Brown is pursuing a full-spectrum energy agenda, allowing and regulating fracking activity in developing oil and natural gas resources which appear to lie in abundance beneath much of central California while studies continue. The reality is that fracking is nothing new in California, having been around for some five decades. I first saw it over 30 years ago in Kern County, likely a center for a new generation of fracking, which did not collapse into the hellish conditions that vehement fracking opponents insist will happen. While opponents act as though there is a scientific consensus against fracking, there is not.
Opponents, including some former Brown aides and advisors, insist also that Brown's leadership against climate change is inconsistent with allowing fracking because all fossil fuel development is bad. The reality, of course, is that we are going to keep using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future even as California continues to promote renewable resources and energy efficiency and new vehicles and transportation systems. The obvious national security question is whether it is better for those fuels to"e from, say, the middle of California than from the the Middle East. And whether California should reap a bonanza in the process which just might make many things more possible in the Golden State. Assuming, of course, that ongoing further research does not indicate the worst from fracking.
Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund operator who after helping then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and"pany defeat an initiative by out of state oil"panies to gut California's climate change program in 2010 has gone on to position himself nationally as a sort of left wing counter to the Koch Brothers, piled on after the heckling by calling for legislation requiring a two thirds vote in any county before fracking could go forward there. I doubt that sort of NIMBY ism will fly.But former state Senator Tom Hayden, a veteran pro-renewable energy anti corporate leader who keynoted a rump group of left liberal Democrats at the convention, told me he thinks that "Fracking politics will change as the issue"es to the LA Basin."