Environmental Activisim -- A Reader Comments -- September 22, 2017

This is important enough to be posted more than once or twice. Expect to see this data posted at least a few more times over the next few months.

For now, no editing: simply re-posting data points that came in from a reader commenting on an earlier post.

The reader's comments:

Californians pay dearly for their environmental activism.

• Retail price of regular gasoline:
• California: $3.01
• Texas: $2.16
• https://s26.postimg.org/tfessjo49/Captura_de_pantalla_1457.png
• Retail price of industrial electricity:
• California: 12.07₡ per kilowatthour
• Texas: 5.22₡ per kilowatthour
• https://s26.postimg.org/s471k2sih/Captura_de_pantalla_1389.png
• Do the high energy prices have anything to do with the following?
• Growth in economy 2006 to 2015:
• California: 12.6%
• Texas: 35.8%
• https://s26.postimg.org/azyx8vzdl/Captura_de_pantalla_535.png
• California has the highest real poverty rate in the United States (adjusted for prices and other local factors):
• https://s26.postimg.org/3le6u92vt/Captura_de_pantalla_990.png
• Violent crime in California in 2016 was up 15.4% over 2014, and property crime was up 5.8%
• http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article167879952.html

My comments:

• these data points have great implications for a "Trump economy" vs a "Hillary economy" 
• these data points have great implications for a "US economy" vs a "EU economy"
• it won't happen "overnight" and it may never be "big enough" to amount to much, but there will be a perception that road and state highway infrastructure paid for by gasoline taxes at the pump will take a significant hit as more and more EVs (or perhaps even worse, hybrid EVs) come to market in California 
• RBN Energy did not seem to come out and say this explicitly, but my reading of the tea leaves suggests that the price of gasoline in California suggests that production is barely -- and that may be a bit of hyperbole -- meeting demand. It would not take much to result in a shortfall of production in the near term (if one refinery goes down for any reason) but over the next decade, the tea leaves suggest to me that production of gasoline in California will not be able to keep up with demand; one wonders how much Sacramento analysts are counting on light rail; the "bullet train"; new CAFE standards; and, EVs to reduce gasoline demand -- I don't any of that happening; in fact, new CAFE standards are probably going to be pushed to the right (delayed)