Environment & Wildfires

The Abundance Choice – Part 7: An Environmentalist Juggernaut

The Abundance Choice – Part 7: An Environmentalist Juggernaut

Editor’s note: This is the seventh article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” Environmentalists in California, who constitute much of the vanguard of environmentalism in the world, have normalized extremism. The...

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice – Part 6: Biased, Hostile Media

The Abundance Choice – Part 6: Biased, Hostile Media

Editor’s note: This is the sixth article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” You can say this for Michael Hiltzik, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist for the Los Angeles...

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice – Part 5: The Fractured Farmers

The Abundance Choice – Part 5: The Fractured Farmers

Editor’s note: This is the fifth article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” “We cannot support your initiative if you include the Delta Tunnel as an eligible project. And to be...

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice: The Complete Series

The Abundance Choice: The Complete Series

Note: This webpage is dedicated to the complete The Abundance Choice series by Edward Ring. In this series, Edward Ring, a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, examines California’s ongoing water crisis and the many years of failed water policies that got us here. Ring outlines the challenges facing California’s leaders...

By Editorial Staff

The Abundance Choice – Part 4: Crafting a Water Initiative

The Abundance Choice – Part 4: Crafting a Water Initiative

Editor’s note: This is the fourth article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” To be fair, Assemblyman Devon Mathis didn’t come up with the idea of allocating a percentage of the...

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice – Part 3: The Mechanics of Ballot Initiatives

The Abundance Choice – Part 3: The Mechanics of Ballot Initiatives

Editor’s note: This is the third article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” By the spring of 2021, it was obvious the California State Legislature would not change its inadequate approach...

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice – Part 2: The Problems with Indoor Water Rationing

The Abundance Choice – Part 2: The Problems with Indoor Water Rationing

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” Perhaps the biggest example of misguided water policy in California are the escalating restrictions on indoor water consumption....

By Edward Ring

The Abundance Choice – Part 1: California’s Failing Water Policies

The Abundance Choice – Part 1: California’s Failing Water Policies

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” In October and again in December, as the third severe drought this century was entering its third year,...

By Edward Ring

Examining California’s Renewable Energy Plan

Examining California’s Renewable Energy Plan

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe. If you live in California, by now you’ve probably seen the ads, either on prime time television or online, exhorting you to “Power Down 4 to 9PM.” These ads are produced by “Energy Upgrade California,” paid for by “investor-owned energy utility customers under the auspices of...

By Edward Ring

Most lucrative firefighting jobs in California

Most lucrative firefighting jobs in California

When you think about the best-paid gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might be thinking of the tech industry. But check out firefighting in San Ramon, just east of the Silicon Valley.   In 2020, the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District —  which covers 155 square-miles in Contra Costa County and serves a...

By Brandon Ristoff

Newsom’s true opponents? Water and fire

Newsom’s true opponents? Water and fire

Not quite one year ago, Gavin Newsom did something that took political courage. It was also the right thing to do. He removed from one of the state’s local water boards one of the most outspoken critics of a desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach. Unlike critics of desalination (once referred to as desalinization, and swiftly being...

By Edward Ring

The teacher union’s love-hate relationship with testing

The teacher union’s love-hate relationship with testing

Testing for thee, but not for me. That’s the message sent to parents by the United Teachers Los Angeles. In its latest demonstration of epic irony, the union is demanding all 600,000 students subject to its reign be tested weekly for COVID-19 in order to return to the classroom, while simultaneously lobbying the district to...

By Chantal Lovell

Smoke on the Horizon: Failed California Fire Prevention Setting Up Terrible Fire Season

Smoke on the Horizon: Failed California Fire Prevention Setting Up Terrible Fire Season

In a recent investigation by CapRadio, Gavin Newsom was found to have misled the public with his progress on his wildfire prevention efforts. How big of a deal is this? Aren’t wildfires just a force of nature or an act of God? Isn’t climate change going to make fires worse anyway? How much did Newsom’s...

By Brandon Ristoff

Solving California’s urban water scarcity

Solving California’s urban water scarcity

A study by the Public Policy Institute of California in 2019 found that per capita urban water use in the state has dropped consistently over the years, from 231 gallons per day in 1990 to 180 gallons per day in 2010. It dropped again to 146 gallons per day during the drought in 2015.  This...

By Edward Ring