California’s sweeping climate change policies cost a fortune –– for no benefit

“The science is settled.” It’s Sacramento’s answer to every climate question.

And if we’re talking about economics, also known as the “dismal science,” that’s right: California’s climate change policies have failed.

They impose huge costs, for no apparent benefit to the planet.

Climate science can tell us the Earth is warming. What it doesn’t measure is freedom: how much of yours a policy is worth, or whether imposing it on you is worth the cost.

Those aren’t scientific questions. They’re political ones — and in a free state, liberty is supposed to be the default position, not something you win back mandate by mandate.

California met climate change with a machine, not a single law: Cap-and-trade, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, renewable electricity mandates, clean-car rules, building electrification, methane regulations, land-use policies designed to get you out of your car.

That’s the short list.

Start with gasoline. In January 2026, the California Energy Commission put the Low Carbon Fuel Standard at about 17 cents a gallon and cap-and-trade at another 25 cents — 42 cents every time you fill up.

Then there’s your electricity bill: a 60% renewable mandate by 2030, and a 2045 target of zero-carbon power that could add roughly 6% to system costs — before it even reaches your grocery bill.

Multiply that logic across housing, appliances and manufacturing, and you get dozens more mandates like these, in places you’d expect and plenty you wouldn’t.

Energy abundance is itself a form of climate protection: The people best protected from heat and drought are the ones who used the most of it, not the least.

No formula takes carbon dioxide in the air and spits out the right gasoline tax or water heater rule. At some point science ends, and judgment — made by voters’ elected officials — begins.

Do any of these actually work? I doubt it, and nobody in Sacramento has ever had to prove otherwise.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office says it knows of no reliable study isolating how much cap-and-trade alone has reduced emissions, even as it estimates the program could add roughly 74 cents a gallon at the pump and cost the average household $700 a year if allowance prices hit their statutory ceiling.

The LAO does say cap-and-trade is more cost-effective than most other state programs. Granted.

That doesn’t tell you whether it moved the planet’s temperature at all.

California’s air isn’t sealed off from Nevada’s by some kind of glass dome — climate change is global, but that cuts both ways.

Asking what difference all this actually makes is basic accountability — not denial.

Proof should come before the bill, not after — Sacramento should have to show a regulation works before charging you for it.

Here’s the elephant in the room nobody in Sacramento wants to name: There is no moral, political or environmental justification, none, for regulations this sweeping and this expensive, imposed on a single state that accounts for less than 1% of the planet’s human-made carbon emissions.

California could shut down every car, furnace and factory tomorrow, and the global climate wouldn’t notice.

Which is why the answer isn’t to reconsider these programs. Reconsidering implies some might be worth keeping, and given what one state acting alone can accomplish, none are.

What California owes its residents is an orderly termination: real wind-down timelines, real transition periods where genuinely needed, but a clear, honest exit from cap-and-trade, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and everything else on the list.

None of this is an accident.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters

California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn California Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X California Post Opinion California Post Newsletters: Sign up here! California Post App: Download here! Home delivery: Sign up here!Page Six Hollywood: Sign up here!

A lot of the people demanding you accept “the science” — Gavin Newsom included — aren’t following data at all. They’re progressive ideologues who’ve found a climate-shaped vehicle for what they actually want: bigger government, more control, less of your money in your own pocket.

Underneath that is another rationale, delivered with the same quiet certainty as a line from “The Mandalorian”: This is the way.

California has to go first, the theory goes, so the rest of the country, the rest of the world, follows.

Maybe.

But that’s a bet placed with other people’s money, by politicians who don’t have to live with the bill.

It’s the same Californians, year after year, funding a strategy that depends on the rest of the planet someday copying us, while living through an affordability crisis of epic proportions: priced out of housing, squeezed at the pump, watching their power bills climb every summer.

Asking Californians alone to bankroll the world’s climate conscience is a very expensive kind of unfairness — not leadership.

Nobody serious questions that carbon dioxide affects the climate.

What’s actually in dispute is whether that fact justifies every tax, fee, mandate and restriction California politicians have bolted onto it.

For too long, Sacramento has assumed the answer is yes, without proving it.

That failure isn’t a reason for more time. It’s a reason to wind this down.

Liberty should be presumed. The imposition of regulation in place of it requires significant justification in the United States of America, which last I checked includes California.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.