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).
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...
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
Ballot initiatives are supposed to empower the people to stand up to moneyed special interests. Fifteen states permit the people to pass laws and amend their state constitutions by popular vote. A fixture in California politics since 1914, the citizen ballot initiative enabled notable victories for the Californians, perhaps most notably Proposition 13 in 1978,...
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
To paraphrase and utterly subvert one of Karl Marx’s best-known quotes, a “spectre” is haunting Silicon Valley—the spectre of authentic abundance. All the powers of woke California have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: public sector unions, the environmentalist lobby, the crony capitalists, Antifa radicals, and Reddit trolls. They’re going to lose....
By Edward Ring
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...
By Edward Ring
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
a new form will got here