How China Captured California

Original article here

Why does California have the highest gasoline taxes in the U.S.? Don’t look to the Strait of Hormuz. Look at Beijing.

Of course, energy has been expensive in California for a long time. Some of this can be attributed to spacey Californians who have spent half a century dreaming up green disasters. The 1979 movie The China Syndrome depicted the evil power company that built its nuclear plant on a fault line. It had nothing to do with China, except that in a meltdown, the reactor’s core would, so to speak, drop all the way there.

The real China syndrome began later. In 2005, the mayor of San Francisco paid a visit to Shanghai, where he worked out some agreements that furthered city-to-city cooperation. Mayor Gavin Newsom was at the beginning of a career that married environmental alarmism to close cooperation with the Chinese state. The memorandum he signed with Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng brought Chinese police officers, attorneys, and judges to the Fog City. Newsom in turn brought bottles of PlumpJack from his Napa Valley winery.

The relationship burgeoned, and Newsom also met with Jia Qunlin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. They brokered an agreement between the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Peking University to form a joint Center of Excellence in Quantitative Biomedical Research.

These may sound like small steps, but they were steps in a very specific direction. Newsom had political ambitions, and the Chinese Communist Party had a strong interest in steering California’s energy policy. In 2017, Newsom, then serving as lieutenant governor, wrote a piece for the journal Medium outlining his plans for green energy, environmentalism, and California’s role in advancing climate change policy.

How was this to be accomplished? The short answer is that he used the state’s regulatory power to make gasoline extremely expensive, to drive up energy prices overall, and to squeeze every industry that needed fuel. The key institution regulating these new environmentalist policies was, and remains, the California Air Resources Board (CARB). California became the first state to mandate the sale of electric vehicles.

One can think of this as simply Newsom’s pure commitment to green energy. Or one can consider that China was and still is the best supplier of the necessary green technology. The coincidence seems a lot less coincidental when one looks at the agreements Newsom reached with the Chinese, flooding the University of California with Chinese researchers assigned to help the state achieve its alternative-energy dreams. A major player in this is the California China Climate Institute (CCCI), which is a partnership between the University of California Berkeley and Tsinghua University (often described as China’s MIT).

It is not too much of a simplification to say that what CCCI proposes, CARB imposes.

My organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), has spent a year attempting to trace the connections, the political favors, and the interweaving of Chinese state interests with California’s political establishment. We don’t have subpoena power or deep connections to the regime. We are, instead, specialists in higher education, so we naturally learned more about that side of the picture than anything else. But the political side was unavoidable.

My assessment: California’s energy policy is made in China, and California is in many respects a vassal of China. Best of all, from China’s perspective, few Californians realize it. They live in a dream world where high-price energy is just the cost they pay for a really clean environment. NAS’s report, Behind the Climate Curtain: China’s Hidden Role in California’s Energy Mandates and University Partnerships, presents our evidence to back these audacious claims. I can’t say we have the kind of proof that will lead to future perp-walks of politicians by the FBI. But we have wind farms, solar plantations, and tankers full of the kinds of details that investigators might want to examine.

But for those who wonder whether the thesis is overstated, consider that China supplies 75 percent of solar panels used in the U.S. It also supplies more than 60 percent of global wind turbine components, including 67 percent of blades and hubs. The more America transitions away from fossil fuels, the more dominant China becomes in our energy sector. And California is more dependent on this market than any other state.

Chinese “experts” coach American regulators on what to do next to achieve “net zero emissions.” But China, of course, does not impose such policies on itself. About 85 percent of China’s energy production derives from fossil fuels, including about 58 percent from coal. China feints towards an “alternative energy” transition, but unlike California, that’s a far-off alliance in the People’s Republic.

Those of us who don’t live in the Golden State can count ourselves lucky, for now. But China’s political strategy and its energy interests don’t stop at the Sierra Nevada. Unless we stop China now, that climate curtain will descend on us all.

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Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars.