Arnold Schwarzenegger Claims Greta Thunberg as One of His Heroes

Big mistake. At Instapundit, "GET WOKE, GO BROKE: How Climate Activist Arnold Schwarzenegger Became Box Office Poison."

ICYMI: "Greta Thunberg Mural Goes Up in San Francisco (VIDEO)."

Greta Thunberg Mural Goes Up in San Francisco (VIDEO)

The climate change movement has its cult of personality in Little Greta.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, "Giant Greta Thunberg mural going up in Union Square."

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "RIDE THE CLIMATE CHANGE RECURSION!"

The Unbearable Whiteness of Climate Protest

These ghouls are truly the burden of our time.

A genuine scourge.

At Instapundit, "THE PRESS WAS ALWAYS CAREFUL TO DESCRIBE TEA PARTY RALLIES AS “OVERWHELMINGLY WHITE,” BUT NEVER DOES THAT WITH THE CLIMATE RALLIES THAT ARE FAR LESS DIVERSE."

Climate Strike

We've raised a new generation of idiots. Conspiracists and idiots.

At NYT, via Memeorandum, "Protesting Climate Change, Young People Take to Streets in a Global Strike."

This is what mass hysteria looks like. 🙄 #ClimateStrike https://t.co/nCie2pTbpL

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 20, 2019

More mass hysteria, but #SanFrancisco’s known for it lol. #ClimateStrike 🤓 https://t.co/p55gVEgZi4

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 20, 2019

Democrats Go Off the Rails

On so-called climate change. I watched some of Wednesday's "Climate Town Hall" on CNN. Kamala Harris is just one mean, nasty bitch and I can't understand why anyone votes for her. Elizabeth Warren just looks like she'll pander to any wacky idea the radical progressive left puts out there. "Insane" is the word that comes to mind. I had to turn it off by the time Joe Biden came on. I switched over to watch "World War II in Color" on Netflix, which is the best documentary on the war I've ever watched.

In any case, at Legal Insurrection, "CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Town Hall was a man-made disaster for Democrat presidential candidates."

Ok, so NO nuclear, NO coal & NO oil & gas. Electric’s ok, but all power plants that run on coal or natural gas (most of them) will be shut down too. Planes, I guess, will run on Pixie dust & you’ll put a windmill on the hood of your car. This is not serious; it’s empty politics. https://t.co/xaQiiD2QE6

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 6, 2019

Michael Mann, 'Hockey Stick' Hoaxer, Loses Multi-Million Libel Suit in British Columbia

At Power Line, "MICHAEL MANN REFUSES TO PRODUCE DATA, LOSES CASE."

And MSE Creative Consulting, "The Iconic Image of the Global Warming Movement Is a Fraud."

RTWT. (Via Instapundit.)

Fossil Fuels Are Not an Existential Threat (VIDEO)

Here's Alex Epstein, the author of the The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, for Prager University:

Leftist Millenarianism and the Green New Deal

This is a great piece, a scary piece.

From David Adler, at Quillette, "Straight to Hell: Millenarianism and the Green New Deal":

“The Green New Deal is a reminder that many Americans are desperate for salvation and that religion is no longer slaking this thirst.” https://t.co/uGxCP2aPXH

— Quillette (@Quillette) May 23, 2019

With the Green New Deal, secular apocalyptic ideas have entered the mainstream of American politics. Millenarian thinking has always been present in the US, but it was avowedly religious. Today, those warning of the imminent Apocalypse are not just cranks in sandwich boards on street corners; they are seated in Congress. The radical millenarian ideas that flourished in the Middle Ages or unstable European societies in the early twentieth century can now be found at the heart of the Democratic party.

Read the whole thing --- it's very well done.

OMG! No Way! We're Doomed! Civilization is Accelerating Extinction and Altering the Natural World at a Pace 'Unprecedented in Human History'

More doomsday hysteria from the climate cult.

At the New York Times, "Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace":

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing...

We're all gonna die!

Anti-Humanism

At Quillette, an excellent piece, "How Anti-Humanism Conquered the Left."

“Ehrlich and many others are still claiming that disaster is imminent, despite their previous predictions repeatedly failing to materialize. Just last year, Ehrlich compared human population growth to the spread of cancer.” https://t.co/gzwIto5So6

— Quillette (@Quillette) May 3, 2019

Today is International Workers’ Day, a holiday with socialist origins. Its name hearkens back to a time when the political Left was ostensibly devoted to the cause of human welfare. These days, however, some on the far Left care less about the wellbeing of people than they do about making sure that people are never born at all. How did these radicals come to support a massive reduction in human population, if not humanity’s demise? Whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher blithely claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream.

