Part One, The Voters

California is a one-party state. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that California’s conservatives have nowhere to go but up. In the wake of the 2022 midterms, conservative representation in the state legislature is the lowest it’s been in the history of the state; they hold 18 out of 80 seats in the Assembly and 8 out of 40 seats in the Senate. Every higher office in the state, from governor down to state superintendent of public instruction, is occupied by liberal politicians. In statewide elections, from U.S. Senator to any higher state office, conservative candidates typically get 40 percent of the vote. In this article and the installments to follow, strategies will be presented  that are designed to persuade that elusive additional 10 percent of voters to vote conservative. California’s voters are the future. Winning them over will translate into success in every swing state in America.

As goes California, so goes the nation, and as goes the nation, so goes the world. It’s only slightly grandiose to make that kind of statement. California remains the undisputed global epicenter of technology and entertainment. This translates into incredible wealth. California is home to 186 billionaires, decisively ahead of number two New York with 135, and way ahead of Florida and Texas, with 78 and 73, respectively. California has the biggest congressional delegation and has a tremendous economy in spite of the government they’re under. California is also a beautiful state with what is arguably the best weather on earth.

With all these strengths, it’s hard to kill California, and it’s easy to dismiss the critics as doomsayers. To start winning again, California’s conservatives have to de-emphasize talking about problems and instead prioritize talking about solutions. Moreover, they have to pick solutions to problems that are of universal urgency. These solutions shouldn’t be primarily ideological because they need to appeal across lines of income, age, ideology, and ethnicity. Everybody in the state is concerned about education, the cost of living, and crime. These are issues that are non-partisan. These must be the focus.

Some of the problems that conservatives have had in California are pretty obvious. A biased media. The legacy of Prop 187, a policy dating back to the 1990s that was supposedly anti-immigrant (it passed overwhelmingly at the time), aimed at denying some categories of public services to undocumented aliens. Then in 2008, there was Prop 8, the ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. These measures were passed decades ago, but the memory of both of them has been used to stigmatize conservatives as bigots. 

Conservatives in California also have a huge disadvantage financially, and then there’s Trump. Regardless of what you may think of Trump, he has been exploited very successfully all around the country by people who are Never Trumpers or people who are liberals who have been thoroughly conditioned to hate Trump, and Trump is often his own worst enemy. Right or wrong, California’s conservatives are stigmatized as identifying with Trump.

These are serious disadvantages, but the only healthy approach is to consider them as excuses because there are two additional reasons that conservatives lose and these are things that can be controlled much more effectively.

First, conservatives must find candidates that have a high profile, have charisma, are right on the issues of education, crime, and the cost of living, and are able to persuasively communicate their positions on these issues. Conservatives in California must recruit thousands of candidates according to their position on these three issues, then contest all elected positions: water districts, transportation districts, city councils, school boards, and county boards of supervisors. They must find thousands of candidates to run for the more than 20,000 elected state and local offices in the state. Eventually, the best among those candidates will rise up on the strength of these universal issues and their abilities. Creating that foundation of strong local candidates to win and then advance and compete for higher offices is how conservatives can regain control over the state legislature again after a nearly thirty year hiatus.

Second, the message has to be coherent. It has to be streamlined. To start winning in California, campaign strategy should focus on and offer solutions for just three huge things: education, public safety, and the cost of living.

California’s Future Voters

The target voters in California are not the voters that conservatives already have today. Right now, 50 percent of California’s white electorate is conservative. Meanwhile, California liberals enjoy support from supermajorities of Latino, Asian, and black voters. Moreover, white voters that aren’t already are probably never going to be conservative because they don’t feel the consequences of the policies that are killing California the way everyone else does. Many of California’s white liberals tend to live in higher-income neighborhoods with better schools; often, the uber-wealthy live in their parents’ or grandparents’ house, which means they have no mortgage and minimal property taxes. By virtue of these legacy advantages, the policies that are killing everyone else in California are merely theoretical to most affluent white liberals.

The chart below depicts California’s electorate today. This is based on the 2020 election. It’s still overwhelmingly white—57 percent. Latinos account for 35 percent of eligible voters, even though, based on 2020’s turnout, they’re only 22 percent of actual voters. In 2020, Asian, black, and white voters turned out in percentages roughly proportional to their percentage of eligible voters, and Latinos were underrepresented.

If conservative political candidates could just unite on concrete solutions to issues of education, crime, and the cost of living, they would become relevant. As it is, all that most conservative candidates do in California is complain about how liberals have failed on these issues, or they focus on divisive social issues for which no consensus can be formed. Education, crime, and the cost of living are urgent, nonpartisan issues that cross ideology and ethnicity and will attract the voters of the future.

