Newsom touts “clean energy” as California’s growth engine, but fact-checks reveal costly mandates, false claims, and heavy reliance on gas, oil, and nuclear to keep the lights on.

In a recent guest op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, California Governor Newsom claimed that “Clean Energy Powers California’s Economic Growth,” a claim that is transparently false. American Greatness has the story.

Aggressive “clean energy” mandates, paired with perpetually escalating restrictions on conventional energy sources, are the reasons Californians pay the highest prices in America for gasoline and electricity, and nearly the highest prices of any major state for natural gas.

Along with ignoring the fact that affordable energy is fundamental to economic growth and California has the least affordable energy in America, Newsom makes grossly incorrect statements.

In the subhead of his op-ed, he writes, “More than two-thirds of the state’s electricity is from sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal.” This isn’t even close to accurate.

The California Energy Commission reports in-state electricity production by source. The most recent data is for 2023, and in that year, wind, solar, and geothermal energy accounted for a mere 31 percent of California’s total in-state electricity production. Even when adding nuclear and hydroelectric power, California’s total “clean” energy only accounted for 54 percent of the electricity generated in the state.

Newsom goes on to write that “climate change has made our summers hotter,” and that 2024 was the warmest on record. He boasts that “rapid deployment of clean energy and battery storage” got Californians through the summer of 2024 without blackouts.

This is a half-truth at best. As reported in CalMatters, a left-leaning site that covers California politics, in 2023, in order to “shore up California’s straining power grid,” Newsom delayed the planned closures of three natural gas-powered generating plants that together contribute 2.2 gigawatts to California’s electricity grid.

In 2022, Newsom delayed the planned 2025 closure of California’s last major nuclear-powered generating plant, Diablo Canyon, preserving another 2.2 gigawatts of baseload electricity.

Furthermore, no fact check of Newsom’s WSJ op-ed would be complete without questioning his claim that 2024 was “the warmest on record.” This is something we hear all the time.

It is a statement meant to foment fear and discourage dissenting opinions. But is it true?

Los Angeles County, a place where an estimated 27 percent of all Californians live, has kept temperature records since 1878. If you plot the average annual temperature, you will see a trend suggesting that overall, in Los Angeles County, it is not quite three degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the 2020s than it was in the 1880s.

The trend isn’t smooth. In the 1930s, average temperatures were comparable and, in some years, hotter than in the 2020s. But there’s a major factor that politicians and biased activists conveniently ignore: the urban heat island effect.

Consider this animated map showing urban development in Los Angeles County over the past century. The area of paved surfaces today is easily ten times more extensive than it was in the 1930s.

According to no less an authority than Cal EPA, the urban heat island effect can raise average temperatures by between 4- and 9-degrees Fahrenheit. By that logic, it’s cooler in Los Angeles County today than it was a century ago. It’s pavement, not greenhouse gas, that’s caused a modest rise in temperature.

Returning to Newsom’s dishonesty regarding energy, and to be fair, California’s sunny weather and lowering costs for photovoltaic arrays and stationery, utility-scale battery storage has allowed the state to develop an impressive renewable electricity capacity.

But what stabilized the grid in 2024 was 4.4 gigawatts of natural gas and nuclear-powered electricity that, were it not for Newsom’s intervention, would have already been taken offline by the environmentalist fanatics who run the state.

Even during afternoons in late summer when peak demand frequently draws over 40 gigawatts from California’s grid, 4.4 gigawatts offer a share that spells the difference between stability and crash.

Read the full story here.