(C) Common Dreams
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Gavin Newsom Wants to Build. Everyone Is Not on Board. - The New York Times [1]

['Ezra Klein']

Date: 2023-06-18  

Hitting these goals requires California to almost quadruple the amount of electricity it can generate — and shift what it now gets from polluting fuels to clean sources. That means turning huge areas of land over to solar farms, wind turbines and geothermal systems. It means building the transmission lines to move that energy from where it’s made to where it’s needed. It means dotting the landscape with enough electric vehicle charging stations to make the state’s proposed ban on cars with internal combustion engines possible. Taken as a whole, it’s a construction task bigger than anything the state has ever attempted, and it needs to be completed at a speed that nothing in the state’s recent history suggests is possible.

California has become notorious not for what it builds but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he said. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”

But Newsom’s immediate problem is the Biden administration. Because it, too, has become focused on how difficult it has become to build — and not just in California. “These delays are pervasive at every level of government — federal, state and local,” John Podesta, a senior adviser to President Biden on clean energy, said in a speech last month. “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”

The Biden administration is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into decarbonization. And it wants to make sure it gets a return on that money. So it’s making states compete for federal grants, and one way it’s judging them is on whether the state has made it easy to build. That has become an issue for California.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/18/opinion/newsom-california-building-permitting-procurement.html

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