Just as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) was boarding a plane to help Vice President Kamala Harris raise money on Wall Street, thousands of his constituents in California were plunged into darkness, thanks to the same policies he and Harris want to inflict on the rest of the nation.
Over three days last week, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, more than 70,000 homes across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties lost power, some for as long as 24 hours.
The proximate cause was a triple-digit heat wave that sent Southern Californians to the thermostat to crank up their air conditioning. But while residents in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas all suffered from similar outdoor temperatures, only California’s electricity grid gave out. Thus, the real culprit was not the weather but lies almost 400 miles north of the power outage in Sacramento, the seat of the California Democratic Party’s power.
Just as the Biden-Harris administration has tried to impose a national mandate on eliminating the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation, California has implemented its own state goal to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2045. This means shuttering perfectly functioning natural gas plants while spending heavily on wind and solar projects, as well as the transmission lines needed to carry the electricity to the grid.
All this spending has to be paid by someone, and that someone is California energy consumers, who have seen their electricity prices skyrocket over the past decade.
As problematic as California’s unrealistic climate goals are, however, they are only half the problem. The larger problem, the same one that disrupts the state’s housing market, is a radical permitting process that makes it next to impossible to build anything in the state, including wind and solar projects, but most importantly, when it comes to electricity, transmission lines.
California used to be the nation’s leader in solar and wind power generation. But not anymore. As the cost of renewable energy production has dropped, it has become profitable to build more wind and solar projects in deep-red, fossil fuel-friendly states such as Texas. Texas is controlled by a Republican Party that still knows how to build things. It does not have a burdensome environmental permitting law that empowers radical activists to stop any infrastructure project. Texas also has its own power grid that is unconnected to other states, meaning it doesn’t have to deal with the National Environmental Policy Act permitting process as often as other states do.
As a result of California’s overregulation and Texas’s contrasting common sense, the Lone Star State has not only surpassed California in wind and solar generation but has now more than doubled the Golden State’s renewable energy output.
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Voters have a clear choice on the ballot this November. A vote for Harris and the Democratic Party is a vote for more environmental reviews, more obstruction, less infrastructure construction, higher electricity prices, a less reliable energy grid, and more summer misery when the mercury rises.
A vote for former President Donald Trump and the Republicans would bring much-needed NEPA reform, more domestic fossil fuel energy production, more renewable energy production, fewer environmental reviews, more transmission lines, lower electricity prices, and a more reliable energy grid. That is what good governance looks like.
Maybe the reason Newsom is so eager to help elect Harris is to make the rest of the nation as miserable as his powerless constituents.