California’s Energy Colonialism

“When you look at the globe, California is a little spot on that globe,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently at Yale University’s Climate Change Conference. “But when it comes to our power of influence, it is the equivalent of a whole continent.”

Perhaps. As an exercise of this influence, Mr. Schwarzenegger has attempted to push climate-change policy forward, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. It commits the state to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels


“California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” he said in his state of the state address last year. “Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there.”

His words are in keeping with the state’s self-perception. Politicians, business titans, academics and environmental activists proudly point to four decades of environmentally conscious public policy