Once upon a time, there was a baseball player named Sam. When Sam began the 2022 season, he knew he needed to improve his hitting. So he set himself a goal of hitting .300 on the year.
About halfway through the season, though, Sam was only batting .185. He was not meeting his target. So what did he do? If he followed the same logic as the editors of the Los Angles Times, then he took the bold step of setting an even higher goal for himself and aiming to hit .400 on the year.
Does the new, higher target help Sam’s hitting? Of course not. It just makes him less likely to reach his goal. If anything, he ought to learn from the first part of the season that .300 was too ambitious. He would do well to get to .225, so that he doesn’t get cut from the team.
I share this parable because the L.A. Times editors fail to grasp the simple logic behind it in their editorial today praising Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new and more ambitious climate legislation for California. They are very pleased with new goals because the old ones are out of date and not sufficiently ambitious. But of course, they aren’t meeting the old ones, either.
They write as if setting higher goals was an accomplishment in itself — this actually seems like a feature of the environmental movement, not a bug — seemingly without realizing that they contradict themselves in the very next sentence:
So … not hitting your climate targets? No problem! Just set much higher ones and then you’ll … fail even more spectacularly to attain them!
California’s current goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. According to a recent analysis, the state would almost have to triple its current annual emissions reduction rate (from 1.6% to 4.3% annually) just to make that happen. But the Times editors are still really glad that Gov. Gavin Newsom is ratcheting that goal up to 55% below 1990 levels by 2030.
Yes, I’m no closer to my weight loss goals for the year, but not to worry — I can make things better by just aiming to lose 38% more weight than I’m already failing to lose!
In fairness, California has one thing working in its favor: depopulation. A combination of crime, homelessness, COVID hyper-safetyism, high taxes, lousy public services, and a hostile business climate has motivated a net domestic outmigration of population and businesses to states that are better run. This is probably already a factor that helps the state get closer to its supposedly unambitious climate goals than it would otherwise. (Although admittedly, people do use a lot of gasoline when they drive those U-Haul trucks to Arizona, Idaho and Utah.)
On the other hand, non-Californians reading this probably ought to appreciate that those unrealistic climate goals are already part of what’s driving the state’s population away. California has long had some of the nation’s highest gas prices — currently, a gallon of unleaded costs nearly $2 less in Texas. Californians also pay the fourth-highest rates for electricity out of the contiguous 48 states — 70% more than the national average. They also have a history of rolling blackouts and less-than-reliable service in general because they have pulled too much of their fossil-fuel generation offline and rely too heavily on unreliable wind and solar.
Newsom tried to avoid blackouts in June with a measure designed to keep up the state’s investment in some fossil fuel infrastructure, at least temporarily. The Times editors pan this measure as “polarizing.” They also criticize the legislature for focusing on keeping a nuclear plant open — the only solution to decarbonizing energy that is even worth discussing — instead of something more productive like … setting higher goals for emissions reductions that the state will again fail to meet.
Perhaps none of the Times editors use electricity. Perhaps their news website is powered by rainbows and bicycle paths.
The deeper lesson here is that even California cannot accomplish such emissions cuts, even though the legislature, the governor, the judiciary, the local governments, and every idiot newspaper editor in the state seems to want it. The underlying problem, which these people will never get, is that Californians stubbornly insist on living life instead of conforming to their climate plans. They use energy and do things and go places instead of hiding in their basements and holding their breaths all day so as to live up to the L.A. Times editors’ and Newsom’s unrealistic expectations about carbon reduction.
It’s a real problem, but maybe Gov. Newsom can propose a law to stop them. I know of one newspaper editorial board that will support him.
In all seriousness, here’s the key to understanding the urgency of carbon reduction and climate change: if they can’t do this in California, then it cannot be done. So either the alarmism is hyperbole that can be safely ignored (we’ll get electricity from fusion soon enough anyway), or we’re already way past doomed and there will be no next generation, so no need to worry.
Which one is it? If you are saving money for retirement, then you have already chosen a side.
