From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Melissa O’Rourke

California’s population is growing again, but not because Americans are moving in, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In 2024, nearly 240,000 Californians packed up and left the state, WSJ reported. The state’s population still rose by 0.6% overall because more than 361,000 immigrants arrived to take their place.

The exodus from the state is not a new phenomenon, as around 344,000 Californians left in 2023, while 292,000 international migrants arrived, the outlet reported.

About 56% of Californians have considered leaving the state due to the exorbitant cost of living, a 2024 Emerson College poll found. California’s median home price topped $900,000 in 2024 — well over double the national average — while utility and gas prices remain among the country’s highest.

The state’s population decreased for the first time in history in 2020, when over 477,000 Californians left, leading to the state losing a congressional seat. The population continued to decline until 2023, buoyed by an influx of international immigrants.

The H-1B visa program, which allows businesses to employ skilled foreign workers with bachelor’s degrees, brought nearly 79,000 workers to the state in 2024, WSJ reported. However, applications for the program fell by 25% compared to a year ago due to higher fees and expectations that the Trump administration could impose more restrictive immigration policies.

The H-1B visa program has sparked fierce debate among Republicans in recent months. While big names such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have defended the program, opponents have argued it allows companies to undercut American workers by importing cheaper labor from abroad.

In addition to California, many states rely on immigration to drive population growth. In 38 states and Washington, D.C., immigration outpaced domestic migration last year, and in 16 states, it was the only reason populations grew, WSJ reported.

California has the highest share of foreign-born residents in the nation, with more than 25% of its population born outside the U.S., according to the Public Policy Institute of California. As of 2022, about 17% of California’s immigrant population was in the country illegally, according to the Pew Research Center.

At the same time, the Golden State faces mounting challenges, including a $45 billion budget deficit, while programs like Medi-Cal — covering hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants — are projected to cost taxpayers $8.4 billion in the 2024–2025 fiscal year.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

After an all-night bargaining session, the House of Representatives passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in the wee hours of Thursday morning on a mainly party-line vote.

“It quite literally is again Morning in America,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on the House floor following the vote. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America first agenda is finally here.”

Among many key provisions where energy is concerned, the bill eliminates subsidies for wind and solar installations contained in the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 faster than previous versions would. The previous bill draft would have phased them out starting in 2029. The new version eliminates them in full at the end of 2026 – any proposed projects not permitted by that time would become ineligible for the credit. Projects that meet the permitting deadline would have to begin generating electricity no later than the end of 2028 or face elimination of their subsidies.

Naturally, boosters of intermittent, unreliable electricity generation from wind and solar installations immediately rolled out messaging claiming that the elimination of the subsidies would spell an end to their industry’s growth in the United States, a claim that may well be accurate.

What they don’t seem to realize is that by using these talking points, they are admitting that their industry lacks a business case for continued expansion. Any business model that cannot survive without taking in an unending stream of government rents is a business model that deserves to fail.

The significance of the prospective elimination of the IRA credits was starkly illustrated by big data and analysis firm Enverus in a report released in early May, its “2025 Interconnection Queue Outlook.” In that report, Enverus details the critical impact those subsidies have had on the rapid growth of wind and solar since 2022, while also resulting in huge backup queue for interconnection in the various U.S. regional power grids.

Enverus’s researchers point out that “generous tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and the EPA’s update to 40 CFR Part 60, which mandates additional coal retirements, have significantly boosted demand for renewable energy projects across the United States.” Indeed, the “surge in investment and development” in the past three years has been so substantial that it “has overwhelmed interconnection queues, with a record number of projects seeking grid connections.”

This reality has created a situation in which developers of proposed wind and solar arrays must often wait in line for years before being approved for grid interconnection. As a result, Enverus finds that “[o]nly a fraction of capacity in the interconnection queues are expected to reach operation.” The company’s gradient-boosting machine learning model estimates that just “~10% of projects will successfully come online in the next three years.”

If Enverus’s analysis is right – and the company has a strong track record – just 10% of the projects already in the queue will be able to meet the end-of-2028 deadline contained in the House bill passed Thursday. This reality would essentially eliminate any hope that projects planned to be permitted in future years could benefit from the IRA largesse.

The same House bill passed Thursday also enhances the ability for new nuclear projects to access the IRA’s enhanced investment tax credit. The IRA only allowed access to the credit for nuclear projects once they begin delivering electricity as the Biden administration and Democrat congress of 2022 strove to disadvantage all alternatives to their client renewables industries. The new House version would allow such projects to access the tax credit immediately upon start of construction, a provision strongly preferred by Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

In an exchange with Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty on Wednesday, Wright told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development that nuclear is “the critical technology that could scale wildly beyond where it is today, which is just electricity production into huge scale…I am all in with you on advancing nuclear…Nuclear is the [energy source] that could burst through.”

Where energy is concerned, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act presents a nod to the realities of a dramatically changed political landscape, and to the fact that the energy alternatives favored by the previous administration won’t do the job. Elections do still matter in America.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.