A fascinating article authored by a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute was published at City Journal recently describing how policies climate cultists support hurt the very people they claim to help. Worst of all, they’re coming right out and saying it (emphasis mine).

Despite their progressive bona fides, many California leaders are increasingly comfortable acknowledging that the state’s climate policies will harm the poor and benefit the wealthy. In 2023, Golden State bureaucrats belatedly disclosed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 would cumulatively reduce the incomes of families making less than $100,000 per year by $5.3 billion, while enriching higher-income households by the same amount. Earlier this year, some concerned lawmakers asked the nonpartisan state Legislative Analyst’s Office to evaluate how to lessen the “regressive effects” of California’s climate initiatives. Though the request focused on just two items—clean-vehicle and household-energy programs—the LAO compiled a 16-page response detailing the myriad ways the state’s climate policy hurts the disadvantaged, including through high energy costs, limited access to clean technology, and poorer residents subsidizing wealthier “green” households.

It might seem unthinkable that deep-blue California legislators would deliberately plan to impoverish poor and minority communities. But climate activists rely on two dogmas to downplay social-equity concerns. First, they claim that human-caused climate change will hurt low-income people the most. Second, they argue that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in California will limit climate risks for everyone, especially the poor. Neither belief withstands scrutiny.

At first glance, the claim that climate change will disproportionately harm lower-income communities makes some sense. After all, the poor have fewer resources than the wealthy. Whether the future is hotter or colder, poorer people will be less able to afford air conditioning or heating. But the same is true today of lower-income families’ ability to secure medical services, education, and housing. California, like other states and nations, already offers taxpayer-funded and charitable services in these areas for the less fortunate; presumably, it would continue to do so in a warmer (or cooler) future.

The author meticulously points to numerous examples of policies enacted in California and elsewhere that clearly show that policies geared to combat climate change actually end up affecting the poor worse than wealthy people. But, unsurprisingly, the author reveals that politicians and climate cultists are restricting the progress of American blue collar and middle class communities claiming to inhibit carbon emissions, but the economic benefits shift elsewhere to countries like China and Mexico.

Essentially efforts to restrict economic growth pitched as trying to clamp down on climate change is nothing more than window dressing. It is no surprise when countries, like Russia, and other fossil fuel companies, like those involved in natural gas, or even billionaires, like Michael Bloomberg, will even fund environmentalist groups to oppose certain energy sources, like coal, since doing so helps minimize competition too.

It is with all of this in mind that it is small wonder that efforts, like the degrowth movement, arise since fringe ideas like it end up becoming mainstreamed. Climate change policies is clearly an effort to continue to concentrate more wealth and power for them or done out of some naive, altruistic sense of trying to fight climate change.

In the end people from the middle class on down suffer from environmentalist policies who advocate for them, even to the point of innocent people dying resulting from environmentalist group efforts. Worst part about it, environmentalist groups could care less about the consequences of their actions.