Editors at the Washington Examiner warn about the dangers of spreading California’s misguided energy policies.
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.
