Mastodawn

@Rusty tbfh like why the fuck would i vote for the guy who as recently as last year was willing to throw trans people under the bus to get what he wanted, as if sacrificing us for the economy is the lesser of two evils

@Kodi Meanwhile Gavin's entire economy is being held up by a bubble that's destroying the environment, weeeeeee.

@Rusty i lived in cali for a while. in some ways it was nice, but also it has a high homeless population for a reason. they will Not make more desalination plants despite nearly single handedly bleeding the reservoirs for the whole southern sierra desert, is absurdly expensive, and every open field there is filled with oil wells. california is a blue state in the same way kraft singles are cheese

@Kodi California is a shining beacon that liberalism is not leftism. California is a blue state, yeah, but that's because the Democrats are a right-leaning liberal party. It's basically a neoliberal hellscape here.

That said, here comes the insufferable part where I defend California at least a little bit. Desalination is not a great way to generate water. It's incredibly energy intensive, the brine it produces is terrible for the environment, and it doesn't scale well, so you'd end up burning more fuel to produce water that makes less of a dent than other water preserving methods California is actually implementing. California is requiring new agricultural methods to replace flood irrigation, infrastructure to refill underground aquifers with winter snow melt, wastewater recycling, rebates for removing turf, covering canals with solar panels to generate electricity and prevent evaporation, etc. They recently passed an $8.7 billion dollar bill to reduce wasted water in the California water supply.

The biggest problem California faces in funding infrastructure and reducing costs is that California pays the highest proportion of taxes to the federal government compared to the little it gets back. The tax deficit is actually insane. California is being bled dry by red states that cut their own taxes then expect the federal government to bail them out with California's money.

As for the oil fields, meh. I dunno if that makes California any less progressive. Norway is a petrostate just as much as any country in the middle east, but I wouldn't call Norway a conservative country.

To be clear, my defenses of California here does not make it a progressive state. It is a neoliberal state that regularly fails to make any meaningful social reforms that'd drastically improve the lives of the people living here. California needs massive redevelopment to drastically increase its housing stock and access to public transportation, but thus far it's only making very meager steps in that direction. The power to implement restrictive zoning needs to be stripped from municipalities and the people who live there and the state needs to assume much more power to spur on low-cost housing. That'll probably never happen.

@Rusty It doesn't read as a defense of California as a progressive state, no worries lol

In terms of like, generating power, iirc people are charged out the ass if they get solar panels in order discourage them from doing so. At least we were in Stockton. Cars are one thing I guess if EV vehicles just aren't powerful enough yet, but it's the mix of oil fields + allowing oil companies to make it as expensive and inconvenient as they can to move away from oil that pisses me off with that, tbh. When I see those oil fields I can't help but remember that like at least part of the demand they're drilling for is being artificially inflated by more sustainable things being harder to get in their own state by the company that is drilling. We need to be moving away from oil however we can, not investing in more of it or allowing people to be bullied into relying more on it. That and like, allowing fracking on a fault line seems a little more than unnecessarily stupid.

As far as desalination plants go - idk, makes sense. I pretty much start and stop at "california has 0 water but ocean has 10,000 water" admittedly and wasn't really aware of any bad byproducts and the like

Rusty Corgi

@Kodi I'm not entirely sure I know exactly what you're referring to. The only solar surcharge I can find is a grid participation tax implemented in 2026, but that's not a separate charge and is only taken out of the money you make selling electricity back to the grid. It's used to cover the costs of transmission lines and other electrical infrastructure, as those weren't being properly funded when everyone's electrical bills were being reduced by selling electricity back to the grid. California in 2026 really pushed for an adoption of solar battery systems so people store their solar for nighttime use instead of selling it back to the grid only for it to be transmitted back at night. I'm not sure I know about any other surcharges.

Oil companies in California charge as much as they do for gasoline because they're required to use a special formulation called CaRFG that's more costly to refine, but it reduces smog and the prevalence of VOCs in the atmosphere. Chicago does the same thing in the summer because the city was being smothered so bad by smog.

As for other renewables, I dunno. There are EV tax credits, but EVs are still prohibitively expensive for many Americans. The biggest thing California did to limit access to renewables was the removal of all of its public transit infrastructure 70 years ago because of lobbying from car companies like GM-- and, even then, that wasn't really a government decision since the networks were private at the time, and the National City Lines (NCL), a holding company funded by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum, just bought em up and closed em.

@Rusty Not entirely clear on the details either tbh - it was something my landlord I'd lived with used to mention a lot, So I only know about it because I had to pay part of it. I guess they'd gotten solar panels installed and they'd get like an annual bill for having them that they said mitigated any savings they'd have made otherwise. This was in like 2023 so def before this year... If it turns out my landlord was lying I'll be pretty annoyed but in hindsight I am not sure I can put that past him.

@Kodi My guess is that it was a true-up bill, which is just a final adjustment that California operators make when they reconcile the solar vs electricity usage for the year. Most utilities use an electricity "estimate" for the monthly bill, and they'll reconcile that difference at the end of an semi-annual or annual cycle. The payment wasn't a charge for solar panels, it was just a charge for energy that was consumed that PG&E didn't estimate for during the monthly billing cycles.

@Rusty Oh that was it, that was the name of it. That is also much different than what they told me it was for, lol

Good to know!

@Kodi They sound very landlord-y

But yeah, thanks for letting me ramble.