🍊 California shows decline and degrowth is a choice, not destiny

America needs the Golden State to shine again!

Quote of the Issue

“The West’s sustained economic growth began with the emergence of an economic sphere with a high degree of autonomy from political and religious control. The change from the coherent, fully integrated feudal society of the late Middle Ages to the plural society of eighteenth-century Europe implied a relaxation of political and ecclesiastical control of all spheres of life, including not only the economy, but also science, art, literature, music, and education.” - Nathan Rosenberg, How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World

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The Essay

🍊 California shows decline and degrowth is a choice, not destiny

There were two stories from The New York York Times over the past couple of days that really caught my attention and made me really want to write about them for this Faster, Please! issue. But which one? How to choose? It was a minor conundrum until I realized the two pieces represent different aspects of the same story, a tale of government and voters choosing pursuit of Down Wing scarcity over Up Wing abundance.

A summary of the articles: In “Shrinking California Still Dreams, but More Modestly,” Los Angeles Bureau Chief Corina Knoll reports that California, a state that’s been a massive cultural, economic, and political force for 170 years, is facing a population stagnation over the next four decades. The Golden State has unexpectedly lost more people than it gained in each of the last three years, shrinking to fewer than 39 million people in 2023 and reversing its long trend of growth and expansion. Knoll writes that the state’s once-bright allure as a place of endless economic opportunity and upward social mobility has faded in the shadow of a housing crisis, a widening economic divide, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Knoll points out that “the median sale price of a single-family home hovers around $830,000 and homeless encampments proliferate” and concludes that the “promise of easy living in Mediterranean weather has faded.”

The other NYT piece is “The Race to Unlock a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet,” in which reporter Brad Plumer explores the huge potential of geothermal energy. The US Energy Department estimates the so-called “sun beneath our feet” could power the entire country five times over. But geothermal only produces 0.4 percent of America’s electricity currently, and so the DOE has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest more of that thermal potential. Until recently, geothermal energy has been limited by the scarcity of natural hot water reservoirs underground. But new drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry could enable geothermal companies to tap hot, dry rocks almost anywhere on the planet. Numerous start-ups are using different methods to create artificial geothermal reservoirs.

“There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” says Tim Latimer, co-founder and chief executive of Fervo Energy, a start-up that uses fracking techniques — drilling down into solid rock, injecting water at high pressure through one well, fracturing the rock to let the water pass through, and then collecting the heated water through another well — that US Geological Survey estimates could provide more than 500 gigawatts of electric capacity in the United States.

Limiting energy means limiting growth

On its own, each NYT piece tells an interesting story. But when they’re read in tandem, a much deeper narrative is revealed.