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California is a dysfunctional state. This is not just our opinion. The Democrats who run it have mismanaged its energy policy so badly that they are now forced to beg people not to charge the electric vehicles that they are simultaneously trying to force every resident to buy because they can’t generate enough electricity.
The California Air Resources Board voted unanimously last month to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered automobiles in the state starting in 2035. As of today, only 4% of cars on the road in California are electric vehicles. But as California continues to dismantle its only reliable sources of electricity, including a nuclear plant that currently supplies 9% of statewide demand, it is in no way prepared for a future in which 70% or 50% or 20% or even 10% of the cars there are electric-powered. The state’s far-left legislators and regulators have painted themselves into yet another corner from which they are simply too proud to walk away.
Unfortunately, California might drag at least three other states down with it. Virginia is one of them. Unfortunately, Democrats in the Old Dominion foolishly passed a law in 2021 that actually ties their emissions policy to whatever nuttiness Californians embrace. In surrendering their state’s power to govern itself, Virginia Democrats joined Washington and Massachusetts in making themselves a client state of California.
It should come as no surprise at all that the newly inaugurated Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, is seeking to unshackle Virginia from California’s Titanic. If Democrats in Virginia’s state Senate unanimously resist, they can block his efforts. But if they choose to do so, they will be making war against their own constituents on behalf of another state’s ideologically inflexible, pie-in-the-sky policy.
To sum up: an unelected climate panel in a state thousands of miles away is about to force an insane and unworkable policy on all Virginians. This is quite literally something Americans (and Virginians especially) once fought a revolution to prevent.
The Biden administration exacerbated this problem when it renewed a waiver allowing California regulators to pursue their own climate policy. Seventeen states are currently challenging that waiver in federal court, so Virginia could be saved from this fatuity, even if Democrats remain intransigent.
But in the meantime, Virginia and other states should consider amending their constitutions to ban such legislative outsourcing. It’s one thing to have your own state legislature pass something dumb, but no state legislature should be allowed to turn its state into a vassal of another, surrendering its own citizens’ God-given right to self-government — especially not to a state as poorly run as California.
Virginia doesn’t want to and should not follow California along its Third World track to regular rolling blackouts, a fleeing middle class, and forced energy scarcity. Virginia voters deserve to govern themselves, and this November, they should remember which party wants to let them do it.