California’s Future is Latino

The next chart below is based on K-12 enrollment today. It isn’t much of a stretch to assume that today’s students are tomorrow’s voters. Nor is it a huge assumption to predict that California’s ethnic composition will not change significantly as the next generation is born, i.e., in the future, when today’s students have grown up and are voting, school enrollment will stay about the same as it is today—about 60 percent Latino. The white population may decrease somewhat further, and the Asian population may gain a few percentage points. But California’s future is Latino.

Even today, less than half of California’s liberals are white, as can be seen on the next chart. Even just among other liberals, they are already an absolute minority. And it’s just begun. 

To see where this is headed, the next chart, below, takes California’s K-12 enrollment currently and extrapolates it to the future. In other words, if registration patterns by ethnicity stay constant between now and the very near future, this is where liberals are going to have to get their voters. In California, within the foreseeable future, it’s not going to matter if white voters are converted to become conservatives because they’re going to be an insignificant portion of the electorate.

The future in California is primarily Latino, at around 60 percent of the electorate, with the percentage of Asian and white voters stabilizing at about 15-20 percent each. California’s black population has been consistent for decades at about six percent of Californians and may not change very much. This demographic profile is not likely to be America’s destiny insofar as the percentage of black residents is much higher in a number of other states  and the percentage of Asian and Latino residents in most states is much lower. 

The key to reviving conservative politics in California is to focus on solutions to issues of universal, nonpartisan urgency, starting with education, crime, and the cost of living. In all three cases, California’s progressive liberals have failed catastrophically. The next sections will propose specific policies to fix education in California, end its epidemic of crime, and lower the cost of living to make the state affordable again. Offering these solutions is the path to victory for conservatives in California and a prescription for victory in every battleground state now and in the future.

Part Two: Fixing Education

There are at least three ways to fix public education in California. Let’s begin with charter schools. They are a simple first step to give parents more choices in their children’s education with hundreds of successful examples of charter schools in California. While charter schools are public schools, the laws are currently rigged to make it hard to open charter schools, thanks to the relentless attacks against charters by California’s powerful teachers’ union lobby. There are caps on how many charter schools and how many charter school students are allowed in the state. Those caps have to be lifted.

Teachers’ unions allege that charter schools induce financial costs, harming districts with charter schools in their boundaries. These allegations can be easily debunked. Charter schools almost always receive less public funding per pupil than traditional public schools. An application for a new charter school should never be denied based on the alleged financial impact. Moreover, denied charter school applications should get an automatic appeal and there should be multiple entities capable of approving charter schools, such as cities or accredited colleges or universities.

Here are policy recommendations that candidates who aim to protect and grow charter schools in California should advocate:

1. Allow charter schools to be approved by the following entities: the state board of education, any county board of education, any school district school board, and any public or private accredited university.
2. Charter school permits should be granted for 10 years—this is in order to make it easier for charter schools to secure financing to build or remodel school facilities.
3. Eliminate caps established by the state or any public agency on the number of charter schools or the number of charter school students.
4. Virtual charter schools that support pod schooling or micro-schools should not have their applications denied on that basis.
5. Renewal applications for charter schools that are denied by school districts should have the right to appeal to any county, state, or university-based authorizing entity.
6. No charter school application or renewal should be denied on the basis of the financial impact it will have on the school district in which it is located because students are leaving the district’s traditional public school and taking the state funding with them to the charter

Another way to restore quality education: universally available Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). This solution preserves public funding for education but puts the choice of what school to attend in the hands of parents. ESAs are viewed by opponents as a radical solution, which is true for one overwhelmingly good reason—it will break the monopoly that traditional public schools currently wield over public education in California by allowing families to use state dollars that would go toward that student in public school instead to pay tuition at a private school of their choice. 

Here are policy recommendations that candidates who want to break the unionized public school monopoly in California should advocate:

1. An education savings account should be created for every K-12 student.
2. These accounts should be credited annually with each student’s pro rata share of K-12 education funding.
3. The parents of K-12 students should be able to direct that money to a participating school, whether it’s an accredited private or parochial school.
4. The money, if unspent, should accumulate in a designated account for each student to be used for college, vocational, or any other accredited educational expense.

Education savings accounts are implemented by granting an annual credit to parents based on the amount of funding that goes into public schools. These parents can use the credit to pay tuition to the school of their choice. While it may have changed slightly in the final budget, in the 2024-25 Governor’s January 10th Proposed Budget, K-12 per-pupil funding totaled $17,653 per the Proposition 98 General Fund and $23,519 per pupil when accounting for all funding sources. The average cost of K-12 private school tuition in California is much less than that, around $15,000. There are private schools that charge a lot more but there are also much less expensive parochial schools and other types of private schools throughout California. There are now online education options as well as in-person/online hybrids. There are a lot of ways to deliver quality education in the Golden State that don’t cost a lot of money.

