The premise of this newsletter is that abundant and affordable energy and water are prerequisites to solving every other challenge standing in the way of lowering California’s overall cost-of-living. Not only because the cost for energy and water directly impacts the cost to build homes, or pay household utility bills, or engage in industrial production,...
A new year has begun, and here in California, 2026 promises to deliver challenges that may at last transform the state’s energy and water policies. Let’s begin with a quick look at California’s current water policies in action. The last month of 2025 delivered a series of storms that merited the distinction of being dubbed “atmospheric...
With another series of drenching storms about to hit California, now is a good time to ask what has become a perennial question: why can’t we harvest more of this massive runoff and reserve it for our farms and cities? California must periodically cope with multi-year droughts, but these droughts are usually preceded by years...
There’s only one way to restore reliable water allocations to farmers, avoid turning our cities into rationed “xeriscaped” heat islands, and cope with whatever the climate ultimately delivers. That’s to build more infrastructure to safely and sustainably produce millions of acre feet of new fresh water every year. There are many practical ways to accomplish...
When it comes to the achievement of “carbon neutrality” and the requisite energy policies to get there, few choices carry with them more consequences than the planned, nearly total electrification of our economy. And when it comes to electrification, few categories of consumption are likely to outweigh the demands of EVs. With a focus on...
A few years ago I was involved in an effort to qualify a ballot initiative, the “Water Infrastructure Funding Act.” While we failed to gather sufficient signatures to get it onto the November 2022 state ballot, if it had been approved by voters, water scarcity in California would have been eliminated forever. Unfortunately, certain provisions...
In December 2023, an obscure federal agency known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management produced a “Field Reserve Estimate Summary” in which they claimed that up to 10 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil lay just off the West Coast of the United States. The vast majority of that oil is off the coast...
California’s Little Hoover Commission was created in 1962 “as an independent and bipartisan state agency charged with making recommendations to the governor and Legislature on ways to make state programs more efficient.” Funded by taxpayers, officially nonpartisan, they’ve just released a set of recommendations to lower “The High Cost of Electricity in California.” They’re right about the high...
The cost-of-living has become a national issue, a favored topic of partisan debate. The debate is governed by emotions, ideology, and widely divergent economic theories, probably in that order. Our contribution to this debate, drawing on all three of those influences, is simple: Abundance lowers prices, and deregulation enables abundance. Conversely, scarcity increases prices, and...
Achieving California’s goal of net zero by 2045 requires rapidly transitioning away from combustible fuel. It’s a risky strategy. If the transition happens too fast, Californians confront energy shortages and high prices. When it comes to electricity, Newsom has so far managed to avoid an acute crisis by sensibly prolonging that transition. In 2023, he delayed the...
Why is it axiomatic among California’s water agencies and policymakers that large scale desalination is inconceivable in California? That certainly isn’t the case in other arid locales. In 2024, an estimated 30 million acre feet of fresh water was produced by desalination plants worldwide. On the coast of the Red Sea, about 60 miles south of the...
An opinion piece in the Santa Barbara Independent, published last week, heralded the decision by the Santa Barbara County board of supervisors to phase out oil drilling, which as the authors put it, “will save lives, reduce air pollution, and help meet our climate goals.” Meanwhile, a study about to be publicly released by James Rector,...
