That has been the mood music for most of the last year, as some Democrats dream about getting rid of their current ticket and replacing it with more adept, more popular, more articulate, and less physically and mentally rickety politicians.
Leaving aside the gratuitous propaganda where neutral journalism should be, Politico is on to something. At the moment, that doesn’t appear to be very important to the governor, whose Public Utilities Commission recently unanimously approved increasing storage capacity in Aliso Canyon to almost 70 billion cubic feet, which is about a 60% increase. By comparison, all of California uses about 6 billion cubic feet a day.
How can the transition to clean energy happen with this sort of backsliding going on? Well, it turns out that some governors may care more about reliability and affordability than about the energy transition. It seems safe to conclude that citizens think the uninterrupted provision of electricity at nonconfiscatory prices should be a necessity in an advanced nation like the United States. They would rather not be the lab rats for various schemes.
Smart politicians — and Mr. Newsom is a smart politician — know that and act accordingly. That is why he has turned his back on his brethren in the environmental community.