Victor Davis Hansen -- The Myth of a California Renaissance

From National Review, VDH hits it out of the park again.

Yet despite what God and man have given the state, California has often squandered its inheritance. For all its costly investments in wind and solar power, California’s electricity rates are the steepest in the nation.

The tab falls most heavily not on the green elites of the affluent coastal communities, but on the poor and middle classes concentrated in the hotter and colder interior. For many in Fresno or Bakersfield, keeping the air-conditioning on when August temperatures hit 100 is a fantasy from a bygone age.

Californians pay among the highest gas prices in the country. Again, those astronomical costs seem surreal, given that the state sits atop huge untapped deposits of gas and oil.

The split between the coastal elites and the rest of the state grows daily. California has vast farming resources in the Central Valley which are allowed to sit fallow, due to the water supply being reduced to 10% of the promised allowance to save a non-native fish, the Delta Smelt.