Finally, to restore quality education in California, candidates can propose ways to rescue public schools. Listed below are three reforms that would go a long way towards improving the quality of teachers that California’s K-12 public school students are depending on to prepare them for adulthood. These three reforms were argued in the Vergara case, brought by nine public school students who argued that current statutes denied them their right to a quality education as guaranteed by California’s state constitution. The Vergara plaintiffs lost their case on what amounted to technicalities in appellate court in 2016. But the reforms they proposed are still needed.

Three reforms for candidates to promote if they want to improve public education in California:

1. The period necessary before teacher tenure can be granted to a new teacher should be extended from two years to five years.
2. Criteria for teacher layoffs should prioritize retaining the best-performing teachers without regard to seniority.
3. Teachers should be hired on an “at will” basis, with the school principal granted full authority to terminate their employment at any time.

Nothing matters more in a student’s development than the quality of the teacher. Not money. Not new buildings. Not creative new curricula. If the teacher is good at their job, the students learn. These three reforms will immediately improve the quality of teachers in California’s public schools.

There are other public school reforms that candidates and activists can promote that have universal, bipartisan urgency. We have to eliminate so-called woke curricula and replace them with fundamentals. For example, we should restore classical education. Classical education principles and teaching methods are working at schools where they are taught, such as the successful Orange County Classical Academy in Orange County, and they work with students of all abilities and incomes.

We also need to reestablish classroom discipline. The teachers unions’ advocacy for “restorative justice,” which typically does not remove disruptive students from the classroom, just disrupts and intimidates the students who do want to learn. Restorative justice in California’s public schools, without necessary balance in the form of the ability to suspend or expel disruptive students, is a recipe for classroom anarchy. Restorative justice that isn’t ultimately backed up with tough consequences for the tough cases is the carrot without the stick.

We also need to bring back standardized aptitude tests. They are the best way to tell if our schools are working or not.

California’s voters know their education system is failing. And the way the system is set up today, these failures are disproportionately affecting schools and students in low-income neighborhoods. When it comes to fixing education, conservative candidates don’t have to get dragged into polarizing battles over social issues. Their message can stick to topics that will resonate with every parent in the state. California’s public schools need competition because they’re not providing a quality education to the students who need it the most. All they have to say is, “Here are the policies that will solve the problem.”

That is a winning message.

Part Three, Fighting Crime

In recent years, California has become a target for conservatives around the rest of the country who claim it is the prime example of a deep blue state where crime is out of control. This isn’t entirely deserved, since blue cities across the U.S. cope with similar, if not worse, levels of violent crime and property crime. The issue of rising crime is nonetheless one of the biggest  concerns of California’s voters and for good reason.

As crime rates rise in California, law enforcement is hindered by laws that tie their hands and budget cuts that deplete their resources. Crime statistics, alarming enough as officially released, are probably understated as victims no longer bother to report them. Smash-and-grab robberies by organized gangs routinely make headline news. Retail theft, afflicting businesses already coping with online competition, has forced the closure of countless stores and threatens to push California’s downtowns into an economic doom loop. The problem of homeless encampments is more visible and more problematic than ever.

The reasons Californians confront a multifaceted onslaught of lawlessness and chaos can’t be traced to any single cause. Background conditions play a major role. The state has become one of the most difficult places to earn a living wage, thanks to a legislatively engineered epidemic of scarcity and high prices for every essential, including food, fuel, and housing. At the same time, the state has become one of the easiest places to be homeless—which is not to say being homeless is easy—thanks to the mildest weather in the U.S., a legislatively engineered lack of laws to control vagrancy, drug use, and petty theft, along with a massive Homeless Industrial Complex that won’t collect billions of dollars per year anymore if the problem is ever solved.

But the direct and explicit causes of California’s crime and homelessness epidemics are known, as are the solutions. At the top of this list is the need to repeal the notorious Prop. 47, sold to voters in 2014 as a compassionate way to give nonviolent offenders a second chance by downgrading drug and property crimes. Proposition 47 has led to what police derisively refer to as “catch and release” because suspects are only issued citations with a court date and let go. With respect to the homeless, passage of this initiative has made it a waste of time for police to arrest anyone for openly using illegal drugs or for petty theft (defined as stealing items worth less than $950 per day). Only very serious crimes are still investigated.

