Policy failures created California’s energy crisis

As temperatures cracked a record 120 degrees on the California coast last week, Mayor Eric Garcetti had a message for his Los Angeles constituents.

And as wildfires turned Bay Area skylines into orange hellscapes, an August fire in Northern California was determined to be the largest in recorded California history.

The state’s cyclical crisis of fiery climates and energy crises is no coincidence. Instead, it’s the direct result of calculated decisions made by its ruling class, primarily executed by the Democrats who have dominated California politics for decades.

The question of California’s fires hinges not on whether too many acres are burned each year, but rather how many of those acres burned are controlled. More acres of California have burned this year as opposed to last, but significantly fewer from either have burned than in the state’s early history. Indigenous Californians subverted the state’s dry air by enacting controlled burns over more than 4 million acres of land. Although scientists have long warned the state that its refusal to enact large enough sized controlled burns has continued to imperil the state, little action has been taken up until recently. President Trump got Gov. Gavin Newsom to commit to controlled burns of at least 1 million acres per year, but apparently, it’s all a little too late.

California’s energy crisis is far more politically untenable, with Newsom a proponent of shutting down the state’s entire nuclear energy grid back when he was still lieutenant governor. The anti-nuclear lobby has entirely won the favor of California Democrats, putting the state’s only carbon-neutral energy form with the fortitude to power the entire state on the path of imminent extinction. The Diablo Canyon Power Plant is the only functional nuclear power plant in the state, and PG&E, the California energy company effectively given monopoly power by the state, announced it would shut the plant down after pressure from Newsom and other Democrats.

California has been hot and arid since antiquity, and although climate change has exacerbated some heat waves, the rolling blackouts and wildfires plaguing the state are a result of the failures of public policy more than anything. Acts of God have and always will continue to happen, but policy decisions to cut off carbon-neutral energy sources and let the state’s greenery dry out to become fodder for fires are calculated choices.