The logical conclusion of this anti-humanist ideology is, depressingly, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt). According to its founder, activist Les Knight, Vhemt (pronounced “vehement”) is gaining steam. “In the last year,” Knight told the Daily Mail, “I’ve seen more and more articles about people choosing to remain child-free or to not add more to their existing family than ever. I’ve been collecting these stories and last year was just a groundswell of articles, and, in addition, there have been articles about human extinction.”

Over 2000 new people have “liked” the movement’s Facebook page since January and, more importantly, the number of people fulfilling the movement’s goals (regardless of any affiliation with the movement itself) is growing. The U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low. According to the latest figures from the Center for Disease Control, the total U.S. fertility rate for 2017 was at an all-time low of 1.77 babies per woman (i.e., below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman needed to maintain the current population).

Recent examples of writings that are warming to the idea of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’ “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” and the New York Times’ “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” which muses that, “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off.” Last month, the progressive magazine FastCompany released a disturbing video entitled, “Why Having Kids Is the Worst Thing You Can Do for the Planet.”

Some anti-natalists are not content with promoting the voluntary reduction of birth rates, and would prefer to hurry the process along with government intervention. Various prominent environmentalists, from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to science popularizer and entertainer Bill Nye, support the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having “too many” children. In 2015, Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book advocating a “one-child” policy, like the one China abandoned following disastrous consequences including female infanticide and a destabilizing gender ratio of 120 boys per 100 girls, which left around 17 percent of China’s young men unable to find a Chinese wife. Even after that barbaric policy’s collapse, she maintains it was “a good thing.”

Modern-day anti-humanism emerged in the 1970s, midwifed by a doomy strain of environmental pessimism led by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich (but with intellectual antecedents dating back to Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century). Ehrlich published his widely read polemic The Population Bomb in 1968, which originally opened with the lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Thanks to human ingenuity in the form of the Green Revolution, that didn’t happen...

Keep reading.

California's High-Speed Rail Disaster Is a 'Shot Across the Bow for the Green New Deal' (VIDEO)

It really is.

What a total nightmare boondoggle. And now the news is that even the Bakersfield to Merced leg will run out of money before completion. Thanks Democrats!

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "If high-speed rail can’t make it in there, can it make it anywhere in America?"

'Is It OK to Still Have Children?'

Man, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just won't quit, and thank goodness!

The woman's a godsend for American politics, heh.

Click through and watch the video at the link, "Ocasio-Cortez on Climate Change: ‘Is It OK to Still Have Children?’"

And at the New Republic, "Is It Cruel to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?":

If the looming 12-year deadline to confront climate change is missed, what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall? https://t.co/8kbWEf48b9

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) February 25, 2019

In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what “the best thing of all for men” is. “The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,” Silenus replies: “not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.”

Raphael Samuel, a 27-year-old from Mumbai, offered an echo of this argument to the BBC this month. Samuel plans to sue his parents for bringing him into a world of suffering without his consent. “Why should I suffer? Why must I be stuck in traffic? Why must I work? Why must I face wars? Why must I feel pain or depression? Why should I do anything when I don’t want to? Many questions. One answer,” Samuel wrote on his Facebook page: “Someone had you for their ‘pleasure.’”

Once, such thoughts might have seemed far-fetched or even self-indulgent. Today, however, similar reasoning—known as “antinatalism—seems to be spreading as potential future parents contemplate bringing children into a world climate change is likely to devastate. “Why did you have me?” Samuel asked his parents as a child. If the bleak scenarios about the planet’s future come to fruition, will parents have a satisfying answer to such questions?

Once, such thoughts might have seemed far-fetched or even self-indulgent. Today, however, similar reasoning—known as “antinatalism—seems to be spreading as potential future parents contemplate bringing children into a world climate change is likely to devastate. “Why did you have me?” Samuel asked his parents as a child. If the bleak scenarios about the planet’s future come to fruition, will parents have a satisfying answer to such questions?