Reducing crime and homelessness in California also requires judicial changes. A ruling by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the case Martin v. Boise held that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if they do not have enough homeless shelter beds. This case and similar ones (ref. Jones v City of Los Angeles) have made it almost impossible to get the homeless off the streets. The situation is made much worse because the definition of “shelter” has been opportunistically conflated into insanely expensive “permanent supportive housing” that California’s taxpayers are now spending over $500,000 per unit to construct, to the delight of participating politically connected developers and nonprofits.

Finally, a primary cause of California’s crime wave are district attorneys who consistently favor criminals over victims. There are several of these district attorneys active in California counties, the most notorious among them being Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and George Gascon in Los Angeles. But here is where hope begins. Boudin was recalled by voters in San Francisco in 2022, and Gascon is in a tight race for reelection this November in Los Angeles. Voter sentiment in California is changing. Maybe they’ve finally had enough.

Recent reason for hope is the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision to overturn Martin v. Boise, a ruling that garnered rare bipartisan praise in California. Even Governor Newsom, in a statement on June 28, stood behind the court, saying “Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets.”

A big test of just how much voter sentiment is changing will come if a proposition to repeal Prop. 47 is approved by California voters this November. A trifecta, then, might see Californians entering 2025 with Prop. 47 repealed, the criminal-friendly George Gascon no longer serving as district attorney in a county of 9.7 million people, along with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that makes it easier to get homeless people off the street and into shelters.

Regardless of what happens in this year’s election and at the U.S. Supreme Court, most California voters still need to be convinced that law and order is achievable without violating the dignity and human rights of all concerned. Only with a cultural shift can current and future reforms be sustained. There are three things that conservatives should keep in mind as they consider what message and tone to share with voters on the issues of crime and homelessness.

First, if a conservative candidate or incumbent is unwavering in their commitment to a realistic agenda to reduce crime, there is no harm in acknowledging that criminals themselves are victims. Nobody chooses their parents, their genes, or the society they’re born into. Early childhood trauma can damage a developing brain for life. There is no harm in expressing this fact, and doing so is a better way to attract undecided voters than taking on a punitive tone. One of the reasons crime-friendly district attorneys have been able to attract major donations and win elections is because they have seized the rhetorical high ground of compassion. It’s helpful to expose the hideous results of progressive “compassion,” but that job is much easier when the perpetrators of these failed policies cannot hide behind the shield of compassion. Conservatives must emphasize that they also have compassion, but that compassion comes with obligations. 

Which brings up a second point that conservative candidates should emphasize: deterrence matters. This fact comes with a crucial nuance. It turns out that criminals are not deterred by the severity of punishment nearly as much as they are deterred by the certainty of punishment. In California today, criminals have almost no fear of punishment. The laws aren’t in place to make it likely they’ll ever be held accountable, and either there aren’t enough police to arrest them anyway or police who operate on limited resources are unwilling to spend time on yet another “catch and release” case. If California’s laws and prosecutors were reoriented to a high probability of convictions with sentencing, crime rates would drop overnight.

Finally, the entire concept of incarceration needs to be revisited. I recall a retired sheriff once telling me about an encounter he had with an ex-con who had recently been released. The ex-con confronted the sheriff, who had made the original arrest that sent him to prison. But then something unexpected happened. He explained that while in prison, he earned a high school diploma, learned a vocation that accounted for his current employment, and had been cured of his drug addiction. Prison was the best thing that ever happened to this young man.

A related story came from someone who spent most of his career helping homeless people. He operated a private shelter that put conditions on entry, unlike government-funded shelters. To get admitted, the homeless person had to commit to sobriety, counseling, and job training. The program is successful and could be expanded if government funding were available. More to the point, this man and every other professional homeless advocate operating privately funded shelters have shared the same conclusion—homeless people are almost all substance abusers or mentally ill, or both. Whether that’s the cause or the effect of their homeless status is irrelevant. They need to be compelled into shelters where they can get treatment and recover their dignity.

If Californians begin to reform their laws and recall their crime-friendly DAs, then the overwhelming question going forward is how to come up with innovative new forms of incarceration. The number of incarcerated individuals may not go up as much as statistics currently indicate. Crime is deterred by the certainty of punishment, not by the severity of the sentence. 

By expressing these three concepts—compassion, deterrence, and rehabilitative modes of incarceration—conservative candidates in California have a chance to win over voters who won’t respond to a harsher “lock them all up” message. Adding this nuance costs nothing and, in fact, can pave the way for a productive discussion over the cost/benefit of differing modes of incarceration.

