The Democratic Party’s monopoly on power in California is, apparently, not as invincible as it seems. That is the only conclusion one can reach from the events in Sacramento over the past month, as Democrats have been forced to balance their ideological commitment to destructive climate policies and their desire to avoid the looming political landslide that those policies would bring.

Just last week, California lawmakers approved a change to the California Environmental Quality Act. State Democrats had previously worked on a case-by-case basis to grant exemptions, as CEQA was used to hold up the construction of tens of thousands of homes, bike lanes in various cities, the high-speed rail project, gas stations, and various renewable energy projects. The new change grants blanket exemptions to water system upgrades and manufacturing facilities such as electric vehicle plants. The new reform also provides CEQA exemptions for state-approved rezoning in an effort to make it easier for localities to build more housing.

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Environmental groups are, of course, outraged, but California Democrats were slowly drowning their political power in CEQA delays. Delays of six months or more dragged out the process of building housing and led to increased costs, while also spooking developers wanting to avoid regular legal challenges under CEQA. According to a poll from the University of California, Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, 70% of California voters say housing should be a major funding priority, and 33% rank it as their highest priority, nearly double the next highest issue.

California may be a solid blue state, but the pillars on which the state Democratic Party’s power rests are becoming more precarious. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, a California native, performed worse than any Democratic presidential candidate in California since 2004. President Donald Trump flipped three of the state’s 10 largest counties, all three of which had backed Democrats since the 2004 election. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) got dragged into a recall election in 2021, which had his team nervous for at least one month, and then won an underwhelming victory over a little-known state senator in his reelection campaign in 2022, winning by 6 fewer points than he did in his 2018 victory.

Oil deregulation

As housing and the overall cost of living get more expensive in California, California Democrats are going to become more responsive to complaints about housing, which is how we end up here. You can see this effect in areas other than housing. Take gas prices, for example, an issue that state Democrats have suddenly woken up to as a driver of the state’s cost-of-living crisis. Earlier this year, California Democrats grilled state regulators about gas prices and carbon emissions, acting stunned that the California Air Resources Board does not take into account gas prices when pushing its regulations.

California Democrats refused to block the latest set of regulations, which are expected to jack up California’s highest-in-the-nation gas prices further, but Senate Democrats have begun pushing a bill that would cap the price of fuel standard credits that fuel producers and importers are forced to purchase if they don’t meet the state’s restrictive fuel standards. These offsets supposedly save the planet (spoiler: they don’t), but they also vastly increase the cost of operating in California for refineries and other industries that rely on fossil fuels.

That has become a problem for California, which is on the verge of losing two more refineries, which would cement a 21% decrease in the state’s refining output over three years. Gas prices in California are projected to top $8 per gallon by the end of next year as a result. Gas prices have proven to be a potent electoral issue. Democratic state Sen. Josh Newman was recalled in 2018 in his Los Angeles area district after voting to increase the gas tax, costing Senate Democrats their two-thirds supermajority at the time. California voters nearly repealed the gas tax later that year in a statewide ballot proposition, which only failed because the state’s Democratic attorney general deliberately described the measure in as confusing a way as possible to scare voters away from supporting it.

In that same vein, the vice chair of the California Energy Commission, appointed by Newsom, is recommending pausing the 2023 profit cap on oil refineries that Newsom signed into law in 2023. Newsom even supported this reversal, which, again, is happening because Valero and Phillips 66 are planning on each closing a refinery in the state.

Natural gas

The fear of political consequences altering California’s approach to climate policy actually stretches back years. The Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility is a prime example. Newsom campaigned on closing it. He said in the early days of his first term in 2019 that he wanted to speed up the closure process, which was set to last about 10 years. By 2023, Newsom had begun advocating that Aliso Canyon stay open, and the state was even considering increasing its storage by two-thirds.

In December 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission voted 4-0 to extend the plant’s lifespan, pushing its possible closure from 2027 into the 2030s. This came over the objections of activists, and the vote occurred in the same month that the distribution of a $71 million settlement was announced for the facility’s 2015 methane leak, one of the largest gas leaks in the history of the country.

All the environmentalist momentum would suggest that Aliso Canyon was on its way out, but Newsom and state regulators couldn’t pull the trigger. Newsom said in a statement that “Aliso Canyon must be closed for good, but without harming working families with skyrocketing utility bills.” According to Newsom, “It would be reckless and irresponsible to burden working families with enormous price increases, all with no guarantee of being able to keep the lights on,” and that this was “a reasonable path that protects residents near the facility and doesn’t throw the natural gas market into chaos.”

Nuclear power

The same thing happened with Diablo Canyon, California’s last operating nuclear plant. A 2016 agreement between PG&E, which runs the plant, and environmentalists and the plant’s workers union set a closure date for Diablo Canyon in 2025. But Newsom was plagued by summer after summer of headlines about rolling blackouts as California’s renewable energy failed to keep up with energy demand. The plant accounts for over 8% of California’s energy production on its own. According to PG&E, the plant also accounts for 17% of California’s carbon-free energy.

CALIFORNIA’S ENERGY DISASTER IS NO MODEL FOR THE NATION

Newsom thus advocated to keep the plant open, and state Democrats voided the closure deal in 2022 at Newsom’s request. California energy regulators voted in December 2023 to extend the plant’s lifespan to 2030, and federal regulators are poised to renew the plant’s license for another 20 years, just in case California Democrats get cold feet again when it comes to closing the plant and losing almost one-tenth of the state’s energy in five years.

Again, the motivation for this walk-back of climate policy was a fear of political consequences. Newsom and state Democrats are afraid of being blamed for rolling blackouts, just as they are afraid of being blamed for rising gas prices, the state’s affordability crisis, the housing crisis, or rising energy prices. They know that even traditionally Democratic California voters have a breaking point, and that means that environmental policy must be slowed or even reversed as possible political backlash brews.