Even Trash Isn’t Safe From California’s Regulatory Overkill
The Golden State’s overreach extends to the garbage, but these policies ignore the real trash.
The Golden State’s overreach extends to the garbage, but these policies ignore the real trash. California regulates everything. Gas stoves, pronouns, lawn equipment, cow farts — if there’s a way to insert bureaucratic red tape into daily life, Sacramento will find it.
In the Golden State, taking out the garbage has become an environmental chess match. The latest battleground? Landfills. California’s newest proposed landfill regulations read like something drafted by a Berkeley philosophy department on edibles — abstract, vague, and completely detached from physical reality.
Ignoring the Problem
In 2015, I led the group pursuing the American Apparel buyout. While the media fixated on the company’s branding and social controversies, California’s regulatory messaging conveniently ignored textiles — one of the most pollutive industries on the planet. This was one example of how the state tends to focus on performative issues while disregarding meaningful, industrial oversight. This is useful if you are constructing a wildlife highway crossing, but counterproductive when avoiding industrial oversight. That’s the California model: overlook real problems; obsess over symbolic ones.
California Landfill Management Mandates
The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) is mandating sweeping new standards for landfill management, emissions monitoring, and methane capture, despite no clear evidence that existing systems are failing. The new mandates are so convoluted that even seasoned waste management firms — already complying with state audits and clean-air rules — are struggling to interpret them.
In Los Angeles County, one landfill had to close in part because of state rules that extend beyond federal standards. Local politicians’ preferences for grandstanding instead of serving constitutions impeded the landfill’s ability to regulate an extremely rare chemical reaction.
The result? Nobody’s using less trash, but now more taxpayer money funds the removal of trash farther away. Local politicians do nothing but make wild, unsubstantiated claims about both public infrastructure and the landfill’s environmental impact and promise to investigate alleged price gouging.
Read the full article here.
If you want to read more about California’s endless government overreach, read my new book: The Myth of California. The Amazon Kindle version is available now. The full book, paperback and audiobook will be released this summer.
Endorsements for "The Myth of California"
"California was once America’s “Promised Land” where people flocked to find gold, good weather, and opportunities in everything from movies to manufacturing. It was the agricultural epicenter of the world, known as the “salad bowl” of the planet. But decades of leftist leadership has destroyed everything but the weather. It’s become “Paradise Lost” with homelessness, unanswered crime, and choking tax rates and regulations causing people to flee in stunning numbers to get to places where their families can live without the boot of big government on their necks and cultural cuckoos setting the atmosphere of the lifestyle. Chad Hagan details what happened in his riveting book, “The Myth of California: How Big Government Destroyed the Golden State.” It’s the tragic story of how the irrational left destroys everything it touches and how one state exchanged its gold for garbage. - Mike Huckabee, Former Governor of Arkansas, Bestselling Author, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel
"My father was a car salesman in a town of 800 people in Northern Minnesota. He had one vacation in his working life, and we took a trip to California. He had a friend who had settled in Carlsbad years earlier and wanted to visit. I was 10. My brother was 11, and our sister was 7. We were in awe. It was a modest home, beautifully maintained, with a yard full of fruit trees. We picked oranges and ate them in the yard. We had grapefruit off the trees for breakfast. I dreamed of moving to California for years. No longer! Chad Hagan’s book, The Myth of California, will make you disappointed, infuriated, and then just plain sad. It is a cautionary tale about how politicians can destroy a paradise in one lifetime. Ultimately, unchecked political power serves only itself. The citizens are included only to pay the bills. It is also a testament to how the crazies run the world. Most of us just want to go to work, come home and relax, and build a family and life. The crazies don’t think that way. They are loud, and they vote. Ultimately, politicians whose only interest is in power, cave in to them. (A government permit needed to wear heels taller than 2 inches in Carmel? Spare me!) As Californians now flee in droves, the stories they tell disabuse us of any notion of paradise. This book does that in spades. Read it!" - John Linder, Former U.S. Congressman (GA-7)