California Governor Newsom became further convinced that voters continue to support his bizarre energy policies when they defeated the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election on September 14, 2021, thus keeping the incumbent elected for the term January 2019 to January 2023.
With California having the highest prices for fuel in the nation, the highest poverty and homeless rates, and barely able keep the lights on as its climate policies bite the electric grid, Governor Gavin Newsom is undaunted. With his ego at an all-time high, on Friday September 23rd he signed at least 40 new climate bills to ramp up California’s green-energy shock experiment onto the same citizens that defeated the recall.
Newsom does not realize that wind turbines and solar panels CANNOT manufacture anything for society.
The reasons why subsidized wind and solar electricity are not replacing fossil fuels, is that they can only generate electricity intermittently from breezes and sunshine. When we look at Newsom’s pledge for an all-electric world, it is obvious that Newsom remains oblivious to the reality that everything that needs electricity is made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Newsom has short memories of world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years. Newsom, like Biden, has no “replacement” for oil, just a delusion that intermittent electricity can replace oil.
California, which has been closing continuous uninterruptible electricity generation from natural gas and nuclear plants for years, has forced the state to import over 30 percent of its electricity from other states. This has made California the nation’s largest net electrical-importing state by a wide margin. By 2050, state consultants estimate that electrification mandates, including those for cars and trucks, will cause total demand to skyrocket, with some estimates of demand rising 60 to 90 percent by that time, hoping that adjoining states will have the extra power.
California, a state that was virtually independent of imported crude oil from foreign countries in 1995, today California is the only state in contiguous America that imports oil, now at more than 60 percent of the needs of the fifth largest economy in the world.
At today’s price of crude oil around $90 per barrel the imported crude oil costs California more than $150 million dollars a day, yes, every day, being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs and business opportunities, and drivers to pay premium prices for fuel.
Even with that huge cost burden to the state, Newsom continuously seeks further reductions of in-state production that will place greater dependency on foreign countries, with significant less environmental controls than California, and further increasing the daily cost to the state to meet the demands of its economy.
Newsom believes that an all-renewable electricity system from unreliable weather conditions, WITHOUT the products and fuels from fossil fuels, can work to support a modern economy.
All parts for renewables are all manufactured from crude oil. These manufactured items from oil did not exist before 1900. Ridding the world of crude oil would eliminate wind turbines, solar panels, and vehicles!
In Newsom’s all-electric world, Newsom believes that the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels, which are supporting infrastructures, lifestyles, and economies, which did not exist before 1900, are dangerous and polluting and is causing dangerous climate change.
In Newsom’s all-electric world, Newsom believes that all the infrastructures developed in less than two centuries, from the products manufactured from crude oil, are NOT needed by future societies, such as medical, electronics, communications, and the many transportation infrastructures such as airlines, merchant ships, automobiles, trucks, military, and the space programs.
Those with a passion to rid the world of crude oil are oblivious to the fact that crude oil is virtually useless, until it is manufactured (refineries) into something usable. Those oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our daily lives that did not exist before the 1900’s, and the fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of aircraft for military, commercial, private and the President’s Air Force One, and merchant ships, and the military and the space programs.
These are a sampling of a few items that will not be available from the breezes and sunshine that generates intermittent electricity:
Fuels for the:
- 50,000 heavy-weight and long-range merchant ships that are moving products throughout the world.
- 50,000 heavy-weight and long-range jets used by commercial airlines, private usage, and the military.
- The 290 million registered vehicles in the U.S. as of 2021, that were comprised of about 56 percent trucks, 40 percent cars, and 4 percent motorcycles.
- The cruise ships that now move twenty-five million passengers around the world.
- The space program.
Oil derivatives to make thousands of products such as:
- Tires for the billions of vehicles.
- Asphalt for the millions of miles of roadways.
- Medications and medical equipment.
- Vaccines.
- Communications systems, including cell phones, computers, iPhones, and iPads.
- Water filtration systems.
- Sanitation systems.
- Fertilizers that come from natural gas to help feed billions.
- Pesticides to control locusts and other pests.
- Wind turbines and solar panels as they are all made with products from fossil fuels.
Efforts to cease the use of crude oil will be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change, and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages of fossil fuel products like we had in the decarbonized world in the 1800’s.
Climate change may impact humanity but being mandated to live without the products manufactured from oil, will necessitate lifestyles being mandated back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800’s and could only lead us back to shorter life spans, diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths resulting from the elimination of fossil fuels that are benefiting society.
Life Without Oil is NOT AS SIMPLE AS NEWSOM MAY THINK as renewable energy is only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine and NEITHER wind turbines, nor solar panels, can manufacture products or fuels for society.
While renewables continue to underperform in the generation of electricity, subsidies continue for wind and solar power plants based on “nameplate ratings”.
Wind and solar should be penalized when they cannot deliver that for which they have been permitted. And while Newsom promotes the “nameplate farce” of wind and solar, crude oil continues to be targeted for elimination along with coal and natural gas, even though oil is seldom used for generating electricity.
The unintended consequences of Newsom attempting to rid California and the world of crude oil usage are being realized in supply shortages and soaring prices. The elimination of products and fuels manufactured from crude oil will impose shortages and inflation in perpetuity for all California residents, inclusive of the same residents that defeated the recall of Newsom in 2021.
First published at California Political Review.
Ronald Stein is an internationally published columnist and energy consultant, and a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute.
