California is pursuing better living through poverty.
In order to accomplish the state’s goal of pretending to eliminate “fossil fuels” and “greenhouse gases,” California has enacted laws and regulations that are making everything more expensive.
For example, on June 6, the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District is expected to vote on Proposed Amended Rules 1111 and 1121, which will ban home furnaces and water heaters that run on natural gas. (Email your comments to ClerkOfBoard@aqmd.gov.)
If the rules are approved by the unelected and unaccountable regulators, it shall be forbidden to supply, sell or install gas-powered furnaces and water heaters in any residence in the South Coast Air Quality Management District, beginning in 2029 for existing buildings and 2027 for new buildings.
About 17 million people live within the jurisdiction of the SCAQMD, which includes all of Orange County, most of Los Angeles County and portions of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. And if any of those 17 million people have to replace a furnace or water heater, they’re in for an expensive surprise.
Amid fierce criticism, the proposed rules were recently amended to create an alternative compliance path: manufacturers can pay a mitigation fee and delay the deadline date for ten years. The idea is to make the gas appliances so expensive that consumers will be incentivized to buy expensive electric units instead. Voluntarily, of course. Your regulators love you and want you to be happy. Poor, but happy.
The blithering idiocy of this policy cannot be overstated. Air quality regulators pretend they are reducing the burning of natural gas by mandating appliances that run on electricity. Can you guess how electricity is made in California? Largely by burning natural gas. The Golden State also imports electricity generated in other states. We don’t ask where it came from. The stork brought it.
Regulatory compliance in California is a torture that would impress the Spanish Inquisition. Steaming stacks of reports are required from local governments and businesses alike. Experts are paid to calculate the emissions credits generated by an empty bicycle rack and the penalties assessed against a busy warehouse. The cost of all that meaningless measuring, calculating, reporting and complying is passed through to Californians in higher taxes and higher prices.
Supposedly the ban on gas appliances will reduce smog-inducing NOx emissions and eliminate some amount of fine particulates in the air. Is it enough to notice? And what will it cost?
These are not questions that regulators have to answer. Their job is to bring the region into “attainment” by any means necessary. But who sets the standard that must be attained?
In February 2024, nearly three dozen U.S. senators signed a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael S. Regan to complain about the EPA’s new revision of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for fine particulate matter under the Clean Air Act. This is known in government circles as the PM2.5 NAAQS standard.
Since 2013, the standard had been 12 micrograms per cubic meter, a level that the EPA had determined to be protective of public health. The senators pointed out in their letter that the EPA’s own data showed a 42 percent decline in PM2.5 emissions over the last two decades, with scientific evidence of continuing improvements in air quality. In 2020, the EPA concluded again that the standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter was sufficient.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is directed by Congress to reevaluate the NAAQS standards every five years, with the next review due in 2025. But just 33 days after its 2020 review was complete, the EPA started up another review of the PM2.5 standard. In 2024, the agency announced a new rule tightening the standard to 9 micrograms per cubic meter.
That was enough to put 40% of the U.S. population, in 200 counties, into “nonattainment.” Complying with the new standard would threaten more than 850,000 jobs as companies moved or expanded overseas, according to an analysis by the National Association of Manufacturers. “Even the aggressively overregulated European Union maintains its standards for PM2.5 at 20-25 micrograms per cubic meter, more than double the new standard for the United States,” the senators wrote.
States in nonattainment can lose highway funds unless they submit a plan to the EPA explaining how they will hit the new number. Costly and restrictive regulations inevitably follow, and approvals for new economic developments are stalled.
But if a standard of 12 was fine for public health in 2020, is it a good idea for 850,000 people to lose their jobs to get the number to 9? Should unelected regulators be empowered to single-handedly impair critical sectors of the U.S. economy such as agriculture, mining, forestry and manufacturing? These all generate PM2.5, which is essentially dust in the wind.
This is why the Trump administration is reviewing the tighter emissions standards for NOx and PM2.5 that were imposed during the Biden administration, as well as the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” issued during the Obama administration, which gave the EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Trump is also threatening to revoke California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act, which allows the state to set its own, tougher emissions standards. It has effectively empowered state air regulators to raise the price of gasoline in order to reduce driving.
The standards are established without any connection to actual, verifiable health data. Instead, we have numbers that are arbitrarily tightened, then justified by running faulty assumptions through computer models to come up with wild-eyed estimates of “health costs” and “premature deaths” supposedly attributable to gas-powered leaf blowers. Or classic cars driving to a Sunday show. Or water heaters and furnaces. Or trucks delivering food.
Regulators call this “cracking down on the worst polluters.” The truth is that the “worst polluters” of the 1960s and ‘70s were cleaned up long ago. Today it’s the poverty rate that takes your breath away.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
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