For example, if inmates are sequestered to Cal Fire to work the fire lines, why can’t they do other tasks throughout the rural regions of California? Why not use inmates to improve rural access roads, remove dead trees from our overgrown forests, or even work in agriculture? Why can’t homeless people also have these opportunities?

As for the possible need to expand California’s capacity to absorb minimum security inmates and recovering substance abusers, why not equip new facilities with the latest robotic and surveillance technologies, not to eliminate them but at least to reduce the need for guards and fences? The amount of money that is currently spent to allegedly help the homeless in California could easily pay for shelters—voluntary and involuntary—established in less expensive parts of the state, with plenty of money left over for counseling, job training, and treatment.

Californians can reduce crime without having to invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It can be done by redirecting money that is currently wasted and by political and judicial reforms that change the rules and create deterrence. It can be done with compassion for everyone concerned and deliver results everyone wants. This is the message conservatives can carry in California all the way to victory in upcoming elections now and in the future.

Part Four: Abundant Energy

When it comes to the essentials of civilization, energy is at the top. It is the prerequisite for every other basic essential, from pumping and heating water to powering farm equipment to keeping the lights on. And in California, the state government has declared war on practical, affordable energy. People can’t afford to live here anymore.

The primary cause of the high cost of living in California is out-of-control environmentalism. The two foundations of affordability in California are energy and water, and the institutional and legislative consensus in California is to cram down and ration both of those essentials. But there is a counterargument that is gathering momentum. It represents a tremendous opening for California’s conservative candidates and it can’t come a moment too soon.

Possibly the most powerful and unifying political opportunity in California today is to promote policies that will restore abundance and reject policies that involve rationing. Contrary to the Malthusian dogma that prevails in Sacramento, abundant and affordable energy and water is feasible and sustainable. It is the foundation of middle-class prosperity and upward mobility for everyone. California’s natural resources, innovative culture and wealth ought to make this easy.

Californians have everything they need to have abundant water and energy. The state is blessed with both financial and natural resource wealth. California has ample reserves of oil and natural gas. The state also has untapped hydroelectric potential that could take the form of additional off-stream reservoirs that can utilize pump storage to absorb surplus electricity.

The Case for Electrification

When advocating for abundant energy, it’s accurate to be appalled at the precipitous rush towards renewables before they’re anywhere close to practical and cost-effective. But understanding that we need to be more realistic about how fast renewables can be introduced should not blind us to the case for electrification. An effective argument for abundant energy needs to embrace an all-of-the-above strategy. To dismiss entirely the move towards electrification is an overreaction.

The pie chart below illustrates the argument for electrifying California. The fact is that right now, Californians—along with most everyone else in the world—use energy very inefficiently. Two-thirds of the energy input going into California’s grid in the form of inputs to create electricity, fuel for transportation and fuel for heating and lighting our homes is wasted as friction, heat or transmission losses.

When you electrify an economy, you can actually bring that level of conversion efficiency up to about 80 percent. You can go from 65 percent wasted, which according to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the Energy Information Administration is how much is wasted in California, to only 20 or 25 percent wasted energy. That’s based on basic physics, based on the fact that electricity can be transmitted, stored, and turned into heat, cooling, or traction far more efficiently than devices that rely on combustion. This has to be acknowledged.

But in the here and now, Californians must recognize the consequences of trying to electrify too fast. During 2022, Californians only generated 22 gigawatts on average in the state. They had to import another 10 gigawatts from generating plants in other states, primarily Washington, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. To transition to an all-electric economy, Californians would have to generate approximately five times as much electricity as they did in 2022. This objective is made more difficult by the fact that 50 percent of California’s in-state electricity generation comes from natural gas, as shown on the next pie chart.

The only categories approved by environmentalists today in California are solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and so-called small hydro—if you have a hydroelectric plant that produces more than 30 megawatts, it does not count as renewable energy. Of these approved categories, geothermal likely can’t be significantly expanded; biomass is also problematic and probably can’t be scaled very much; nor can small hydro. That means under the current plan, Californians are going to have to get this additional electricity almost exclusively from solar and wind.

This means that to accomplish California’s net zero goals, wherever you see a solar farm, imagine 20 of them, and wherever you see a wind farm, imagine 20 more. To offer just one example of how insane it is to try to increase California’s solar and wind generating capacity by a factor of twenty, consider what it will take to get energy from offshore wind. Keep in mind this would mean expanding in-state generation of renewables to roughly 100 gigawatts, because that’s a best case number in order to completely replace oil and gas in California.