The basic antinatalist argument is simple, albeit easily misunderstood. As philosopher David Benatar argued in a 2006 antinatalist treatise, life is full of suffering and strife, the moments of pleasure and happiness few, transitory, and elusive, and ultimately it all ends in death. This is not the same as saying that life is not worth living, if you happen to be alive—for one thing, living and then facing death can involve its own physical and emotional pain. The argument is rather that it would have been better never to have been born in the first place. Some lives can indeed be rather satisfactory, even rewarding. But as a potential future parent, you are taking a risk on your child’s behalf, because, Benatar kindly reminds us, “there is a wide range of appalling fates that can befall any child that is brought into existence: starvation, rape, abuse, assault, serious mental illness, infectious disease, malignancy, paralysis.”

Which brings us to a risk unique to the twenty-first century: climate change. According to the 2018 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, humanity has only 12 years left to prevent global warming from reaching levels that would result in the poverty of millions and the greatest displacement of people in the history of humanity as they flee extreme drought and floods. Such events also tend to involve violent conflict. The political community’s tepid response to climate change so far, with world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro refusing to acknowledge global warming as real, let alone as urgent, makes it hard to be optimistic. Given the very real possibility that life will be much worse for the next generation as a result of the global instability, some, recent trend pieces report, are thinking twice about becoming parents.

One might argue that, like Benatar’s catalogue of human suffering, this response is overly pessimistic. Hardship is nothing new. Life can be meaningful despite it, and sometimes even because of it. Strife gives you something to work towards, purpose; it’s what gives life meaning, not what makes it meaningless.

But if climate change causes wars to break out, would one still choose to birth children into a high likelihood of violent death? And if the looming 12-year deadline is missed, and further temperature increases become statistically inevitable, what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall? At least people living today still have the agency to change things. But bringing children into a decaying world, without even the opportunity to do something about it, seems a cruel fate to inflict on someone, especially your own child...

Still more.

But let's be honest: Leftists don't want more babies because they believe that growing populations will bring about the global warming apocalypse. If the current generation stops procreating we can save the planet. The good thing about this, I guess, is that sooner or later everyone dies. Yes, good people will die, but fortunately diabolical anti-human leftists will die too, so burn it all down. If humans are a cancer on the earth, and that's what leftists believe, then fuck 'em. Party like it's 2099. And f**kin' burn it all down.

The Green New Mess (VIDEO)

An excellent segment, from Tucker Carlson:

The Green New Deal

The #GreenNewDeal is perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. But don’t tell leftists! I pray #Democrats run on it — the entire party! <Rubs hands together diabolically ha ha!> This is truly the best political thing ever lol. 😂😎😝

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 9, 2019

The Green New Deal isn't just un-American, it's also completely bonkers. https://t.co/r7VeFTAQIt

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) February 8, 2019

Democrats to Prohibit the Sale of Gasoline-Powered Internal Combustion Vehicles by 2035

I'll move out of state.

At a time when America has gained not only energy independence, but global dominance of the energy industry, which is improving the lives of untold millions upon millions of people, making the cost of living less expensive and improving the quality of life for the nation's poorest and least well-off, California's Democrats are pushing in the exact opposite direction, pushing a fad technology that has not shown to reduce so-called climate emissions.

What a total disaster.

This is the problem with living in a one-party state. The majority becomes diabolically infected with the most ugly hubris, thinking their notions of "what's best" is the only way things should be done. For example, how's that bullet train working out, pfft?

And these freakin' electric vehicles leftists are promoting? People will die driving those human death traps. People will die!

In any case, I swear I'll move.

At LAT, "At Jerry Brown's climate summit, one deadline will overshadow all the others":

California plans to ban sales of internal combustion cars by 2035, outlaw them completely by 2050; assuming anyone will still be living there https://t.co/m0ERMMdZuP

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 12, 2018

from my cold dead hands, motherf***ers pic.twitter.com/rfbt7rk4ZS

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 12, 2018

The political leaders coming from around the world for Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate action summit this week will grapple with a lot of urgent deadlines to drive down emissions, but one date is especially exasperating.

It is 2035 — the year advocates aim to kill off production of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.

Keeping global warming to levels society can tolerate could hinge on meeting that target. But even clean-tech-nology capital California has no clear path for getting there.

The question of whether drivers should be gently persuaded or forced out of their internal combustion engine cars and trucks over the next 17 years will weigh heavily on the landmark summit, which runs from Wednesday through Friday in San Francisco.

