Matt Mahan

We pushed that out of state.

Now we're importing the same amount of gas from thousands of miles away.

It is dirtier.

It has a bigger carbon footprint.

We lost those good, high paying jobs.

We lost the tax base of those companies paying local taxes.

It has been a hit on every level.

And actually, because climate and climate change is a global phenomenon,

We've actually made the problem worse while hurting ourselves economically.

So that's the opposite of what we need.

We need win-wins.

We should be paying EV owners today in the middle of the day, strongly incentivizing them to charge their vehicles in the middle of the day when power is so cheap and abundant in California that we sometimes pay Arizona to take our excess solar.

and then have them plug in at night to power the grid and get through that roughly 5 p.m.

to 9 p.m.

evening peak where we've got to start firing up gas power plants because there just isn't enough power on the grid.

So we need to be smarter.

We need to invest in innovation, infrastructure, not regulate

energy sources out of state that we still rely upon.

Now they're talking about increasing it even further.

It's the most regressive tax imaginable because it's even worse than a sales tax, which is already fairly regressive.