The federal government just leased more than 500 square miles of ocean off the coast of Humboldt and San Luis Obispo counties for offshore wind in order to build offshore wind farms that are intended to generate 4.5 gigawatts. That’s not moving the renewables transition very far, but even 4.5 gigawatts is overstating the contribution these wind farms are going to make. You have to look at the actual yield from these turbines because the wind doesn’t blow all the time. In reality, these offshore wind farms—if they’re ever built—are only going to actually deliver a baseload power equivalent of 1.8 gigawatts. That isn’t even two percent of what Californians are going to need if they hope to achieve their goal of electrifying their transportation and residential sectors.

Consider the engineering of these turbines. At a minimum, a wind farm with a 4.5 gigawatt capacity will need 450 turbines because the biggest ones only have a capacity of 10 megawatts each. To produce that amount of electricity, each one of these things has to be a thousand feet tall from the waterline to the tip of the rotor blade when extended vertically. Each of these units is expected to float in place while anchored with mooring cables to the sea floor, which, once you are a few miles away from the California coast, is almost a mile down, and each one of them will also require a high-voltage cable dangling to the ocean floor, where it must then traverse its way 20 miles to onshore transmission lines.

Think about the impact to sea life caused by 450 of these leviathans, the navigation hazard; think about the ports, the ships, the submersibles, the divers, and the construction crews. To fully appreciate just how big these wind turbines will be, recall the Statue of Liberty, which is about 300 feet tall from the water line to the tip of the torch. This gargantuan statue and its base towers over the ocean and is visible for miles. By comparison, a 10-megawatt wind turbine is nearly 1,000 feet tall, three times taller than the Statue of Liberty.

You’d have to float and maintain 450 of these merely to get Californians two percent of the way to the electrification they’re going to need if they fully electrify their economy. Conservatives need to make the case to Californians that these proposals are as far-fetched as they are undesirable for the Golden State coastline and the environment.

The Practical Path to Abundant Energy

There are alternatives. And once you point out the futile insanity of pursuing a strategy that calls for total electrification primarily through the installation of more wind farms and solar farms, voters will be ready to listen. To return to abundant and affordable energy in California, here are some solutions to consider.

Advanced hybrid vehicles can use variations of combustible carbon-neutral fuels that are being developed. For example, these fuels can be synthesized by electrolyzing hydrogen and combining that with carbon dioxide waste streams taken from flue gas to synthesize liquid hydrocarbons that are completely carbon neutral.

More practical already is the possibility of producing advanced hybrids that make extremely efficient use of gasoline or natural gas to fuel combustion engines in tandem with much smaller, less resource-intensive batteries powering electric motors. These vehicles would generate almost no pollution and can operate in an all-electric mode on dense urban streets, but retain the extraordinary range and rapid refueling capacity using existing infrastructure when used on longer trips.

So why are Sacramento’s visionaries limiting their automotive future to pure EVs when nobody has the slightest idea where the technology is going with advanced hybrids? Californians can be inspired to embrace their heritage of innovation and not lock out entire categories of technology.

Californians also need to take the natural gas power plants which Sacramento politicians are systematically shutting down and instead retrofit them so they can more efficiently harvest more of the waste heat. This is called combined cycle power generation, where you have a natural gas power plant with a gas turbine that turns a generator, and then the exhaust heat is harvested to heat water that turns into steam to drive a second turbine. Modern designs are already able to get more than 60 percent of the natural gas energy that’s going into a power plant back out in the form of electricity. There are new combined cycle technologies that promise to increase that efficiency to more than 80 percent by replacing steam with compounds that can harvest heat from the first turbine at much higher temperatures.

Why aren’t these innovations being pursued in California, of all places? And if California’s politicians are serious about climate change and if they’re serious about electrifying the economy, why not start running California’s natural gas power plants at 100 percent of their capacity, which is what they were designed for? As it is, California’s natural gas power plants only operated at 28 percent of their capacity in 2022. To make power plants using combustion more palatable to Californians who worry about greenhouse gasses, California’s power utilities can also change the fuel mix, replacing or partially replacing the natural gas with so-called green hydrogen or carbon-neutral methane. 

If the politicians running California explored all new technologies, including innovative solutions that still permit clean and ultra-efficient combustible fuel for electricity generation and transportation, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, including pump storage, along with solar, geothermal, and biomass, working families and businesses there would again have access to abundant and affordable energy. Taxpayers and ratepayers would not need to spend hundreds of billions to subsidize offshore wind, nor would they have to support expensive extremes to deploy utility-scale battery storage. These are practical ways to achieve energy abundance, and it could rely primarily on private investment. These solutions would also cause less disruption to the environment, both in California and around the world.

In an era of $6.00 per gallon gasoline and $0.40 per kilowatt-hour electricity, this is a winning message that California’s voters are desperate to hear.

