By the time I talked to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he was clearly frustrated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “These guys write reports and they protest. But we need to build. You can’t be serious about climate and the environment without reforming permitting and procurement in this state.”

It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California. …

California has become notorious not for what it builds but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he said. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”

[Progressives happened to California, that’s what. The same allies that put Newsom in office are refusing to allow any relief valves to address crises that progressives have created. This is about electrical production in a state that’s mandating the switch to electricity for cars and stoves but which can’t meet present-day demand without regular rolling blackouts. The same people pushing that switch won’t allow transmission lines to be built or the required mineral elements for green tech to be mined from the ground — and not just in California. This is the predictable outcome of Malthusian dystopianism combined with ideological magic thinking, and Newsom is one of its leading advocates. It’s a little late to cry about it now. And that high-speed rail system is among the dumbest and least necessary of the projects the progressives will allow, by the way. — Ed]