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, National Review, City Journal, Real Clear Politics 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 “The Analyst’s Cookbook: Making the Case for Abundance Using Numbers” (2026).
In the cities and farms immediately south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the worst flooding of the 20th century happened in 1997. Several days of unrelenting rain pummeled the slopes of the Sierras, and with the snow line unusually high at 10,000 feet, nearly all of it poured into the San Joaquin River and other tributaries. Reservoirs...
By Edward Ring
Iron air batteries appear poised to play, at the least, an important niche role in the emerging electric age. A very recent example of this is the $750 million equity financing that Form Energy secured this week, raising the total investment in that iron air battery manufacturer to over $2 billion. Iron air batteries offer...
By Edward Ring
California attracts a lot of criticism, with perhaps the most bipartisan criticism focusing on its punitive cost of living. And this bipartisan criticism even extends to agreement on the reason California is too expensive. In their bestselling 2025 book Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argued that liberal governance has become too legalistic, bureaucratic,...
By Edward Ring
Earlier this week, a respected YouTube channel covering the future of technology and energy released a video exploring the viability of solar panels covering California’s canals and aqueducts. The videos are hosted by Ricky Roy, a California-based mechanical engineer whose channel is called “Two Bit Da Vinci.” Reviewing his findings is an opportunity to offer some updates...
By Edward Ring
While the burgeoning democratic socialist movement is getting a lot of attention in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, a parallel dimension of wokeism quietly continues to advance. For now, the Trump administration has attenuated its most extreme threats, but its institutional support is unwavering, and its slow progress is unrelenting. The woke greens are...
By Edward Ring
Veteran political strategist Garry South has just published a guest commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle in which he asks the question, “Is Steve Hilton a serious candidate?” South then launches a series of attacks to make clear he doesn’t think Hilton is gubernatorial material. But only a serious contender could have survived California’s so-called “jungle primary,” where...
By Edward Ring
Earlier this summer a guest op-ed appeared in the Orange County Register, “Learning the right lesson from San Diego’s desal water surplus.” But the “lesson” presented was only partly accurate. What the authors, both affiliated with the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), got right was the need to change regulations that restrict the ability for farmers to...
By Edward Ring
The Statistical Review of World Energy is arguably the most authoritative and comprehensive source publicly available for national and global energy statistics. And a funny thing happened between the report issued in 2024 and the report issued in 2025. “Renewables” as a percent of total energy consumed in 2023 was quietly lowered from 9.3 in the U.S....
By Edward Ring
The operating agreements that govern Colorado River allocations expire at the end of this year, and negotiations between the seven states that share the water are stalled. With the federal government poised to step in and impose an agreement it formulates, the states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the upper basin, and Arizona,...
By Edward Ring
It’s January 2027, and for the last few months, a super El Nino has already delivered torrential rains to the Pacific Coast of North America. California’s reservoirs have been releasing record quantities of water to preserve space for the next round of precipitation but their remaining capacity to absorb runoff is dangerously low. From the peaks of...
By Edward Ring
Whenever evaluating a new energy technology, caution is warranted. During what was arguably the first big cleantech boom around 2009, schemes were sold to angel investors thrilled to find a hot sector in the wake of the recent financial crash. Almost anything that sounded good got funded. Some of these schemes, such as a “clean”...
By Edward Ring
Critics of the policies that have turned California into the most inhospitable place in America to do business or try to make a living tend to focus on outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom. But California is a one-party state. Other entrenched politicians play a powerful supporting role, and Attorney General Rob Bonta is a prime example. Appointed...
By Edward Ring
There are at least three ways to evaluate the economic viability of energy projects. The easiest way is to just repeat whatever is in a press release. The other extreme, a mandatory exercise for anyone poised to actually invest and build a project, is to develop complex projections that take into account the benefits of...
By Edward Ring
On the advent of America’s 250th anniversary, the conventional narrative is that our country is deeply divided. Typical takes on the state of disunity in the United States include this headline from a guest op-ed that recently appeared in USA Today, “America celebrated together at 200. We won’t at 250,” and “We still had a sense of oneness...
By Edward Ring
a new form will got here