Gavin Newsom Signs Another Climate Bill; California Economy Absorbs Another Cost
Governor Adds to Nation’s Most Ambitious Climate Portfolio; Businesses Discuss Relocation Calculus
SACRAMENTO, CA — Governor Gavin Newsom signed California’s latest climate legislation package into law, adding emissions reduction requirements, clean energy mandates, and environmental justice provisions to what is already the most ambitious state climate portfolio in the United States. The package was celebrated by environmental advocacy organizations and received by California’s business community with the calculation that has characterized California business responses to environmental regulation since the 1970s: whether the compliance costs are offset by the economic advantages of operating in California’s large, wealthy market.
The Economic Calculus
California’s environmental regulations impose compliance costs on businesses that exceed comparable costs in other states, which is a documented reality that neither environmentalists who support the regulations nor businesses that oppose them contest. The debate is about whether those costs are worth it, which is partly an empirical question about regulatory effectiveness and partly a values question about what the state should prioritize. California’s position, expressed through decades of environmental leadership, is that the costs are worth it because the alternative is environmental degradation that imposes its own costs and because California’s market size means its standards influence national and international practice in ways that smaller states’ standards cannot.
The Relocation Calculus
The business relocation question is real but often overstated: California’s economy is the largest state economy in the US and one of the largest in the world, and the advantages of operating in it — access to talent, customers, venture capital, and the innovation ecosystem — offset compliance costs for many businesses. The businesses that relocate for regulatory reasons tend to be those for whom California’s specific advantages are less compelling: manufacturing operations that do not require the innovation ecosystem, and businesses in sectors where California’s environmental standards are most burdensome relative to their other options.
Surfrevolt.com covers the economics of freedom from the lineup outward: the individual’s right to catch a wave without a permit, the surfer’s relationship with a state that regulates the beach, the parking lot, and increasingly the wave itself through managed access programs that ration what the ocean provides freely. The libertarian instinct that animates this publication is the surfer’s instinct: the ocean doesn’t care about your permit. The wave doesn’t check your credentials. The bureaucracy that tries to manage the unmanageable is the bureaucracy that surfers have always found absurd, and surfrevolt.com is here to document the absurdity with the specificity it deserves.
The surfer’s politics are not ideological in the academic sense but experiential: the ocean teaches that some things are genuinely free and that the attempt to manage the unmanageable produces absurdity. A wave does not belong to the state. The beach does not belong to the commission. The experience of paddling out and catching a wave at Trestles, or Ventura, or Malibu, or any of California’s surf breaks that have been contested, permitted, regulated, and argued over for sixty years, is an experience of freedom that no regulatory framework has successfully captured or adequately protected. Surfrevolt.com covers the attempts and the failures because both are instructive about what freedom requires and what the state is willing to permit.
California’s regulatory environment and its economic dynamism have coexisted for decades in a relationship that confounds simple theories. The state that has the strictest environmental regulations, highest taxes, and most expansive government also has the most innovative economy, the highest per-capita income, and the largest concentration of venture capital in the world. This coexistence is neither an accident nor a proof that regulation is economically neutral. It is evidence that context matters: California’s advantages are so significant that they compensate for its regulatory costs in ways that are specific to California and that do not generalize to states or countries whose advantages are different.
The freedom question in California is not whether freedom exists but how it is distributed. The established homeowner with a Prop 13 assessment has a kind of freedom that the renter paying 40 percent of income does not. The surf school operator with an established permit has a kind of freedom that the new entrant navigating the eight-month permitting process does not. The experienced surfer who has always known how to access Trestles has a kind of freedom that the newcomer facing a permit requirement does not. California’s regulatory state distributes its freedoms as unequally as any market, just along different dimensions. Surfrevolt.com covers the unequal distribution because it is the story that determines what freedom in California actually means for the people who do and do not have it.
The specific irony of California surf culture’s relationship with the California state is that surfing itself was the original counterculture act against regulation: trespassing across military land to surf Trestles, paddling out in front of No Swimming signs, treating the ocean as a commons that the state had no legitimate authority to restrict. That tradition of principled trespass has evolved into a culture with its own institutions, permits, and regulations, which is what all countercultures eventually produce when they achieve sufficient scale. Surfrevolt.com remembers the tradition even as it documents the evolution, because the original instinct was right even if it cannot be fully sustained in the current institutional environment.
