Just days after signing a greenie law mandating that Californians buy only electric cars by 2035 — and calling it a model for the nation — Gov. Gavin Newsom is pleading with Californians to turn off their electricity to prevent the electrical grid from blowing out.

CA is experiencing an unprecedented heatwave. This will be the hottest & longest on record for September.

Our energy grid is being pushed to its max. The risk of outages is real.

We need everyone to double down to save energy after 4pm today.pic.twitter.com/6QWozS0pyp

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 6, 2022

In some Bay Area cities — Alameda, Healdsburg, and Old Palo Alto — the rolling blackouts have already started. 

It's a policy failure unlike any other, from a guy who makes no secret of wanting to run the entire country based on his state's energy model.  Those ads he's taken out in Florida, urging those who fled to come back to California, are looking pathetic right now.  Florida, after all, still allows air-conditioning.

The hypocrisy runs thick.

"Everyone has to do their part to help step up," Newsom chirps, urging lower power use, although based on his attire, we aren't all in this together.  If we were, he'd be wearing a wife-beater, with sweat stains down his back and armpits, not a dark fleecy pullover with matching baseball cap and cute polar bear decals, in what's clearly either a very air-conditioned room or else a western Canada or Montana vacation getaway — some place where sweltering Californians are not.

Nominally, Newsom and others are blaming "climate change" for this third-world power situation engulfing America's most progressive state.

Here's Axios deep in its blame-climate-change cups:

Context: Heat waves are becoming more common, more intense and longer-lasting due to human-caused global warming.

• Some studies, in fact, have shown that certain extreme heat events would have been virtually impossible without the climate change component.
• While attribution studies on this event will wait until after it winds down, the large area the heat wave is affecting, along with the record strength of the heat dome and the hot temperatures, all bear the hallmarks of a climate change-influenced extreme event.

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit curated a good collection of items shooting that nonsense down, and laying the blame squarely at the feet of Newsom and his one-party blue state.

Climate change?

Nope, not even close.

A record heat wave is pushing California's electric grid up against the point of failure this week, with officials pointing to climate change for putting continued stress on the system.

The California grid is only overworked because leftist politicians have been pushing toward energy policies that make zero sense for decades.

• Shut down nuclear plants? Check.
• Push solar and wind infrastructure that can't sustain diddly squat in order to appear hip and cool? Check.
• Disincentivize the repair of aging power lines that tends to fail or spark and cause hundreds of wildfires by pushing companies to invest in green energy instead of maintaining current infrastructure? Check.

The California energy problem is man-made. It has nothing to do with climate change.

But it does have much to do with "California's Potemkin Environmentalism:" No State Imports More Electricity Than California.

Even during the Schwarzenegger era, Max Schultz of City Journal, who coined the above phrase, noted that California's "celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs." And California's man-made energy woes have only gotten worse since.

For years, the state has laid greenie mandates on California's electricity suppliers, forcing them to pour money into inefficient and wasteful green energy projects, at the expense of basic maintenance of their products.

At the same time, Newsom and his Democrats have encouraged illegal immigration into the state, with California now home to a quarter of the nation's illegals.  Illegals use electricity, too, same as they get in their own countries, which, unless they come from socialist Cuba or Venezuela, usually have no blackouts. 

Now that citizens and even illegal aliens are fleeing the state, it should be easier to supply electricity, right?  Nope, not with these guys in charge.  Their crisis is brought on by crazed greenie mandates on power producers, the shutdowns of nuclear power plants, the reliance on third-world labor to produce lithium and rare earth metals, monster taxes and greenie mandates on fossil fuel blends, and the actual importation of electricity since they won't supply their own.  In short, it's the Germany model of reliance on Vladimir Putin, and greenie virtue-signaling that has gotten California into a whole heap of trouble.

For now, we adapt here in this state, turning off our electricity and crossing our fingers that the power grid won't blow out.  But let's just ask whether this is, as the lefties say, "sustainable" without a little introspection as to the real cause of it.

 Image: Twitter screen shot.