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Bansi Sharma

@bansisharma

, 18 tweets, 3 min read

1. Liberal Policies are Burning Down California to Save the World

Or, as Rich Lowry's excellent column (serialized here) puts it: "California is ‘winning’ its way into the Stone Age."

2. California is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century Californian life.

3. More than 2 million people are going without power in Northern and central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, the Golden State’s best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires.

4. Electric power is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn’t be a negotiable good for anyone living in a well-functioning society, but California, despite its enormous wealth & natural splendor, has blighted itself over time with bad governance and misplaced priorities.

5. The same California that has been the seedbed of world-famous companies — like the ones that make it possible for people to send widely viewed short missives of 280 characters or fewer and share and like images of grumpy cats — isn’t doing so well at keeping the lights on.

6. The same California that has boldly committed to drawing half of its energy from renewable sources by 2025 — and 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 — can’t manage its existing energy infrastructure.

7. The same California that has pushed its electricity rates to the highest in the contiguous United States through its mandates and regulations doesn’t provide continuous access to that overpriced electricity.

8. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has to try to evade responsibility for this debacle while presiding over it, blames “dog-eat-dog capitalism” for the state’s current blackout crisis. But there are no robber barons involved in this debacle.

9. In truth, Newsom is talking about one of the most regulated industries in the state — namely, California’s energy utilities that answer to the state’s public utilities commission.

This is not exactly an Ayn Rand operation.

10. If California regulators wanted, they could have pushed the utilities to focus on the resilience and safety of its current infrastructure — implicated in some of the state’s most fearsome recent fires — as a top priority.

11. Instead, the utilities commission forced costly renewable energy initiatives on the utilities. Who cares about something as mundane as properly maintained power lines if something as epically important, and politically fashionable, as saving the planet is at stake?

12. Meanwhile, California has had a decades-long aversion to properly clearing forests. The state’s leaders have long been in thrall to the belief that cutting down trees is somehow an offense against nature, even though thinning helps create healthier forests.

13. Biomass has been allowed to build up, and it becomes the kindling for catastrophic fires. In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown actually vetoed a bill that unanimously passed the state legislature to promote the clearing of trees dangerously close to power lines.

14. On top of all this, more people live in remote areas susceptible to fires, in part because of the high cost of housing in more built-up areas.

15. There should be no doubt that California, susceptible to drought and whipped by fierce, dry winds, is always going to have a fire problem. But there also should also be no doubt that dealing with it this poorly is the result of a series of foolish, unrealistic policy choices.

16. California’s overriding goal should have been to protect and promote the supply of safe, cheap and reliable power — a public good so basic that it’s easy to take for granted. The state’s focus on ideological fantasies has yielded power that’s none of the above.

The End

Make no mistake. What Blue Governance has done to California, #GreenNewDeal, supported by every Democratic presidential candidate bar none, aims to do to all of America.

Here's the link to Rich Lowry's excellent column.

nypost.com/2019/10/29/cal…