Joel Kotkin discusses California on RealClearEnergy:
“One is often at a loss to explain California to people from other planets—like, say, earth.”
The problem:
“This is a state that issues mandates for electrification of everything while reducing its generating capacity. It blames devastating fires on climate change, without taking the blame for forestry practices that helped make the seasonal fires much worse. In California, pot is legal, but owning a car with a gas engine, however clean, may soon not be, and climate skeptics of any stripe face opprobrium, consignment to obscurity, and—if they have assets—court dates.”
The history:
“With few navigable rivers and a lack of water near its coast and fertile valleys, the state largely engineered its own rise. “Science is the mother of California,” said the University of California’s second president, Daniel Coit Gilman. Largely dominated by desert, flammable dry chaparral and high mountains, California depended on bringing water to its bone-dry coast, tapping electricity from distant dams, and accommodating a massive influx of new residents with largely suburban housing.”
The future: “Will America Go Ecotopian?”
“Grassroots Ecotopian extremism is rising; the vast majority of young Americans believe that we face imminent environmental catastrophe. The student movement around Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg recalls the youthful fanaticism of Medieval sanctus puer—the ‘holy children,’ who rampaged through Europe in the 13th century—or Mao’s Red Guards, unleashed during the Chinese Communists’ Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.”
Well worth reading!