States, cities and companies will try to chart a course to carry the country and the world toward meeting the goals in the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which President Trump has disavowed.

Transportation is the most vexing problem the summit will confront. The sector sends more greenhouse gases into the air than any other, recently outpacing power plants, which are getting cleaner every year. Internal combustion engine cars need to be off the roads altogether by 2050 to meet the Paris goals. Dealers would need to stop selling new models 15 years earlier.

“Even during the Obama administration, when the country was pushing as hard and fast as it could onclimate policy, it still wasn’t enough” to meet the goals on auto emissions, said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a Bay Area research firm.

Rhodium’s modeling shows that just 8% of U.S. drivers will be in zero-emission cars, pickups or SUVs by 2025, a depressing projection for the climate movement.

The urgency is not lost on Brown. Last year, he directed the state’s chief air regulator, Mary Nichols, to look into stepping up the state’s timetable to phase out gas and diesel vehicles. It gnaws at him that other nations are already catapulting ahead.

Electric vehicles account for 5% of cars sold in California and 1% nationwide. In Norway, they make up 40%. Bans on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars are scheduled to take effect there and in several other countries as soon as 2025. China has put automakers on notice that a ban is on the horizon.

But it is a much tougher sell in America, even in California. A state legislative proposal this year to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2040 went nowhere.

“You want me to issue a press release saying, ‘No more combustion engines’?” Brown said in an interview Monday. “There are 32 million in California. It doesn’t work that way. We have to provide an alternative…. We have to get that in place.”

The shift toward electric vehicles in parts of Europe and Asia is bolstered by government subsidies and tax structures that few American politicians would consider. They include tough gas-guzzler penalties for those who drive high-horsepower, climate-unfriendly pickups and SUVs, and large cash grants and tax breaks for those who buy electric.

The U.S. approach is grounded in requiring automakers to meet steadily more ambitious mileage-per-gallon targets, a process that has gone a long way in cutting carbon emissions...

Still more, if you can stomach the idiocy.

Trump Administration Set to Collide with California Over Automobile Fuel Emissions Standards

Hey, I love it.

California's ridiculously out of line with its global warming agenda. The pushback is long in coming and much needed.

At LAT, "Trump and California are set to collide head-on over fuel standards":

BREAKING: Trump admin plan would revoke California's authority to set fuel economy rules, and freeze 2020 mileage targets in place nationwide for six years. https://t.co/Qc2l9dvaXE

— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) April 27, 2018

The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state's long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions.

The move forms a key part of a proposal by Trump's environmental and transportation agencies to roll back the nation's fuel economy standards. The agencies plan to submit the proposal to the White House for review within days.

The plan would freeze fuel economy targets at the levels required for vehicles sold in 2020, and leave those in place through 2026, according to federal officials who have reviewed it. That would mark a dramatic retreat from existing law, which aimed to get the nation's fleet of cars and light trucks to an average fuel economy of 55 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead of average vehicle fuel economy ratcheting up to that level, it would stall out at 42 miles per gallon.

That would constitute the single biggest step the administration has taken to undermine efforts to combat climate change.

Cars and trucks recently surpassed electricity plants as America's biggest sources of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. And unlike the electricity industry, in which market forces have pushed utilities toward cleaner energy, including natural gas and renewable sources, relatively low gasoline prices in recent years have led consumers to pay less attention to fuel economy when they buy new cars.

As a result, the steady increase in fuel mileage standards championed by the Obama administration in partnership with California represented the most powerful action the U.S. has taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The biggest gains have been projected to happen in the years that the Trump administration's plan would target.

The plan from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration remains a draft, and White House officials could decide to back away from a direct fight with California and like-minded states.

Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty. Others, aligned with EPA chief Scott Pruitt, have argued for a more aggressive push.

EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman declined to comment on the details of the draft plan.

"The Agency is continuing to work with NHTSA to develop a joint proposed rule and is looking forward to the interagency process," she wrote in an email.

Environmental groups and California officials already have vowed to fight the administration in court. But if the EPA plan prevails, it would be a crippling blow to efforts in California and other states to meet aggressive goals for climate action as well as for cleaning their air.

"I find this to be an outrageous intrusion," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an email.

Don't Feel Guilty About Plastic in the Oceans

This was the best op-ed I've read in a long time.

From David Mastio, at USA Today, "On Earth Day, you shouldn't feel guilty about your plastic trash."

