You can find synoptic leftists who say that climate change requires solving every other social problem in human history, but there is in fact a lesson to be drawn between the explosion of homelessness over the last few years and the renewable energy mania proffered as a solution to climate change.
Let’s start with this NPR (NPR!!) report on the $1 billion Los Angeles is spending on homelessness, with no apparent effect on actually reducing homelessness:
The high public cost of LA’s first sanctioned campground — more than $2,600 per tent, per month — has advocates worried it will come at the expense of more permanent housing. [Emphasis added.]
What a minute—what? $2,600 per month, per tent?!?!
As the kids say, AYFKM!? Only government could spend more for tents than you’d have to pay for a rental apartment even in high-priced Los Angeles. You can shoplift ten tents from a store (without risk of prosecution in California right now) for that amount.
But let’s keep going with the NPR story:
On a recent afternoon, the site was nearly full. A row of port-a-potties stood along one side of the camp. The program also provides showers, three meals a day and 24-hour security. Campers get entered into the county’s database for matching unhoused people with social services and housing resources. . .
According to a report by the city administrative officer, the new East Hollywood campground costs approximately $2,663 per participant per month. That’s higher than what a typical one-bedroom apartment rents for in the city, according to the website RentCafe. While the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing, some are concerned that the city is investing too much in short-term Band-Aids over long-term solutions.
I’d love to see a genuine audit of this homelessness spending to see how much the bureaucracy, consultants, administrators, and others in the “caring professions” chain of being skim off the top. When I read, two or three years ago, that Seattle’s “homeless policy coordinator” is paid close to $300,000 per year, it was easy to predict that not a single person would be brought out of homelessness, but that the ranks of the homeless would increase.
And the climate scam is just the same—huge sums of money in politically-driven “investments,” tax credits, and subsidies for energy sources that will do little or nothing to solve whatever climate problem we may actually have. Never mind the science; go ahead and concede catastrophe—in fact, the worse the climate problem, the more frivolous and corrupt the whole climate/green energy racket becomes. Just like the homelessness problem. The only real “compassion” is for the bank accounts of the elite “caring” class.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.