California Catastrophe.. Are politicians trying to destroy their state? (Article)

Are California politicians trying to destroy their state? It’s not a far-fetched question. Los Angeles’s lunatic District Attorney George Gascon is refusing to prosecute all but the most egregious criminality. Crime has escalated exponentially.

In San Francisco taxpayers are paying to put homeless people in hotels. The predictable result is even more drug deaths among the homeless and destroyed hotel rooms. The once beautiful cities of California are now filthy and dangerous. But there’s more, much more.

The latest assault on California is coming from State Attorney General Rob Bonta. Bonta has launched an investigation into ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel and petrochemical companies.

deceive the public

What’s the crime? Bonta believes that these companies knowingly deceived the public, “perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.

”The fundamental ignorance of the California AG should be shocking, but this sort of thing is so common in California that people no longer even notice.

To be sure, the world has a plastic waste problem. But why is that the fault of the companies that produce the feedstocks for the plastics the world wants? This is similar to public officials creating legislation that would enable citizens to sue gun manufacturers. Oh yeah, guess what, Bonta and Governor Gavin Newsom are working on that one as well.

plastic pollution

Bonta is pointing his crooked finger at the wrong target. According to Our World in Data, more than 70 percent of mismanaged plastic waste comes from Asia. China is the biggest offender by far with much of the plastic pollution flowing through the Yangtze River.

The United States, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan have very little mismanaged plastic waste.

The problem Bonta says he wants to solve doesn’t involve the US hydrocarbon industry and it isn’t one he has the authority to address in any case.

destroy oil companies

Is Bonta so incompetent that he hasn’t bothered to do the most basic research? I suspect he doesn’t know the facts because the facts are irrelevant to the goal.

It’s an unspoken requirement of all Democrat California leaders that they must hate hydrocarbons in all forms, and they should do whatever they can to destroy the companies that produce them.

But what if destroying these companies winds up demolishing the state through unintended consequences? Bonta, Newsom, Gascon, and others don’t seem to have considered that very real danger.

California refineries

Consider the extremely vulnerable position California is in concerning oil. In early 1990s the state imported only about 5 percent of its crude from foreign nations. The rest was split evenly between in-state production and crude piped in from Alaska.

Today the picture is much different. California refineries aremore than 58 percent dependent foreign nations for crude oil. Most of it is coming from Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

California produces less than 30 percent of its own oil and Alaska (a state also declining in production) contributes about 15 percent.

energy island

This is a big deal because California is an “energy island.” It is sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east.

There are no pipelines that cross the Sierra Nevadas.Any significant disruption of oil tanker traffic would quickly throw California into a crisis with not enough fuel to run the state.

Other U.S. states would soon be in crisis mode as well. California’s oil negligence has made it a national security threat.

CO2 emissions

California officials like to pretend they are reducing CO2 emissions. They are not. The state is simply outsourcing industries and electricity production to other states.

Apple, Google, and Facebook, for example, locate their high energy consuming data centers and manufacturing outside California’s borders.

California imports about one-third of its electricity, more than any other state. Electricity rates are near the highest in the nation.

nuclear power plant

The worst thing California could do now is prematurely shut down its last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. But that’s precisely what’s going to happen beginningin 2024 unless political forces reverse course.

On April 29 Governor Newsom announced his intention of begging the federal government to subsidize the power plant to delay the closure. (Democrat run states are fond of forcing the rest of the nation to pay for expensive energy fantasies.)

Newsom is at least acting as if he wants the best outcomebecause he seesvoters are now noticinghow badly the state is being mismanaged.

He’s also seen the disaster in New York, wherethe Indian Point nuclear power plant was stupidly shuttered, resulting in much higher electricity bills and higher emissions. If California does close Diablo Canyon, electricity bills are going to surge,and shortages are guaranteed.

politicians destroy California

There is no way to know what is motivating California politicians to destroy their state as they pursue counterproductive public policies.

I suspect it’s a combination of ignorance, corruption, ideological blindness, and general obtuseness. Whatever the reasons, reality is coming quickly. Californians are going to get a lot more of what they voted for, and they are going to get it good and hard.

* Speaker, documentary filmmaker, video producer, and author in energy.