My latest — On Earth Day, you shouldn't feel guilty about your plastic trash https://t.co/EmVTAkSCYW via @usatodayopinion

— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) April 20, 2018

Starving Polar Bear

This is sad, but it's an astronomical leap to infer that humans caused this. We have climate change. There's been climate change throughout history. Radical leftists are anti-human, exploiting the death of wildlife to drive their anti-human agenda.

At USA Today, "National Geographic photographer shares emotional video of dying polar bear."

Also at National Geographic, "Heart-Wrenching Video Shows Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land."

From photographer Paul Nicklen

My entire @Sea_Legacy team was pushing through their tears and emotions while documenting this dying polar bear. It’s a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy. This is what starvation looks like. The muscles atrophy. No energy. It’s a slow, painful death. When scientists say polar bears will be extinct in the next 100 years, I think of the global population of 25,000 bears dying in this manner. There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear. People think that we can put platforms in the ocean or we can feed the odd starving bear. The simple truth is this—if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days of this moment. But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth—our home—first. Please join us at @sea_legacy as we search for and implement solutions for the oceans and the animals that rely on them—including us humans. Thank you your support in keeping my @sea_legacy team in the field.

ICYMI: Rupert Darwall, Green Tyranny

At Amazon, Rupert Darwall, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex.

California to Phase-Out Fossil Fuels by 2045

I suspect I'll be retired living in Wyoming by this time, God only hopes.

Leftists will destroy this state if it's the last thing they do, and by eliminating fossil fuels, that's precisely what will happen.

At LAT (FWIW), "California's goal: an electricity grid moving only clean energy":

California's goal: an electricity grid moving only clean energy https://t.co/WJaunnRfdw pic.twitter.com/xjEK7rUBlZ

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 31, 2017

California lawmakers are considering a future without the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, a step that would boost the renewable energy industry and expand the scope of the state’s battle against global warming.

If approved at the end of the legislative session next month, the proposal would eventually ensure only clean energy moves through the state’s electricity grid, a goal nearly unmatched anywhere in the world.

It would accelerate the adoption of renewable energy by requiring utilities and other electricity providers to obtain 60% of their power from resources such as the sun and wind by 2030. Then it would task regulators with phasing out fossil fuels for the remaining 40% by 2045.

The goal: Less than three decades from now, no coal or natural gas would be burned when Californians charge their electric cars, run their air conditioners or flip on their lights.

The lofty ambition of the legislation, Senate Bill 100, could come with similarly steep challenges.

New solar plants and wind turbines would need to be built in addition to massive batteries connected to the grid to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

The state would no longer be able to rely on natural gas — which can be turned on and off to match demand — to help balance a complex electricity grid that stretches across deserts, snow-capped mountain ranges, urban sprawl and rural farmland.

“It’s doable,” said Mike O’Boyle, who studies the power sector at Energy Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco. “But because we don’t really have a working example for a 100% renewable system, it’s going to be an ongoing experiment.”

Hawaii became the first state to set such a target two years ago, but California would be trying to achieve the goal at a much larger scale. Germany and France, countries with economies closer in size to California’s, are also working to phase out fossil fuels for electricity.

Compared with the political firestorm over extending the state’s cap-and-trade program earlier this year, the electricity proposal has flown under the radar. It was passed by the state Senate in May and requires approval from the Assembly before it can be sent to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), who authored the legislation, said he’s confident the state can pull it off. He compared the speed of renewable energy innovation to the rapid spread of the Internet.

“That’s the type of opportunity we have today, right here in California, with clean energy,” he said.

But utilities and some business groups have concerns.

“We want to help California achieve its bold clean energy goals in a way that is affordable for our customers,” said Lynsey Paulo, a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state’s largest utility. “If it’s not affordable, it’s not sustainable.”

An estimate from nonpartisan legislative analysts shows renewable energy regulations are a relatively costly way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s a more expensive, less flexible approach to reducing emissions,” said Loren Kaye, president of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, a think tank affiliated with the California Chamber of Commerce.

He said ratepayers will end up covering the cost in their utility bills...

See that?

The once-Golden State's largely unaffordable now. Imagine how it's gonna be in 30 years. The entire state will be made up Bay Area leftist-clones. Working class and regular folks will have bailed to parts yonder, Arizona, Nevada, Texas --- even Wyoming.

Good riddance, I say. What a cluster.

Still more.