| KTPhil |
Fri Jan 31, 2025 9:54 am |
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Without regard to party or personnel, I wanted to make a historical point that seems to intersect with many threads on topics like EVs, regulation, mpg, pollution... so I wanted to spike out my observation, for those who weren't around (or in California) back to the '60s/'70s. FYI, I've lived here in suburban/rural southern California, but have travelled and worked elsewhere.
California is often portrayed as alternately over-regulated, and industry-leading. On any particular issue, it can be one or the other, but in reality it is a mixture of both.
I'm not debating those particular instances here. It's more of a "how did California come to feel it is so special?" discussion.
In many ways, California had a unique (or more accurately, worse) air pollution problem, starting in the '50s, growing worse in the '60s, and outright deadly in the '70s. Numerically it had the highest concentration of pollution and population. This combination made for the necessity of being more aggressive than the rest of the nation in fighting smog.
I agree with this approach, sort of a "more bang for the buck" combined with "higher costs for generally more affluent consumers"; it was a way to be a pathfinder for the country in fighting smog. So California was granted the ability to set more stringent smog regulations by the Feds.
Growing up in suburban Los Angeles, I can tell you that as a kid the mountains only 5-7 miles away were not visible for much of the summers. We had "smog days" where we stayed inside in elementary school. If you exercised, you felt your lungs burning.
Today I can look and usually clearly see mountains 25 miles away.
The dark side... this unique success started a perception that California should always be ahead of the regulation curve, since it worked unquestionably well in this instance. But it is forgotten that this was a crisis response, and that crisis is over. Expanding this exceptionalist mentality to other areas eventually turns into an extreme and entitled attitude that results in excessive regulation and ever more marginal gains at ever more marginal cost.
It is a mentality that drives hair-brained "solutions" and imaginary benefits, and also cherry-picking results and data in order to justify the efforts. The Average Joe sees through this and now we have both an entrenched nanny state, and an energized opposition.
And that is the dynamic we find today on so many environmental issues.
I won't debate those, and I hope this thread doesn't devolve into those discussions (covered in other threads already). I Just wanted to explain the history of why California has a mentality that pervades its politics today.
One well-deserved victory should not imply that out-doing other states is always the best approach. Yet we do it over and over. |
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| Glenn |
Fri Jan 31, 2025 2:50 pm |
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Jon Schmid wrote: I see this topic landing on the fast track to be locked. :(
Yup...
Locked for Everett to review. |
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| EverettB |
Fri Jan 31, 2025 5:57 pm |
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Nah, let's leave it closed since the very first reply showed where it was going... it was removed.
It can stand alone as it's own statement of history and an opinion of the result. |
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