TUCKER CARLSON: California’s leaders know nothing about energy

On April 24 of last year, and you may have missed this, the state of California finally achieved what the Green Movement has dreamt about for decades. It happened. The State Energy Authority in California was able to generate 95% of its total power from entirely renewable sources. They said it couldn’t be done. We said it couldn’t be done, but just months into the Joe Biden administration, California did it. 

“It sends chills down my spine,” announced Elliot Mainzer, who runs California’s biggest power grid. “It’s amazing. We’re making a real dent in the state’s carbon emissions.” April 24th, 2021, ladies and gentlemen, remember that date. It’s a moment that will live alongside Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb, alongside Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the surface of the moon. It is a day we saw a glimpse of humanity’s future.  

That’s what the news accounts told us, but actually, there were some caveats to this achievement. For starters, April is not the time to test the power grid. It’s the most temperate months of the year when electricity use is at its lowest. Nor was the grid in question statewide. It didn’t, for example, supply power to Los Angeles, which is by far the biggest city in California, and now that we’re being honest, it wasn’t entirely renewable. As the L.A. Times conceded in a far lower paragraph, despite its press release about renewables, the state of California was actually, “also burning a bunch of natural gas.”  

Now, according to scientists, natural gas qualifies as a fossil fuel, and it’s not technically renewable and then there was this amazing but thoroughly downplayed fact: the green energy miracle that sent chills down the spines of California power executives, the event they described as “amazing” lasted for a total of (can you guess?) 4 seconds. Not days or hours, seconds, 4 seconds. That’s what California politicians were bragging about: 4 seconds of not actually renewable energy, but the celebration obscured an inconvenient fact.  

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a bill signing ceremony. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Just a few months earlier, in mid-August, California’s green energy grid had collapsed completely. Half a million residents lost power in the middle of a heat wave. Grid operators warned it was about to get a lot worse. From late afternoon until evening, they predicted, at the times people returned to their homes and were hoping to use electricity, as some Americans do, the state would be short thousands of megawatts and that meant millions of Californians would be without any power whatsoever and that would be a catastrophe, an undeniable one. So, to fight it, the state implemented a strategy the developing world has come to know, well: rolling blackouts. 

“It’s almost 3 p.m.,” the mayor of Los Angeles tweeted on September 6, 2020. “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees, or use a fan instead. Turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy,” except, of course, for the mayor of Los Angeles who gets to be on Twitter whenever he wants, but really, the message was clear: We give up. We’re no longer pretending to provide a first world standard of living to our citizens, the most heavily taxed in America. We are Tegucigalpa now. Please play along and for the most part, patient Californians did play along, but the problem did not improve. In fact, it got worse.  

The California Energy Commission has just issued a report predicting widespread power outages in the state of California for the next five years at least and of course, September will always be the worst month. As the vice chair of the commission put it, “Securing energy reliability is a tremendous responsibility. The responsibility is becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill with the tools we have in hand.” 

Oh, stop whining. Keep the power on, but no, we don’t have enough tools. What happened to all the tools? Well, those tools would include the famous nuclear plant at San Onofre, but that plant was shuttered a decade ago after 40 years of protests by green activists, supposedly on behalf of something called the environment, something with which they are personally unfamiliar, but it didn’t matter. The state shut it down. What happened next? What was the effect of shutting down San Onofre? 

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Well, scientists estimate that closing San Onofre led to the release of 37 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, if you believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and they all do, that would qualify as a very bad thing. But it didn’t stop California from plowing forward anyway and doing more of the same: polluting in the name of saving the environment. Now the state has announced a plan to close the San Luis Obispo Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. That plant supplies energy to millions of other Californians. So as a result of these and many other closures of actual power plants, the state of California now imports a third of its energy from elsewhere and that would seem to be an embarrassing display from what is supposedly our richest state.  

So, say what you will about California politicians, like them or not, it’s indisputable that on the question of energy, they have no idea what they’re doing and we know this because their track record of incompetence is lengthy and unbroken. They are majestic in their ineptitude. So naturally, they want more power over power. There’s just so much more to destroy. This week, the state’s surgically enhanced governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a new way to overburden California’s already collapsing energy grid. He’s got an idea. He wants to ban gasoline-powered engines and force everyone to drive an electric vehicle, a vehicle that has to be plugged into outlets that in the state of California no longer work. We’re not kidding, by the way. Watch this.  

NEWSON: We will be the first jurisdiction in the world to require all new cars to be sold to be alternative fuel cars. We are going through one of the great transformations in our history, energy transformations, and the electrification is the architecture for economic transformation.  

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So, here’s a guy who’s never had a job, who couldn’t fix a broken lawnmower lecturing, you about energy and architecture and transformation. The same guy who’s presided over a state that can no longer power your washing machine is telling you he’s going to control what kind of car you drive. Now, just think broad for 1 second. If that guy can tell you what kind of car you’re allowed to drive, what can’t he tell you? Why can’t he tell you what kind of job you can have, what kind of food you can eat, who you can sleep with? So, of course, the instinct behind all of this is totalitarian, which is to say total control over you and banning the gas engine is, among many other things, an attack on your autonomy.  

Electric vehicles can be, above all, controlled by the people who control the grid and that means the next time that California’s energy regulator decides to shut off the power, you can’t go anywhere. You can’t leave California. Now, a few things you might notice about this. First, they’re doing this because they’re so concerned about carbon emissions and burning fossil fuels adds to carbon emissions and is destroying the planet. If you actually were worried about that, what’s the first thing that you would ban? Well, private jet travel obviously, private jet travel emits a lot of carbon. In just 60 minutes, a private jet emits more carbon dioxide, in fact, than the average American household emits in three months in one flight.  

So, private jet travel is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the nation of Denmark. (They) pollute at a rate about 15 times higher than commercial planes. So, you would think since most people who fly private are affluent by definition, and the global warming cult is the most popular with the affluent, that these same people would have given up private jet travel because it’s just such an obvious offense against the climate, but no, just the opposite. Private jet travel has become more popular since the pandemic. Business jet travel is up more than 22% since 2019. More than 70% of all private jet flights take place in the United States. What are they doing? Well, they’re faring politicians like Gavin Newsom, who does not fly commercial, and of course, celebrities like Taylor Swift, famously. Her jet emitted 8,300 tons of carbon this year so far. Oh, interesting.  

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So if you’re looking to reduce carbon emissions, you would think they’d worry a little less about your minivan and a little more about their G4. Oh, but they’re not worried at all about their G4 and that’s why Taylor Swift, Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi and all the other people out there lecturing about climate will never give up their private planes because when you fly private, you’re not only immune from COVID, like you don’t have to wear a mask on a private plane. Are you kidding? You poor or something? Shut up, but you’re also immune from the immutable laws of climate change.  

So, California has no interest in preventing people who are making the rules like Gavin Newsom, from traveling anywhere they want. They want to control the way that you travel. Now that’s California. So, you are tempted to say, “Well, okay, California’s beautiful, but it’s obviously run by lunatics who are turning it into a…