“Nowhere else in California is tied to oil and gas the way we are, and we can’t replace what that brings overnight,” said Ryan Alsop, chief administrative officer in Kern County, a region north of Los Angeles. “It’s not just tens of thousands of jobs. It’s also hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue that we rely on to fund our schools, parks, libraries, public safety, public health.”
Kern County has become California’s most important source of renewable energy, providing half the state’s wind power and one-quarter of its solar power.
In 2020, Kern County’s solar farms generated just $1.5 million in property taxes, less than 1 percent of what fossil fuels did, partly because of the state tax exemption for solar panels, a policy the county has fought to change.
Read the entire article in The New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/.../california-fossil-fuel-tax...
Original source can be found here.
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