California's green debacle

It’s well and good to have hope for the future and for new technologies. But implementing strict mandates based on nothing but wishful thinking is unrealistic. Nothing the state does to reduce GHG emissions will reduce catastrophic wildfires, which in the past five to seven years have been caused primarily by Pacific Gas & Electric’s failure to maintain its transmission and distribution system—including the disastrous 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and for which PG&E pled guilty to manslaughter. Nothing the state does to reduce emissions will reduce periodic droughts or flooding from heavy rains.

But the state’s energy policies have accomplished something concrete: damaging California’s economy and immiserating millions of its residents. Not for nothing does the state have the highest average electricity price in the 48 contiguous states and the highest average prices for gasoline and diesel fuel. Residents and businesses are unsurprisingly fleeing. And the state’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors have been devastated.

California’s unwillingness to confront energy, environmental, and economic realities would be almost comical were it not for the increasingly ruinous costs of its green policies, especially for the poor. In 1971, when Boeing was reeling economically, a billboard in Seattle famously read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?” California may not have to wait for that to happen. More likely, the lights will turn off by themselves.