California has gone far beyond merely encouraging residents to abandon gasoline and natural gas in favor of electricity. In time, it aims to make state residents solely dependent on the electrical grid.
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The state adopted rules that require new passenger vehicles sold by 2035 to be zero-emission vehicles, essentially banning the sale of new gas-powered cars. In the meantime, politicians have also offered subsidies and incentives to make electric vehicles more attractive while imposing increasingly burdensome regulations on their existing gasoline-powered competitors.
California has pursued a similar strategy inside the home. Building codes promote electrification; government programs subsidize electric heat pumps, water heaters, and induction cooking; and regulators have pursued zero-emission standards for new space and water-heating equipment. Some local governments have gone further by restricting natural gas equipment in new construction.
In other words, Sacramento’s strategy combines subsidies for the preferred technology, regulations against its competitors, and mandates seeking to shift Californians from gasoline and natural gas toward electricity — even while Californians already pay some of America’s highest electricity rates.
California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has noted that residential electricity rates are roughly twice those elsewhere in the country. From 2019 through 2023, average California residential electricity rates increased about 47 percent, compared with an increase of roughly 18 percent in overall consumer prices. The state’s costly greenhouse gas policies rank among the primary reasons.
There seems to be something incoherent about making electricity exceptionally expensive while simultaneously requiring citizens to use more of it.
California’s building requirements add another layer. State standards require EV-charging capabilities in new residential construction and demand new single-family homes to include solar photovoltaic systems. Politicians relentlessly demand changes that drive up the already high cost of building homes, while wringing their hands about unaffordable housing.
Imagine the supposedly ideal California home of the future. Its stove is electric. Its water heater is electric. Its heat pump provides electric heating and cooling. The family automobile is electric. Perhaps the garage door, communications equipment, and virtually every other important household system also depend upon the electrical grid.
Then the grid goes down. Suddenly, one failure affects nearly everything.
California doesn’t have to imagine this possibility. The state has experienced blackouts, extreme-heat emergencies, and deliberate public safety power shutoffs intended to reduce wildfire risks. During an extended outage, an electric stove cannot cook dinner. An electric water heater eventually stops providing hot water. Heating or cooling disappears. An EV sitting in the garage may contain plenty of stored energy, but once its battery is depleted, the family’s primary transportation is dead in the water.
Solar panels can improve household resilience, but panels alone do not keep a home operating during a grid failure; appropriate equipment and, for sustained backup, battery storage or another backup source are required.
Contrast that with a diversified household.
Its electricity may fail while its natural-gas stove still provides another means of cooking where service remains available and safe. Its gasoline automobile contains energy stored independently in a fuel tank. A generator might provide emergency electricity. Batteries power radios and flashlights. Solar and storage might provide still another option.
Resilience does not come from pretending that one system cannot fail. It comes from ensuring that the failure of one system does not cause everything else to fail with it.
Investors diversify portfolios because putting every dollar into one company magnifies risk. Computer networks maintain backups because a single copy of important information is dangerous. Hospitals install emergency generators because nobody would seriously suggest that the public electrical grid is sufficiently reliable to make backup power unnecessary.
Yet California’s electrification policy moves household energy in precisely the opposite direction: toward greater dependency.
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The same principle applies to money.
Americans increasingly live in an almost cashless world. We tap a telephone against a terminal, insert a credit card, or transfer money electronically. The convenience is extraordinary — until the system stops working.
An extended electrical or communications outage doesn’t merely darken houses. Internet connections can disappear. Electronic cash registers may stop operating. Credit-card terminals can become useless. ATMs may become inaccessible.
Imagine standing in a functioning neighborhood store during an emergency with food, bottled water, and batteries sitting ten feet away. You have thousands of dollars in the bank and several credit cards in your wallet — but the electronic payment network is down.
At that moment, your wealth is real but inaccessible.
A few hundred dollars in physical currency suddenly looks remarkably sophisticated.
The lesson extends far beyond electricity and money.
A family dependent upon one transportation method is more vulnerable than one with alternatives. A business dependent upon a single supplier is more vulnerable than one with several. Information stored in only one place is more vulnerable than information backed up elsewhere. A society dependent upon one communications network, one payment mechanism, or one energy source comes to a screeching halt when that system fails.
Central planners naturally prefer uniformity. One approved technology is easier to regulate and control. One energy system is easier to manage and manipulate. One payment network is easier to administer and monitor.
Liberty itself contains redundancy. Millions of individuals make independent decisions, pursue different solutions, and prepare for different risks. Some decisions succeed; others fail. But the failure of one does not necessarily become the failure of everyone.
The issue, therefore, isn’t whether electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels, induction stoves, or electronic payments are good technologies. The question is whether politicians should deliberately eliminate or discourage alternatives, making citizens dependent upon one centrally regulated infrastructure for nearly everything.
Californians should be free to choose electricity because it serves them — not because Sacramento has progressively eliminated their other choices.
Keep the electric car if you like it. But keep gasoline-powered ones available. Allow customer demand, not political proclamations, to keep the energy market diverse. Use the heat pump, but don’t sacrifice alternative heating and cooking options. Pay with your phone, but be sure to keep some cash in the house.
The objective isn’t resistance to technology. It is resistance to dependency.
The most dangerous systems are not necessarily the unreliable ones. They are systems upon which everything else has been made to depend.
Resilience comes from alternatives. Liberty does too. Dependence on any single system trades individual resilience for centralized vulnerability — and no government mandate can repeal that reality.
Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com. Read more of his essays there.
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