California’s role as a global climate leader will take center stage during the international climate conference hosted by Governor Jerry Brown in San Francisco this week.
The world also needs to know that California is our nation’s housing crisis, homelessness, and poverty leader. We have highest percentage and highest number of homeless and poor people of any state in our nation: 9 million Californians, including 2 million children, are poor. Notwithstanding our “progressive liberal” reputation, our housing, homelessness, and poverty crisis are not color blind – the victims, once again, are disproportionately Latinos and African Americans.
We have each been civil rights advocates and leaders for over 50 years. Decades of progress in minority homeownership, and housing-induced poverty, have been wiped out in California. And today’s new darling of the liberal elite, like urban redevelopment and racist New Deal programs elevating only white Americans into the middle class, is California’s climate program.
We believe the world’s climate leaders also need to know that California’s climate elites have implemented stunningly regressive measures that worsen global warming while also worsening the housing, poverty, and homeless crisis in our minority communities.
We are not climate leaders. Our environmental elites brag about reaching greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets early, even as Governor Brown acknowledges this as “hype,” and even as the Obama administration concluded that California was responsible for just 5% of the GHG reductions in the United States between 2007-2015.
Our climate leaders only rely on GHG metrics that favor the wealthy and punish the working poor. For example, we count as GHG “reductions” our substantial out-migration of California’s working-class families (and jobs) to states like Texas and Arizona that automatically double (or more) per capita global GHG emissions.
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