Featured Video — Is California Feeling Green Yet?

The Capital Research Center is proud to feature a summary of policy expert Rupert Darwall’s new book, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (buy the book here).

Many liberals in California like to boast about their state’s conservationist movement and “environmentally friendly” policies. But pretending that there aren’t negative tradeoffs to California’s supposedly “green” policies does more to hurt Californians than help them.

In Green Tyranny, Rupert Darwall investigates the history of how California’s policies veered further and further towards radical environmentalism, and how the environmentalist movement was hijacked by liberal billionaires and nongovernmental organizations for purposes that are less than “green.”

Watch the CRC’s latest video, “What Green Policies Did for California,” here:

“For the better part of a century,” Darwall writes, California’s shift towards environmentalism “did not put a brake on the state’s booming economy.” However, the ideology behind environmentalism radically shifted further left at the beginning of the 1970s after an oil well exploded off the coast of Santa Barbara. Then-first term Governor Jerry Brown brought in “radical antigrowth environmentalism” policies. By the end of his term in office, the old policy of producing economic growth through industries like manufacturing and agriculture was replaced by environmental “sustainability”—and it came at the expense of economic advancement. As usual, it was paid for by California taxpayers.

Anti-pollution regulation resulted in “aerospace manufacturing shift[ing] to states with lower energy costs.” This economic devastation was so bad, in fact, that “in the ten years to 2015, southern California’s industrial base shed 60 percent of its workforce, from 900,000 to 364,000.”

California’s electricity grid suffered as well. Rising “antigrowth” sentiments in the 1990s emerging from the “green” crusade contributed to rising power costs in the state. As Darwall writes,

hardly any new generating capacity had been built in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Between 1990 and 1999, California’s generation capacity decreased by 2% while consumption increased by 11%.

Darwall also criticized California billionaires and nongovernmental organizations for financially capturing the environmentalist movement. Concerning a 2010 grassroots effort aimed at suspending an energy benchmark law, he writes, what supporters of the legislation “lacked in intellectual edge, they more than made up with an overwhelming money advantage.” Wealthy, left-wing organizations like the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club each donated millions in support of the legislation. In Darwall’s words,

Environmentalism fueled by West Coast billionaires and philanthropic foundations meant that working people lost the political party that was meant to represent them. Money can’t buy me love, but it had bought the soul of the Democratic Party.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex is available for purchase here.