric vehicles) that are being propped up by market distorting subsidies or tax breaks.

For the electric vehicle industry specifically, this isn’t a major setback, because many of the automakers in this space are having success in bringing costs down to levels that are attractive for consumers, even without generous tax breaks. It is a heat check of sorts, though, and it suggests that the promised takeover of EVs is further away than its most ardent advocates (and environmentalists) might have you believe.

California is widely celebrated as the fount of technical, cultural and political innovation. Now we seem primed to outdo even ourselves, creating a new kind of socialism that, in the end, more resembles feudalism than social democracy.

The new consensus is being pushed by, among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer. The financier now insists that, to reverse our worsening inequality, we must double down on environmental and land-use regulation, and make up for it by boosting subsidies for the struggling poor and middle class. This new progressive synthesis promises not upward mobility and independence, but rather the prospect of turning most Californians into either tax slaves or dependent serfs.

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.