‘Climate Action’ Has California’s Energy Economy on Its Knees
Dear John,
Kern County, in California’s Central Valley, is being destroyed by a perfect storm of laws, regulations and lawsuits designed to eliminate oil and farming. Those industries have sustained Kern’s economy—and California and the nation’s—for over a century. But abetted by bureaucrats and opportunistic litigators, state officials have denied oil drillers and farmers the permits they need to operate, hit them with fines and crippling regulations, cut off their water, and sued them into oblivion.
Oil-and-farm rich Kern County may be ground zero, but this storm is destroying the entire state. Every essential foundation of a healthy, affordable economy is under attack. But rather than acknowledge this storm, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing everything in his power to make it worse.
Immediately after Nov. 5, Mr. Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to “protect California values in the face of an incoming Trump administration.” He intends to allocate as much as $100 million to the state’s attorney general to wage lawfare against the federal government. One of Mr. Newsom’s top priorities is “climate action.”
In pursuit of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, the Newsom administration has given billions in subsidies to the “renewables” industry, at the same time it has relentlessly attacked producers of conventional energy.
As a result, California’s households and businesses pay for the most expensive electricity and gasoline in the lower 48 states. It’s all for nothing. California still relies on oil and gas for 80% of its energy, a reliance on fossil fuel that is the same as the national average.
But unlike other states, California imports nearly 90% of its natural gas despite sitting on tens of trillions of cubic feet of reserves. California used to produce 60% of the oil it consumed, but despite reserves estimated as high as 30 billion barrels, in-state production is down to 23% of consumption. Thanks to Mr. Newsom, California’s resource-rich geology is off limits.
This is pure hypocrisy. Instead of safely extracting oil in a state with the world’s most rigorous environmental and labor protections, California is forced to refine oil imported from such paragons of human rights and environmental stewardship as Ecuador, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Meantime, California’s refineries are shutting down, one by one, without the option to import gasoline thanks to the special formulation the state requires to lower the “carbon content” of transportation fuel.
This same hypocrisy extends to renewables. Virtually all of California’s grid-scale batteries are manufactured in Asia, and while California does have some manufacturing capacity, the supply chain of raw materials is controlled by China. There are abundant reserves of lithium in eastern California, but regulations prevent timely development. As for California’s alleged 50 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity? The panels are mostly imported from China.
Perhaps the worst of Mr. Newsom’s schemes is offshore wind, for which the California Air Resources Board has planned 25 gigawatts of capacity. They clearly haven’t thought this through. Just offshore, California’s continental shelf rapidly descends to a depth of 4,000 feet. This requires floating wind turbines, which must be imported from Europe or China. The plan calls for developers to haul 2,500 of these 10 megawatt turbines, each about 1,000 feet tall from the waterline to the tip of the blade, to points 20 miles offshore. There they’ll be connected to the sea floor with cables nearly a mile long. High-voltage underwater cables will transmit electricity to onshore substations. This is an environmental and financial catastrophe in waiting, but Mr. Newsom says only a climate denier would oppose it.
These are the consequences of a state run by rent-seeking renewable-energy firms and the environmentalist fanatics that offer them political cover. Mr. Newsom’s climate action is hitting every industry and every household.
California’s farmers are losing up to a million acres of some of the planet’s finest irrigated farmland thanks to bureaucratic delusions that water should be left in rivers that run out to the ocean. Californians can’t afford homes, thanks to a housing industry subject to climate-change laws that require infill—or building in “unused and underutilized” city spaces—to prevent the emissions that accompany urban “sprawl.”
California’s forests now burn in superfires that annually release hundreds of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere—far in excess of reductions from climate-inspired laws and regulations. But these intense fires aren’t, as Mr. Newsom alleges, caused by climate change. They’re out of control because environmentalists regulated the state’s timber industry to 25% of what it was in the 1990s. To prevent these massive fires, you must either harvest lumber or permit controlled burns. California regulators have made both nearly impossible, turning 50 million acres into unnaturally dense, overgrown tinderboxes. After a summer of devastating wildfires in 2020, Mr. Newsom announced a mandate that all new car sales in the state must be electric vehicles by 2035. California’s shipping industry is also trying to cope with laws that mandate all-electric trucks and locomotives within the same time.
While Californians from Kern County to Humboldt Bay suffer the consequences of Mr. Newsom’s policies, the governor is positioning himself as the antidote to Donald Trump. He is betting on climate panic to deflect criticism of his policies, and keep him in the presidential mix for 2028. Californians can only hope that the storm passes soon.
This op-ed by Edward Ring, Director of Water and Energy Policy at California Policy Center, was originally published by the Wall Street Journal.
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