Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, National Review, City Journal, and other media outlets. Ring’s undergraduate degree is in Political Science from UC Davis, and he has an MBA in Finance from USC. Ring is the author of several books, including “Fixing California – Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism” (2021), “The Abundance Choice – Our Fight for More Water in California” (2022), and “Solutions – Innovative Public Policy for California” (2024).
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,...
By Edward Ring
While the progressive candidates in America rely on millions of college-educated liberals as its base, it depends on two additional sources of political power. The loss of either one could be fatal to the party’s ability to win elections. The first is America’s financial elites, providing money and institutional support. The second is America’s low-income...
By Edward Ring
Earlier this month a letter was sent to Governor Newsom from the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 water agencies that together deliver water to nearly 30 million Californians and irrigate nearly one million acres of farmland. This letter is a document of extraordinary importance to the future of California’s water supply. It summarizes several significant reasons...
By Edward Ring
For the most part, California’s farmers grow food, not fuel. But the fuel required to operate farm equipment is diesel fuel, increasingly refined from food grown on America’s great plains. Digging into this reveals a rabbit hole of such depth and complexity that I’ll skip to the conclusion before evaluating just a few critical details....
By Edward Ring
In the wake of devastating setbacks in the 2024 elections, Progressives are deemphasizing identity politics and instead are prioritizing economic issues. Progressives are now embracing an “abundance movement” and claiming they are the party to deliver abundance to working families. The latest iteration of this new strategy was expressed by progressive activist and pundit Donna...
By Edward Ring
Access to adequate supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel for Californians is in dire peril, and the signing of SB 237 on September 19 will do very little to change that. To rescue the industry, far more sweeping legislation is required. First, to put this in perspective, note that fully 50 percent of California’s raw energy inputs still...
By Edward Ring
Of all the possible ways to increase California’s water supply, nothing compares to the potential of the so-called “big gulp,” that is, the ability of new and improved water infrastructure to safely divert millions of acre feet from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during high winter flows. How much water? A study published by the...
By Edward Ring
A few months ago I had the privilege of speaking directly with some of the top executives at one of California’s largest water agencies. Their primary question for me was explicit, and my attempts to answer were inadequate. They contend, accurately, that during the last century there were periods when massive federal funding to pay...
By Edward Ring
In a recent guest op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, California Governor Newsom claimed that “Clean Energy Powers California’s Economic Growth,” a claim that is transparently false. Aggressive “clean energy” mandates, paired with perpetually escalating restrictions on conventional energy sources, are the reasons Californians pay the highest prices in America for gasoline and electricity, and nearly the highest...
By Edward Ring
Last month, for the uninitiated, we devoted a newsletter to the topic “Tips to Understand Our Convoluted Yet Obligatory Units of Water.” It attempted to summarize some essential facts and relevant units for anyone who wants to monitor state water policy. Now it’s time for those of us who fancy ourselves members of the energy...
By Edward Ring
Public sector unions constitute the bedrock of progressive power in the United States. The estimated total nationwide membership exceeds 7 million, or 32 percent of all public employees. This compares to an equal number of unionized employees in the private sector, 7 million, but that only represents 6 percent of private sector employees. The fact...
By Edward Ring
The short answer is no. Never. What is happening with the Sites Reservoir is a case study in why, if the people running California today were in charge in the 1950s and 1960s, the California Water Project would never have been built. This reservoir, approved by voters in 2014, could have been built by now....
By Edward Ring
The argument against gerrymandering begins with visuals. Across the U.S., almost without exception, if you view a map of state and federal electoral districts, they appear as convoluted, obviously contrived jigsaw puzzles, drawn with no regard for geographic features or municipal boundaries. In the face of such obvious manipulation, so the argument goes, the process...
By Edward Ring
ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization and winner of multiple Pulitzer prizes, recently published a report “The Drying Planet.” They report that “Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the...
By Edward Ring
a new form will got here