Electricity in Taft, California costs 275% more than what electricity costs in Bullhead City, Arizona. While residents of Los Angeles and San Francisco may feel comfortably smug hundreds of miles away from the Kern County city, it is rare to get a side-by-side comparison of energy bills in neighboring states.
How could this be?
In March, 2023 the California Assembly jammed SBX1-2, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Gas Tax, through an expedited hearing, pretending that was enough exposure to the public, and debated the bill and voted on it. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill.
Newsom’s Gas Tax also created a new panel of unelected bureaucrats with subpoena power, to investigate oil and gas companies, impose penalties, new costs and regulations, which would inevitably lead to gas shortages, rationing and price spikes. The bill created a new government agency to arbitrarily decide how much profit oil and gas businesses are allowed to make, disrupting California’s energy market and threatening the reliability of the state’s fuel supply,
Dave Noerr is the Mayor of Taft, and also has a home in Bullhead City, AZ. The electricity bills mentioned above are his. The Globe talked once again with Mayor Noerr about California Governor Gavin Newsom’s draconian SBX1-2, and the new agency it created to decide on oil/gas industry profits.
The Green Agenda
In addition to Gov. Newsom’s $310+ billion dollar budget and $75 million budget deficit, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association President Jon Coupal warned us last summer that the legislature is also advancing a $15 billion ‘Climate Bond’ to appear on the ballot sometime in 2024” – a Green Agenda climate tax.
The Green Agenda pushed by radical environmentalists in California is on steroids and is making food, cars, energy and homes unaffordable. The radical greenies are responsible for the no-forest management policies which ignite into California’s annual “wildfire season.” The radical greenies are responsible for the government created water shortage. The green agenda is planning to completely shut down the extraction of California’s wealth of natural resources – oil and natural gas.
And Governor Newsom is the Big Chief Greenie.
Mayor Noerr reported that in a meeting in McKittrick, CA in Kern County in 2019 after an oil seepage, Gov. Newsom said, “My bias is consistent” about the oil and gas industry. When they spoke after the meeting, Noerr asked the governor what he saw on his tour around McKittrick. Noerr said the governor answered by offering disclaimers: “I did not know that water comes out with oil extraction; I did not know there was heavy oil and light oil; I did not know heavy oil can be bagged and used…”
Noerr said Newsom is a slave to his bias, in spite of emerging facts. And “he’s a slave to his ego,” Noerr said. “He went in to the issue with his bias fully in tact.”
While Gov. Newsom was fairly conciliatory at the time, he did comment that oil and gas is our past, and renewables are the future.
Evidence of his bias is very clear when you observe Newsom’s appointees to the California Public Utilities Commission – all like-minded rabid environmentalists who equally share his bias and tow his party line. The CPUC commissioners set and accept electricity rates, and Newsom has appointed all five.
The CPUC says, “Our five Governor-appointed Commissioners, as well as our staff, are dedicated to ensuring that consumers have safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates, protecting against fraud, and promoting the health of California’s economy.”
Noerr also addressed that Gov. Newsom bases the need for SBX1-2 on the high cost of oil and gas. But the high cost is because of Gavin Newsom and his policies, and are not in response to market drivers.
Mayor Noerr directed the Globe to the Energy Information Agency (eia.gov) and said going back to 2018, California paid 124% more for electricity than other states. In 2019, it grew to 139%; 2020 it was 131%; and in 2024 it is 140% – the cost of Californias energy and energy poverty. He said this rules out refiner margins.
Noerr showed me PG&E’s January 1, 2024 Annual Electric True-Up and said PG&E has raised energy prices 60% in the course of the last two years – and 23.8% in a single year. “That’s 10 times the CPI target for the feds to lower interest rates!” Noerr said.
As for electricity across the California/Arzona border differing by 275%, Noerr notes that Arizona isn’t exactly the lowest priced state for electricity in the U.S. He said Arizona ranks 25th – right in the middle of the pack.
The whole point of this conversation besides identifying the real culprits behind highest-in-the-nation oil and gas prices, and electricity prices, is this is where the poor, and in particular the working poor, are hit the hardest. As a percentage of their take-home income, they spend more on electricity and energy than anything else. And unaffordable energy bills can make a family homeless the moment they can’t pay the bill.
So after spending billions on housing for the 180,000 homeless drug addicted, mentally ill in the state – who still live on the streets – Noerr said the United Way identified 3 million families who can’t pay their utility bills – families driven to the edge of homelessness.
These high electricity and energy costs also drive up the costs of everything else, Noerr says – the cost to run a school, a grocery store, every mall, car dealer, doctor’s office – every business in the state is paying more for electricity, and passing the cost on to the consumers.
Gavin Newsom says oil and gas companies are “gouging” people. Yet Noerr says the governor is absolutely indifferent to the real hardships, as well as the real root causes.
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