I'm John Batchew with my colleague and friend, Professor Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institution and University of Chicago where he teaches law,

and NYU where he teaches law. We turn now to an essay he's written for defining ideas,

and one piece of it is especially rich. I read...

Poignant, Darwin, yes.

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order stating that he's here to, quote,

to help curb rising electricity costs and provide electric bill relieved.

The way he's doing this, of course, is subsidies and mandates about

clean electricity. Richard, this appears to be Gavin Newsom's play for the future, looking to be

a nominee for the presidency in 28. Will it work? No. By the time this thing is four more years into play, it will fall apart

at the seams. What Newsom seems to be thinking is that he can follow a mandate that was put into

place by Jerry Brown in 2018, which is essentially to be carbon neutral by the time he reached 24.

So you will have 100% clean electricity.

This is a fantasy.

The appropriate way to deal with energy and electricity is to take existing established stable sources

and to make them better.

And so if one starts to look at the advances that have been made in connection with fracking,

for example, and the use of fossil fuels, these have been tremendous over the last years.

There are very powerful physical limitations on what you can do with solar energy and what you can do with wind,

because the simple objection, the sun doesn't always shine

and the wind doesn't always blow, turns out to be true. So what you have to do is to reverse

the priorities and you have to get rid of the subsidies for any of these kinds of technology.

If there is a place where solar work and you could get it without subsidies by all means do it. But all the

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