Part Five: Abundant Water

If energy powers modern civilization, then water gives it life. And in California, for at least the last 20 years, with escalating severity, life has been tough. There isn’t enough water to go around. But as with energy, the water shortages in California are largely the product of political choices. And as with energy, this presents an opportunity for politicians willing to present voters with alternatives.

California’s chronic water shortages aren’t happening because droughts have become more severe, although that is part of the cause. But the main reason there is water scarcity is because Californians have been relying on a water supply infrastructure that was largely completed more than 50 years ago, when the state’s population was half what it is today. Since then, investment in water infrastructure has been neglected at the same time as environmentalists have demanded increasing percentages of water remain in the rivers as “unimpaired flow.” In response, rationing has been the tool of choice to allocate what water supplies remain available for the state’s farms and cities.

When designing policy alternatives to rationing, the first thing to understand is that California’s cities don’t use very much water compared with other uses. On average, the state’s water supply systems divert 75 million acre feet of water from rivers and aquifers, and only around 10 percent of that is used for urban consumption. Moreover, residential water use only accounts for about 6.5 percent of total water diversions in California, or just around 5 million acre feet per year. And of that, 3 million acre feet of that is for interior water use, all of which could be recycled and reused. As for residential outdoor water use, a mere 2 million acre feet per year, this water percolates to help recharge urban aquifers and to irrigate urban landscaping, which helps absorb and filter runoff during storms.

New policies and more investment in water are required, not only because Californians have neglected to maintain and upgrade their water supply infrastructure, even as their population has doubled since the 1970s. 

Between droughts, the draining of Colorado River reservoirs, and depleted groundwater, Californians are going to have to find a source for millions of acre feet per year of new water; most estimates range around 5 million acre feet per year. Getting all of that via conservation will lead to urban water rationing and major reductions in irrigated farm acreage.

The good news is that California is uniquely positioned among the states in the American Southwest to get more water. The state has an 840 mile border with the Pacific Ocean so they can build desalination plants. Even in dry years, California is pummeled with so-called atmospheric rivers that hit the Sierras and dump tens of millions of acre feet onto the high-altitude snowpacks and down the rivers into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Californians have the potential to solve water scarcity for the entire Southwest if we properly harvest water in this state.

What is needed, just as with energy, is an all-of-the-above strategy to develop new water supplies. Conservation is not enough, mostly because the state has already taken most reasonable measures. California’s farmers have doubled their productivity per unit of water over the past 30 years while using the same total amount of water. They were using about 30 million acre feet per year back in the 90s, and they’re still only using 30 million acre feet.

The same impressive achievements in conservation have been made in California’s cities, where total water use per year has dropped from 9 million acre feet in the 1990s to 7.5 million acre feet today. The last time California’s urban water consumption was only 7.5 million acre feet was in 1989, when only 29 million people lived there. Today, there are 39 million Californians. People have become extremely good at conserving water in California.

The question we should be asking is: how much does even more conservation cost in terms of money and consumer inconvenience when permanent new supplies of water are attainable and might actually cost less? 

Where to Find Additional Millions of Acre Feet

There are three big solutions to delivering more water to Californians that sort of go together: more capacity to divert storm runoff from the Delta, more off-stream reservoirs, and more aquifer recharge. All three of these depend on harvesting water from atmospheric rivers; that’s when there’s so much rain coming down that the concern is no longer making sure ecosystems are getting an adequate pulse but rather that flooding needs to be controlled. It’s during these events that we could, if the capacity was there, harvest and store millions of additional acre feet per year, if not tens of millions of acre feet in very wet years.

Another large-scale possibility for more water supply is to recycle urban wastewater. Of the roughly 2 million acre feet per year of urban wastewater that is treated in California’s coastal cities, only about 25 percent of it so far is treated and reused. The rest is treated and discharged into the Pacific Ocean or the San Francisco Bay and its estuaries. Getting the rest of this wastewater treated and reused would not only deliver more than a million acre feet of new water to California’s coastal cities, but it would also solve the problem of nitrogen pollution, which even in treated water is currently being dumped into the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. In both cases, but especially in the Bay and Delta, this nutrient-rich outfall has nurtured algae blooms that kill fish and create dead zones. Investing in wastewater reuse would increase California’s water supply, but it would also rescue these ecosystems.

Not mentioned yet is urban runoff harvesting. This is an interesting topic: right before the crucial vote to approve or deny the Huntington Beach desalination plant, the Pacific Institute, an environmentalist think tank, put out a study claiming that Californians can get up to 3 million acre feet a year from urban storm runoff.  The way they came up with that amount was by compiling data over several years to determine how many inches of rain falls in urban areas, and then by overlaying that data onto a geographic grid, they calculated the total acre feet of runoff in each metropolitan region in the average wet year and the average dry year.

