Since the early 2000s, governors and legislators of both parties have signed a climate program in California which makes energy regularly unaffordable.
Petrol in California, According to AAAwhich follows the prices of national gas daily, costs an average of around $ 4.78, compared to $ 3.16 nationally. The cost of electricity in the state is now the highest continental United Statesat 30.22 cents per kilowatt hour.
You may want to blame the gaps on greed – a great main principle pricing gougg Governor Gavin Newsom suggestedAnd the public services that line the pockets of their shareholders. But at the pump and on your light and electricity bill, the high energy prices of California are better understood as a self-inflicted injury, traceable to the state-of-the-art energy policy.
The notoriously high cost of gas in the state is the result of many factors – we tax gas to pay the road infrastructure and a less polluting fuel mixture during the summer months. Last year, Sacramento decided to move stronger, faster towards its objective of a carbon -free future, adding deterrents for refineries and incentives for electric vehicles that California Air Resources Board predicted Will add 47 cents the gallon at the pump.
Overall, California's zero -carbon climatic policies – pushing electric vehicles as a car purchase and heat pumps to cool and heat your home – largely count on electricity which in turn depends on costly and intermittent, such as wind and solar. Come hell or high waters, California leaders try to regulate, impose and encourage their way to 100% carbon -free electricity by 2045.
Unfortunately, as the green-skeptical energy analyst Robert Bryce notes it in books and on Its substitutionWherever governments have tried to base their energy supply on a rapid passage to renewable energies – The United Kingdom,, Germany, California – The result was huge Energy prices peaks. Germany The industrial economy slowed down in part, according to most observers, due to the high cost of renewable energies.
These costs also undermine the prosperity of California in several ways. They add to the “energy poverty” of the state, increasing a divide between wealthy and casesAnd not only because of the difficulty of Californians at low income to pay their gas and public services bills.
The Air Resources Map The most recent “scope plan” – The State framework to reach the neutrality of carbon – provides that the transition to renewable energies will lead to significant drops in income for individuals earning less than $ 100,000 per year, while increasing income for those above this threshold.
“Carbon economics” jobs will decrease – manufacturing, logistics, petroleum and gas industry – many of which are well -paid union jobs. A study by the Economic Development Committee of the ECC revealed that 148,000 direct jobs and more than 350,000 indirect jobs could be threatened by policies aimed at eliminating industry.
Worse still, green technologies have developed and kissed by Californians, such as electric vehicles and their batteries, now Create mainly jobs in red states. One of the reasons by expanding micropile companies, including Nvidia,, Samsung And Taiwan semiconductor, have located new installations in Arizona or Texas and not in California, it is because of more favorable energy costs than here. Electricity costs are A major factor in the manufacture of fleas.
California's refusal to continue to exploit our own fossil fuels energy resources means that the State will not attract any of the massive investments intended, for example, New liquid natural gas installations.
And a renewable energies policy even threatens the green agenda which it is intended to support. The air resource board of directors calculates that to keep the state and its electric vehicles in the process of being executed in the neutral carbon future will require Double the electric generation. And the need for more power will only be exacerbated by the growth of artificial intelligence, an essential industry Technological domination at risk of the State. Overall, energy demand only for data centers should grow 160% By 2030, according to Goldman Sachs.
In fact, recent analyzes claim that California will face “acute electricity shortages“During the next decade. Not the least among the reasons: an authorization process dragged, exorbitant and unpredictable; the difficulty in finding places appropriate for wind turbines and solar farms; And, ironically, the objections of premises and environmentalists who do not want renewable installations in their backless. Example: Moss Landing, Where a toxic fire in a battery plant, associated with plans of offshore wind turbines, turned the inhabitants against green policies.
To ensure its economic viability, California must prevent the verification of the fantastic concept that wind and solar will soon produce lots of clean and cheap energy. The Trump administration quickly removes federal support for renewable energies in favor of “drill, baby, forest”. In reality, less than an unexpected boom in controversial nuclear energy but without emissions, most experts project Continuous dominance fossil fuels, Even coalWell in the future and even in California. Last summer, Exxon Mobil forecasts For 2050, the global energy market dominated by oil (54%), renewable energies reaching only 15%.
In such conditions, rather than killing the state fuels industry in the state, we should use it to meet more of our needs because of local drilling and refining, in addition to renewable energies. California, despite its substantial oil deposits, imported almost 60% raw oil he uses.
For all California green energy leaders, it is not even a certainty that our energy absolutism does a lot for the planet. California since 2006 has reduced emissions to a normal pace for all states.
Fortunately, energy realism can finally be back in fashion. Last year, the Newsom Public Services Commission decided to Keep the Aliso Canyon online natural gas storage installation For the moment, explicitly in response to the need for gas to help reduce electricity bills that have been diverted by the high cost of electricity. Newsom also granted the controversial Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant for environmental demonstrations. He even tried to prevent the closure of the state.
California can only prosper if it can develop an affordable and reliable energy of all sources, including the supplies of state fossil fuels. Without a change of direction, the trajectory is built towards a neo -feudal future – a state largely divided between the few rich and the many in difficulty.
Joel Kotkin is a contributor to Opinion Voices, the presidential scholarship holder for Urban Futures at Chapman University and principal researcher at the Civitas Institute of the University of Texas in Austin.
