The Environmental Defense Fund wants to shut off the lights in California

“California is doubling down on cheaper, cleaner electricity and curbing climate pollution while DC digs in on failed policies that fuel higher energy prices and the climate crisis,” proclaimed the California state director for the Environmental Defense Fund, in the opening sentence of a news release from Friday.

“Fake news release” would be a truthier description. California has already “doubled down” with the most expensive energy in America.

According to the most recent data from Electric Choice, an electricity price comparison website, Californians pay twice the national average for residential electricity.

And just stepping across the border out of California slashes your electricity rates by even more than half. Residential electric rates in California are 120 percent more expensive than in Oregon, 122 percent higher than Arizona, and 163 percent higher than Nevada.

The only state with higher residential electricity rates than California is Hawaii.

The most recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy (covering April 2025) also shows Californians paying $4.85 per gallon for gasoline. This was 52 percent more than the national average at that time, and more than every other state. Sunny states such as Texas, Tennessee and South Carolina all checked in with prices at least two dollars per gallon cheaper. Californians who wanted to keep their mountains could have saved nearly two dollars per gallon by moving to Colorado; Californians wanting their sunshine and coastline could have done the same by fleeing to Florida.

Fleeing California is exactly what has occurred. Prior to 2020, California’s growth rate, relative to the nation, had slowed to the point where the state ended up losing a Congressional seat and electoral vote for the first time in its history.

And that turned out to be the good news. After 2020, California’s population began to decline. Census Bureau estimates show California’s population fell by 90,000 between 2020 through 2024, one of only seven states to lose residents.

During those same years the nation’s population increased by 8.5 million and California’s three neighbors (AZ, NV and OR) added a combined total of more than 574,000. Those sunny states with inexpensive energy also added proportionally huge gains during the previous four years: Texas up more than 2 million residents, Florida nearly 1.8 million, South Carolina almost 350,000, Tennessee 300,000, and Colorado 170,000.

The Friday news release from the Environmental Defense Fund dodges this dismal evidence and claims California is the place those states should emulate.

“California created the continent’s first carbon market,” claimed EDF’s California state director. “Extending Cap and Invest for the next twenty years will help keep costs down for families while enabling a growing list of jurisdictions across North America to join.”

Two more decades of this???

When I was a young teen in early 1980s Michigan, we suffered a brutal recession that led to the circulation of a sardonic joke: “Will the last person to leave Michigan please turn off the lights?” If California continues taking policy advice from the Environmental Defense Fund, then the last person out may not be able to afford lights.