California EV Mandate Approaches; Surfers Assess Whether Bureaucratic Climate Policy Aligns With Surfing’s Anti-Authority Ethos
CARB zero-emission mandate tightens; wave riders weigh EV advantages against range anxiety on remote surf trips; market signals vs mandates debate
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
California’s zero-emission vehicle mandate — which requires all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be electric by 2035, as administered by the California Air Resources Board — is approaching with the slow certainty of a medium-period swell: you can see it on the charts, you know it’s going to rearrange the lineup, and the surfers who have been at this break for thirty years are watching with the specific skepticism of people who have seen regulation arrive before and noted that it rarely produces the ocean it promises.
The libertarian case against California’s EV mandate is not that clean air is bad or that climate change is not a problem. It is that government mandates replace market choice with regulatory diktat, that the timeline for mandating away internal combustion engines is driven by political calculation rather than technological readiness, and that the people who will bear the highest costs of this transition — working-class Californians who drive older vehicles, work in industries that depend on internal combustion equipment, and cannot absorb the premium that electric vehicles currently command — are not the people who designed the regulation.
The Surf Industry’s Specific Relationship to EV Mandates
Surfing creates a specific relationship between people and internal combustion that the zero-emission mandate will need to address: the surf van that hauls boards and wetsuits and four friends to a camping spot a hundred miles from the nearest charging station; the diesel truck that tows the boat; the gas-powered generator at the remote break. The EV infrastructure that exists in coastal Santa Monica is not the EV infrastructure that exists at the breaks in the Sierras, on the Baja peninsula, in the rural stretches where surfers actually camp. “Range anxiety” is not just a marketing concern for non-surfers — it is the practical question of whether you can drive three hours into the desert for a swell, run the heat all night, and still get home.
The EV’s genuine advantages for urban surfing — lower fuel cost, reduced emissions in congested coastal cities, access to HOV lanes that get you to the break faster — are real and are moving younger surfers with short-range commuting patterns toward electric vehicles voluntarily, which is how a functioning market should work. The mandate extends this choice to people for whom EV infrastructure doesn’t yet match their actual use case, which is how government mandates don’t work.
California’s Regulatory Pattern
California’s regulatory response to its significant environmental challenges has consistently combined genuine environmental concern with regulatory overreach that produces costs and restrictions that market mechanisms would not have generated and that fall disproportionately on middle-income Californians. The state has the world’s most ambitious climate regulations and some of the world’s worst housing affordability, which is not a coincidence but a reflection of the same regulatory culture: well-intentioned regulations that restrict supply, drive up costs, and produce outcomes that require additional regulations to address. The California Air Resources Board is a legitimate institution pursuing legitimate environmental goals. The libertarian argument is not with the goal but with the mechanism: competitive market pressure from Tesla’s success, consumer preference shifts, and advancing EV technology were already moving the California vehicle market toward electrification faster than historical comparable markets. The mandate accelerates this movement at the cost of choice, market flexibility, and the specific freedom to make transportation decisions based on your own assessment of your needs.
The Surfer’s Political Philosophy
Surfing produces a specific relationship to authority and freedom that is not easily categorized within conventional political frameworks. The ocean does not negotiate. It does not issue permits, form committees, or produce impact assessments. It generates energy from wind fetch across open water, transmits it across thousands of miles of ocean, and delivers it at the break in forms ranging from unusable slop to transcendent perfection, without consulting any regulatory body about the appropriateness of the conditions. The surfer who reads a swell chart, drives to the break before dawn, paddles out in cold water, and catches the wave before the crowds arrive has exercised a kind of freedom that government cannot provide and cannot easily restrict: the freedom to show up, to have prepared, and to encounter reality on reality’s terms rather than on the terms that bureaucratic systems impose on everything they touch. The libertarian political philosophy that resonates with this experience is not the libertarianism of think tank policy papers, although those papers make useful arguments. It is the libertarianism of showing up at the break and finding that the wave doesn’t care who you voted for, how much you earn, or what your regulatory compliance status is. It just breaks. Your job is to read it correctly and respond accordingly. Every surfer who has done this well understands something about freedom that political theory describes imperfectly. The ocean is always free. The parking lot situation, however, requires ongoing engagement with the systems that govern everything outside the water.
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California’s Permanent Political Economy Problem
The pattern across California’s regulatory failures — housing scarcity, EV mandate timelines, utility monopoly disasters, transit underfunding, environmental review delays — is not accidental and is not fixable through better-intentioned regulation. It reflects the specific political economy of a state where the people who benefit from regulatory restriction (existing homeowners, licensed businesses, established utility operators, incumbent politicians) are better organized and more politically effective than the people who bear the costs of that restriction (first-time homebuyers priced out of the market, workers who can’t afford the EV mandate’s transition costs, fire survivors who can’t switch utility providers, surfers who pay $35 to park at a beach that the ocean provides for free). The libertarian solution is to change the political economy by reducing the government’s capacity to create and maintain the restrictions that produce these outcomes — not by replacing one form of government management with another, but by expanding the scope of decisions that individuals and voluntary markets make without government permission. This is easier to state as a principle than to implement in a state where the political coalition that supports regulation is deeply entrenched and the political coalition that opposes it is fragmented, underfunded, and philosophically diverse. The wave is still free. The system that governs everything outside the water is not. Understanding why, and what to do about it, is the work of the libertarian political project in California — a project that the surf community, with its anti-authority ethos and its direct experience of freedom as a physical reality rather than a political abstraction, is unusually well-positioned to understand.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