Desalination is also an obvious choice. It has already been proven successful in San Diego, where the Carlsbad plant produces 50,000 acre feet of fresh water per year. But California is the most expensive place in the world to build a desalination plant. The Carlsbad plant cost more than $1 billion, and adjusting for inflation. A proposed Huntington Beach plant was estimated to cost roughly the same amount. Other nations can build these plants for less than half the cost per unit of capacity. In this regard, desalination suffers the same financial uphill battle as nuclear power plants: construction costs are grossly inflated due to overregulation and litigation. Since the price of water and power is largely determined by the amount that recovery of construction costs add to the bills sent to consumers every month, desalination and nuclear solutions are derided by critics as too expensive. But that expense is mostly a political choice, not an engineering reality.

Water scarcity is not being forced upon Californians by climate change. Like so many other fundamental challenges Californians must endure—energy scarcity, catastrophic wildfires, and unaffordable housing—the problem is mismanagement. Investment in water and energy infrastructure would increase the supply and lower the cost for energy and water. 

Ultimately, it is a political choice to impose scarcity on Californians that has created chronic water scarcity, along with scarcity of everything else essential to enabling working families to live with a decent quality of life. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to an environmentalist movement that has become a self-serving industry. The solution to water scarcity is easy: build more water supply infrastructure. To have any hope of implementing a practical, competitive, all-of-the-above approach to water policy in California, conservatives have to confront the environmentalist lobby.

Part Six: Becoming the Wave of the Future

California is in play. Only a small minority of affluent Californians are immune to the failures of the one-party state. Everyone else is its victim. Progressives made this mess. All conservatives have to do is explain how they’re going to clean it up. And their focus must be on three things: lowering the cost of living, controlling crime, and restoring quality education. 

Lowering the cost of living is the only solution that benefits everyone equally and can only be done by deregulating businesses and fostering competition in every economic sector. And that competition must begin with deregulation to stimulate investment in practical solutions to produce more water and more energy.

California’s housing shortage is almost exclusively a product of environmentalist regulations, particularly the restrictions on building new homes on open land, but also a product of excessive building codes that increase construction costs, along with excessive costs for building materials such as lumber that are also the result of environmentalist-inspired laws and regulations.

California is a state rich in natural resources. We have it all here. Oil, gas, timber, water, sun, minerals, and an innovative culture. Up until the 1990s, California was a state where working families could afford to buy a home and pay their utility bills. Those days are gone because of political choices, and those choices were primarily driven by environmentalist excess.

Nobody wants to go back to the days of leaded gas and vanishing wildlife. But the tradeoff between the needs of people and the needs of the environment has now swung decisively in an extreme direction. In some cases—offshore wind energy being a prime example—environmentalist inspired projects are probably harming the environment more than they are helping.

Conservatives should acknowledge how important it is to protect the environment and celebrate the progress we’ve made. But they must not hesitate to hold environmentalists responsible for going too far and, in so doing, denying the vast majority of Californians a chance at a better life.

Repositioning Conservatives as the Wave of the Future

Identifying and focusing on specific solutions that are not primarily ideological is what is necessary to reposition conservatives in California. Anyone skeptical of the persuasive power of these issues should imagine asking any voter, particularly those living in low-income and underserved communities: Do you want to live in a state where your children will get an education that instills a work ethic and gives them the skills they’re going to need to succeed in the 21st century, or not? Do you want to live in a state where significant portions of our larger cities are dangerous no-go zones, overrun with crime, or not? Do you want to be able to afford to buy a home or pay rent and have some savings left over every month after paying your bills, or not?

The power of political optimism is not only because of its intrinsic appeal but also because it stands in stark contrast to the inherent pessimism in left-wing liberal politics. Climate doomsday is almost upon us! No, it isn’t. We can adapt to whatever comes along. We live in an oppressive society! No, we don’t. America, and California in particular, is the most tolerant and inclusive society in the history of the world. And our policies are going to make life even better. For everyone.

If conservatives are willing to redefine themselves not merely as an opposition ideology, but as a movement with well-defined solutions to problems that affect everyone, voters will notice. If conservatives find candidates willing and able to focus on these solutions of universal appeal and deliver their message with not only authentic conviction but irrepressible optimism, voters will notice.

Californians don’t want more of the same. Convince Californians that you have concrete answers, that you have a recipe for positive change, and that you represent a movement with a vision for a brilliant future. You will not only resurrect the conservative movement; you will save the greatest state in America and set an example for the nation and the world.