California’s oil industry has been active for well over a century, and Los Angeles was always at the heart of it. By 1894, about 80 wells were already producing oil in the city, setting off a boom that peaked in the 1970s at nearly 100 million barrels per year. Today oil production in Los Angeles County is barely...
When choosing what policies and projects might best ensure abundant water for California’s ecosystems, farms, and cities, the role of the delta is central. Even if large scale desalination were to someday deliver over a million acre feet of water per year to California’s coastal cities, how we manage the delta affects many times that...
A recent article in Grist characterized recent efforts by the Trump administration to preserve Scott Dam as a “culture war crusade.” That is accurate, so long as we recognize that efforts to demolish the dam – and diminish the value of the entire Potter Valley Project that the dam is a part of – are also the result of a culture...
There is no realistic scenario imaginable that does not include Californians consuming at least another five billion barrels of oil before the state achieves its much touted official goal of a “clean energy future.” Here are the numbers: In 2025, Californians consumed 484 million barrels of crude oil. To understand why another five billion barrels is the...
The recently released “Water Renaissance” plan, a product of “conservation groups and tribes,” gets a very big idea right. There is no reason why California’s coastal megacities should have to import water. With that one visionary presumption, this report has made a major contribution. In fact, it doesn’t go far enough. With massive, targeted investments,...
Whether it’s an energy project or a water project, it’s important to avoid conflating capacity with actual production, or yield. With energy projects, that difference is much more certain than with water projects. For example, in 2024, California’s lone remaining nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, with an output capacity of 2.4 gigawatts, would have produced...
For most of the previous century, Californians successfully designed and built big water infrastructure. In sixty years, from 1910 through 1970, we built the most impressive system of interbasin transfers in the world. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, Colorado River Aqueduct, Delta Mendota Canal, Friant-Kern Canal, and California Aqueduct. Altogether these conveyances are...
When asked in a recent interview why California has the highest gasoline prices in the nation, Jodie Muller, the President of the Western States Petroleum Association, began by stating the following: “You can’t point a finger at one particular person, because, unfortunately, it is decades of policies layered on top of one another. You have local air...
Even if the most dire climate scenarios are accurate, and humanity must transition away from fossil fuel, it can’t happen overnight. The rational approach is to first develop alternative sources of energy without precipitously destroying the industries that reliably produce oil and natural gas. Once alternatives are available at a competitive price and in sufficient...
California’s state legislature may succeed in destroying its own oil industry, but it won’t change anything in the world. It will only export jobs and raise the cost-of-living here at home. Here’s a reality check. According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2024, oil, natural gas, and coal contributed 87 percent of the world’s...
Abundance, and its political twin, affordability, are now bipartisan mantras, but cannot be realized if the only permissible avenues are via urban infill, renewable energy, and water rationing. California is uniquely positioned to do much more. Breakthrough technologies and big projects, both pioneered here, could unite a powerful coalition of farmers, energy companies, high tech...
California’s state government has set an official goal of “net zero” by 2045. That’s less than 19 years from now. Already in pursuit of that goal, the state has managed to have the highest priced gasoline and the highest priced electricity in the entire continental United States. Condemning its residents to a poverty inducing bleeding...