What Homelessness and Climate Change Have in Common

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.

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