What California Could Be if Our Politicians Loved the State and its People

Just imagine if the California Governor and California Legislature loved California as much as the people do. Imagine if they also loved the state’s abundant natural resources, rather than imposing harsh restrictions and locking them away.

California is rich in natural resources which once powered the state: natural gas deposits in the Monterey Shale formation; geothermal energy, abundant rivers and waterways such as the San Joaquin River Delta and hydroelectric dams; the Pacific coastline; 85 million acres of wildlands with 17 million of those used as commercial timberland; mines and mineral resources, vast farming and agricultural lands, and hunting and fishing.

But California politicians and appointed agency officials, under pressure from radical environmental organizations and lobbyists, decided to ignore the energy producing natural resources, and instead move to an all-electric grid, and the only approved “renewable energy:” solar and wind energy.

And they punish those who seek to restore all of this abundant natural energy.

The only conclusion is that California’s politicians are not working for the people of the state; they are working on behalf of the “green” lobby, deceitful philanthropists, corrupt and connected corporate interests, and even foreign entities.

At times when much of California has been on fire, Gov. Gavin Newsom shamelessly blames climate change.

“The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier,” Gov. Newsom claims, “something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.”

Gov. Newsom is lying with impunity.

“Supplying 80% of the world’s primary energy, coal, oil and natural gas make up the lifeblood of modern civilization,” Vijay Jayaraj writes at Watts Up With That and RealClearMarkets. “Yet, there continue to be calls for the abandonment of these fuels without any feasible, scalable replacement in sight.”

“Consensus” on climate change has become a form of bullying, intimidation and censorship—which is exactly what Julie from Canada tried to do here,” I wrote in 2024, answering a climate cultist’s vitriolic email. “It has been used to bludgeon and attack the character of anyone who questions the very shallow claims. It is a cult completely divorced from science and reality. And the larger problem with these climate change cultists is they lack humility, and any interest in self-reflection.”

In an interview with Vickie Davis, Lies are Unbekoming Substack reported, “international frameworks infiltrate local decision-making, turning city councils and neighborhood associations into pawns of a global agenda. …shifting wealth from the middle class to a technocratic elite through tools like carbon trading and green bonds, as outlined in her book’s analysis of Agenda 21’s goals. Her message was simple yet urgent: what looks like progress is often a mask for control, and the stakes are nothing less than our democratic sovereignty.” (read the entire interview here)

Explaining how dishonest it is for “green” lobbyists “to claim that electricity from wind and solar can replace fossil fuels, when currently most of the energy used in the world is not even in the form of electricity,” Jayaraj continues:

“Electricity represents only about 20% of global final energy consumption. That means four-fifths of the world’s energy use comes from fuels that power ships, planes, trucks and industrial furnaces. Oil fuels vehicles, natural gas provides heat for homes and industry, and coal is critically important for the manufacture of steel from iron.

Demand for hydrocarbons is expected to exceed that of electricity for many decades.”

In 2024, 1,600 actual scientists wrote a letter to the California Air Resources Board: “There is ‘NO Climate Crisis’” the scientists said in the letter. In fact, the scientists find that “California is in no danger of unusual drought: The annual precipitation in California has fluctuated greatly over the last 150 years, with only a slight decrease.”

The CO₂ Coalition’s letter was particularly timely with Gov. Gavin Newsom taking his climate change road show to the Vatican in May 2024 where he was invited to speak by Pope Francis at a Summit of mayors and governors. The Summit, which was held May 15th to May 17th, covered “the impact of rising temperatures” in local communities, and “climate resilience.”

Dr. Jim Enstrom, one of the letter’s signers, told the Globe that one of the most prominent signers was 2022 Nobel Laureate John Clauser, who described the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation,” and was disinvited to speak before the U.N.’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25, 2023. “The physicist believes that objective science on climate has been sacrificed to politics. The preeminence of politics is all the worse, he said, because so much money has already gone to climate,” the CO2 Coalition said.

“We’re talking about trillions of dollars,” he said, adding that powerful people don’t want to hear that they’ve made “trillion-dollar mistakes.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom already finds himself in a similar place – that of multi-million to billion dollar mistakes – with his very public attacks on California’s oil and gas industry.

Governor Newsom Takes Action to Phase Out Oil Extraction in California by 2024, Newsom announced. “California will work to end oil extraction as part of nation-leading effort to achieve carbon neutrality. Action will halt issuance of fracking permits by 2024,” Newsom said. Additionally, Governor Newsom requested that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) analyze pathways to phase out oil extraction across the state by no later than 2045.

Remember Newsom’s climate grift:

Gov. Newsom signed a package of “sweeping legislation” in September 2022 to achieve statewide carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2045, by establishing an 85% emissions reduction target, capping oil wells, slowing oil and gas permitting, making it impossible to increase refining capacity, and entirely phasing out oil and gas starting in two years.

That “sweeping set of laws” Newsom touted was 40 new climate change bills regulating California businesses and its people.

Chevron is leaving the state, and Phillips 66 and Valero are closing refineries because of the governor’s destructive regulations and policies against the oil and gas industry.

As governor, Newsom is sending California into energy poverty, rather than promoting economic and energy prosperity by attempting to annihilate the oil and gas industry.

A 2025 report from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) Institute for Applied Economics – Oil and Gas in California: The Industry, its Economic Contribution and Major User Industries – found that California’s oil and gas industry provides 536,770 total jobs in California and 148,140 Californians are directly employed by its individual companies—along with the $338 billion total economic contribution to California’s economy. Those numbers are something we all should feel proud of.

Oil and gas delivers $23 billion in annual wages and benefits to oil and gas workers in the Golden State, and $53.4 billion in wages to all workers supported by the industry.

This isn’t at all about climate change – that’s just the regulatory “catch-all.” The “green” agenda is about power and control. It is evil, not virtuous.