It is well known that the economy in Texas is going gang-busters compared to most of the country fueled (sorry, couldn’t resist) by new fossil fuel production. I just had to laugh when TX Gov Perry made it known he had no problem in busting on New York and especially California: “low taxes and low regulations – we LIKE business”. I have watched as blue state after blue state just makes it harder and harder to do what biz is supposed to do: “We have a right to your profits”. So the Energy Companies are leaving (emphasis mine):
The recent decision by Occidental Petroleum to move its headquarters to Houston from Los Angeles, where it was founded over a half-century ago, confirms the futility and delusion embodied in California’s ultragreen energy policies. By embracing solar and wind as preferred sources of generating power, the state promotes an ever-widening gap between its declining middle- and working-class populations and a smaller, self-satisfied group of environmental campaigners and their corporate backers.
Talk to people who work in the fossil-fuel industry, and they tell you they feel ostracized and even hated; to be an oil firm in California is like being a pork producer in an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem.
One top industry executive told me that many of his colleagues in California cringe at the prospect of being attacked by politicians and activists as something akin to war criminals. “I wouldn’t subject my kids to that environment,” the Gulf Coast-based oilman suggested.
That last remark: “I wouldn’t subject my kids to that environment” should say it all. Period. To be demonized simply because you supply a product that enhances our lives is absolutely crazy, but that is the mindset of the Greenies (and the Left in general). Screaming “Tolerance” on one side of their mouths while yelling “you suck!” out of the other leads most of us to go “yeah, fruits & nuts”. California has been losing its middle class and the businesses they own and work in for years and now we see it crawling up the food chain. Oh, and it isn’t just energy:
Particularly hard-hit has been California’s once-vibrant manufacturing sector, which has not mounted anything like the recovery being experienced in other parts of the country. From 2010-13, the country added 510,000 jobs, while California produced fewer than 8,000. Electricity prices are particularly uncompetitive, roughly twice as high in California, as those in prime competitors such Texas, Nevada, Arizona – as well as the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest.
This has – discouraged manufacturers, such as Intel, from locating or expanding in the state. No surprise, then, that, just last week, it was revealed that the Lone Star State had also surpassed California in exports of high-tech goods.
My company just moved its headquarters – from California to…you guessed it…Texas. I listen to my co-workers out there complain about the high taxes and the regulations just in their personal lives; it is much more intensive on a corporation. I have only wondered why it took this long to do it…
