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And little of that has gone toward creating “clean energy.” Funding recipients have frittered away millions completing paperwork—energy surveys, audits, data analytics—to meet California Energy Commission’s guidelines, which require $1.05 of energy savings for every dollar spent. Schools have spent more than half of the $297 million that they’ve received on consultants and auditors. As if California’s regulatory compliance industry needed more work.

California lawmakers from both parties are calling for more stringent oversight of a clean jobs initiative after an Associated Press report found that a fraction of the promised jobs have been created.

Senate Bill 32, which would extend and expand California’s pollution reduction targets into the year 2050, would likely create a mandate that all homes produce zero net energy, warned a report issued Monday by the California Building Industry Association.

In at least a half-dozen of those communities, the pay-floor ordinances include a provision allowing unions to waive the wage mandates as part of a collective-bargaining agreement.

According to a study released Monday by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the U.S. economy now has about 1 million more jobs in occupations that rank in the top third of income and 800,000 more in the bottom third. The middle third, however, has yet to recover the jobs lost during the recession.

“Not all forms of renewable energy get counted. Large hydropower projects, such as those generated by the dams off Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville or Folsom Lake, are excluded. So are most rooftop solar panel installations, as opposed to the large solar arrays in the desert, which do count. That is a point of contention in the current bill, with utilities and solar installers arguing that rooftop systems also should count. . . . Electricity rates are rising with the policies. According to an estimate from the California Public Utilities Commission, rates have risen three to five percent due to the renewable requirements. In the competition last year to draw the battery factory for the electric carmaker Tesla, Nevada won out over California, the company’s home. Part of the package, according to the New York Times, was discounted electricity rates.”

Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.

Without writing its formal obituary, Brown and other politicians, plus the state’s education establishment, have strangled the test-based accountability system that California adopted in the late 1990s.

Not only does Fresno, vis-à-vis other large California cities, have one of the higher rates of poverty, but its poor residents are among the most isolated of any American city, regardless of race.

Renting in Los Angeles and Orange counties is less affordable than any of the nation’s other top 35 metro areas, according to a Zillow analysis of rent affordability in the second quarter of 2015.

Today’s map cuts through this clutter, presenting effective tax rates on owner-occupied housing. This is the average amount of residential property tax actually paid, expressed as a percentage of home value.

These are questions worth keeping in mind as our energy policy sorts itself out in this climate-change era. As it strives to end reliance on fossil fuel, will California help turn the rest of the West green? Or will the Golden State end up being dusted with coal ash?

Job openings slipped to 5.25 million in June, down from a record 5.36 million in May, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as Jolts.

The contradiction of modern climate liberals is that they promise lower energy bills and a wind-and-solar jobs boom, with zero trade-offs. But then they demand more redistribution to mitigate the economic and human damage that are the real outcome of their policies. Instead of offering to weatherize the homes of the least fortunate, how about trying to increase prosperity?

Californian cities continued their reign atop the list of most-expensive markets, with San Jose commanding a median sales price of $980,000.