Nothing reveals the disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots” like a climate conference.

As I drove from Jerry Brown’s San Francisco global warming summit to view CFACT’s billboard campaign revealing the folly of California’s new 100% renewable / zero CO2 energy law, I saw something shocking. From the elevated highway above Oakland, I saw that I was passing over one of the Bay Area’s many homeless camps. I got off the highway to say hello. There I met Gerry Damiano, an extraordinary man, and a clearer thinker than the Governor Jerry in my rear view. Watch the video of our conversation here.

“I think he’s (Brown’s) living in the past,” he said, “Los Angeles has over 60,000 on the streets… They’re killing our jobs… I think he needs to change priorities. We pay for it in extra taxes on our fuel, we pay for it on the price we pay for power of any kind, and we get no benefit.”

At CFACT we’ve seen this time and again.

At UN COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico, CFACT bused delegates from their air conditioned luxury hotels and meeting rooms to the nearby neighborhood of La Libertad where people live without electricity.

At UN Rio+20 CFACT allied with with activists from the “favelas,” (squatter villages) that line the mountains surrounding Rio de Janeiro‘s luxurious Copacabana and Ipanema beaches where the VIPs were staying, to reveal the nightmare expensive energy means for the poor.

The climate elite shuttle about in private jets and limousines, like 18th century French nobles in gilded carriages, ignoring the high costs and low (if any) benefits of their “solutions.” They are self-absorbed and blissfully disconnected from the realities impacting real people’s lives.

Here are some realities facing California:

When electricity prices drive manufacturers out of state, will California’s ruling class take it in stride, or demand the rest of us share their self-inflicted pain?

Left-wing climate policy strangles economies and hits the poor hardest.

California is leading the way. Backward.