By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Not-So-Golden-Anymore State has always been fertile ground for unintended consequences thanks to the inability of the hard left leadership to critically think. The progressive left does not understand cause and effect, and they believe that when they make a law the response will be strict obedience. As usual, their policies are like a pile of leaves in the wind – and this time their idiotic policies about small gas engines are crashing and burning.
California, in its infinite wisdom, banned small off-road engines — mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws — as part of its crusade to save the planet from Climate Change. Think about that for a moment: their answer to save the planet against a natural phenomenon that they claim is man-made is to implement authoritarianism as they scream and yell that the guy in the White House who is reducing the size of government and doing what he can to cut regulations and federal spending is some kind of fascist authoritarian.
The claim is that the move to ban these engines will save California from out-of-control emissions. A bold move, they said, when it was implemented. A climate victory, they claimed. But as any red-blooded American knows, where there’s a ban, there’s a workaround. And boy, have Californians found it.
Rather than surrendering to government dictates, residents are simply buying their equipment out-of-state or larger engines which are not banned. The bill is specifically aimed at banning all small off-road engines (SORE), mostly emergency response equipment, generators, and commercial lawn equipment – defining the SORE category as off-road spark-ignition engines that produce up to 25hp or less. This means that the list of banned equipment extends far beyond the focused products; industrial equipment, logging, golf carts, riding lawn mowers and most chainsaws. The result? Not only are they dodging the regulations, they’re deploying machines that often produce more emissions, not less. The law has boomeranged, and Sacramento’s bureaucrats are scratching their heads as their environmental utopia combusts in real time. Either, they will need to back off, or go more authoritarian – banning these pieces of equipment from crossing into California (like they’ve done with ammunition), and banning the larger engines, too.
The backfire ought to sound familiar. Think of the infamous plastic bag ban. Supposedly designed to rid the state of waste, it forced retailers to offer thicker, reusable bags for purchase. But guess what? Consumers still use those new bags in the same manner as they did with the old ones — tossing them into trash cans, using them as small trash can liners, using them to pick up after pets, and stocking up on them by the dozen. Except now, the bags take longer to decompose and require more energy to manufacture. As for the reusable bag idea, most people don’t use those things, and prefer not to because they are even more destructive to the environment when tossed, and dangerous if not cleaned completely from the previous leaking food-stuffs that had been shoved into them.
This is what happens when virtue-signaling replaces data, ideology outweighs practicality, and an aim for central-control in the name of the common good reaches way beyond common sense.
What California’s policymakers don’t grasp is simple: forcing people to “go green” doesn’t change behavior (not that government should be in the “we’ve got to change your behavior” business — it just redirects it, often toward costlier and dirtier alternatives. The result is a loophole economy: a patchwork of evasions that undermine the very regulations meant to save the planet from a scam that even Al Gore couldn’t salvage at this point.
This is the kind of legislative lunacy you get when you increase the Democrat Party’s leftist grip on a State through things like term limits and democratic control by the big cities. And as Rush Limbaugh might have torn into it if he were still with us, it is “the predictable failure of liberal do-gooderism.” Either way, it’s more proof that centralized control breeds chaos, not progress.
Sacramento set out with a utopian vision but ignored the real-world mechanics of consumer choice, market reaction, and basic human nature. Instead of incentivizing innovation or allowing choice in education, they mandate bans and expect miracles. In reality, people adapt — not in ways that lawmakers imagine, but in ways that shield their wallets and preserve their routines. The larger engines now dominating the landscape are not a rebellion — they’re a workaround. And they’re entirely legal. That’s the lunacy: laws so riddled with blind spots that compliance actually undermines the original misguided goal; but to eliminate the blind spots the law would have to be even more authoritarian.
It’s a bunch of collectivist bureaucrats who have for the most part never worked a day in the private sector or have done the kind of work that needs the equipment being banned believing they know better than the citizen — an arrogant assumption that lecturing people into behavioral change will somehow fix systemic problems while killing production. It’s not policy; it’s theatrics masquerading as progress. Remember, these are the same folks who told us bigger plastic bags would fix litter, more money given to a failing education system will stop its downward spiral, and heavier taxes on gasoline would make people buy electric cars. Instead, they gave us thicker trash, a higher energy cost to produce the alleged solution, a higher cost to kill education and a bunch of people who can’t afford electric cars paying higher gas prices that forcing them to choose between going to work, or the grocery store. This is the same mindset that promotes subsidized solar panels while the grid buckles under the pressure of lost base load capacity. The same thinking that puts windmills in the desert, using more energy and cost to produce them and stand them up in the sand than the things will ever be able to save – if they don’t fizzle out before their projected lifespan is up. It’s a cycle of ineffective intervention that feels good in press releases but flops in practice.
In the end, California isn’t becoming greener. It’s becoming a labyrinth of contradictions — where the louder the virtue signal, the more likely it is to backfire.
The Founding Fathers were no strangers to the dangers of centralized power — and they worked diligently to dilute it. They envisioned a republic where states operated as sovereign laboratories. That wasn’t just poetic — it was strategic. By granting states autonomy, they allowed policies to rise and fall within state lines, shielding the rest of the union from catastrophic missteps. That brilliance is playing out in real time: California’s climate crusade might set its lawns ablaze with oversized mowers, but thankfully, flyover America isn’t forced to follow suit.
Bans like these would crumble under constitutional scrutiny at the federal level. The Tenth Amendment exists precisely to prevent nationwide lunacy from taking hold when only one corner of the country wants to experiment with extremism. It’s a safeguard, and thank heavens for it. Federalism is all about the States handling their local issues, and the federal government handling the issues related to the Union – which means that the genius of federalism is that it does not provide a centralized license for self-destruction.
California’s demise is, as a result, their own dang fault. It’s like the old saying, “You made your bed, now sleep in it.” The problem is, California will try to avoid paying the consequences for its idiotic actions. While they think they are testing policies they are actually stress-testing the limits of ideological governance. At what point does environmental virtue signaling collide with economic and civic collapse? Will residents quietly absorb the consequences, or will the state spiral until the lesson is too bitter to ignore?
The hope is that California learns before the tipping point. The fear is that it won’t. The realization is that the U.S. Government will probably wind up bailing them out, and if they don’t pay the painful consequences for their idiotic ideologically leftwing policies, they will keep going down the same failed path over and over. That’s what the Democrats excel at: doing the same stupid things over and over and expecting a different result.
Pure insanity.
