Just 6 days after passing a law banning conventional cars, California is asking residents not to use electric ones either. It isn't the first time various parts of the state have undone themselves when faced with reality. 

In 2016, California passed a law banning the use of plastic bags in order to promote reusable ones which, they claimed, were better for everyone. Any business that violated the law was getting a $5,000 per day fine. That was never scientifically valid, the environmental cost to produce a reusable bag is enormous, and they are rarely washed disease factories. Sure enough when the pandemic hit the state banned reusable bags and asked the same companies they had forced out of the state to come back in and sell plastic bags.



With cars, lawmakers have gotten far more efficient in their contradictory flip-flops. For cars, it took just 6 days to go from a law banning conventional cars, because Democratic appointees on the California Air Resources Board said it was needed to protect Gaia, to the California Independent System Operator telling people who own electric cars they have to stop charging them. To protect the grid. In between those two things, allied media outlets dutifully gushed about how the state was showing "leadership."

The Governor who last week called the ban "groundbreaking" knows that solar and wind cannot power the state. Worse, utilities are so heavily regulated by bureaucrats hat they can't sign long-term contracts and also can't compete on the spot market without government approval.

Last year the government that claims to care so much about climate change wrote to EPA and asked to be exempt from all climate standards in order to run every conventional energy plant at full blast. The Governor is panicking about his effort to run for President in 2024 and even asked that the state's last remaining nuclear plant be kept online.

It's necessary politics. Older Democrats still hate energy science but a whole lot more voters will hate sleeping in 82 degree houses. 

Does Governor Newsom even know that the $66,000 average price for an electric car is out of reach for all but wealthy elites in the state? No, just like he doesn't realize that people need cars to work. If he had any presence of mind about reality he wouldn't still think he can be president of the US.