After spending the bulk of his lieutenant governorship waging war against California’s last remaining nuclear power plant, Gov. Gavin Newsom is begging residents to turn up their thermostats as the state battles excruciating heat waves, roaring wildfires, and now, state-sanctioned blackouts to preserve its worst-in-America power grid.
California’s power is not as carbon-efficient as clean nuclear energy, nor is it as cheap as traditional mass fossil fuels. If you’re looking to drink your problems away at your favorite dive bar, too bad; Newsom shut the indoor dining rooms. If you want to sit on a patio, you have to seek out the establishments that survived the state’s shutdown. Soon enough, you might be better off just binging in your basement, as the California machine has mobilized to abolish the ride-sharing apps that revolutionized the state.
In the name of workers’ rights, the California state legislature passed AB5, a bill signed into law by Newsom to make it impossible for individuals to make a living in contracting jobs such as freelance translating or writing and driving for ride-sharing platforms. AB5 redefines independent contractors such that organizations such as Vox Media had to end contracts with hundreds of California freelancers who relied on income from a diverse range of commissioning publications.
Independent artists who had gained exposure and income from playing gigs at multiple venues had their appearances capped. But most importantly, both for easing California’s geographical income divide and in ameliorating the state’s drunk driving fatalities, the state sought to force Uber and Lyft to treat drivers, many of whom only want to work part time or for a limited tenure, as full-time workers. This would essentially shut the apps down, and they are threatening to quit the state.
They nearly did so today, but they won an eleventh-hour reprieve from a state court. They won’t have to shut down, either temporarily or permanently, to put in place the ridiculous logistical standards of filtering through the few drivers who actually wish to work full time and onboarding them as full-time employees.
But the portrait of California in crisis does go to illustrate what a broad swathe of the national Democratic Party desires: a state that rejects both cheap fossil fuels and highly efficient and non-GHG-emitting nuclear power; a state that then must ration and control all energy for the masses; a state that would keep both schools and businesses formally shut down; and one that would legally bar you from seeking supplemental income through innovative apps such as Uber or Lyft.
Unlike much of his party, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has thankfully voiced some support for nuclear power, the single most efficient weapon in the war on climate change, which the Green New Deal explicitly rejects. But Biden has emphatically endorsed AB5, and as a part of his national agenda, he has pushed to implement it nationwide.
President Trump has rightly been derided for lacking a second-term agenda, but we know what the Democratic Party agenda is — it’s California, the land of rolling blackouts and no Uber. We can at least be thankful it has slightly less looting, arson, and anarchy than the Golden State’s neighbors to the north.
