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What would you think of a chef who spends years perfecting a recipe, knowing the kitchen doesn't have an oven? That's how I've come to see a lot of climate and economic development policy, and I say this as someone who was inside the kitchen. Take California's SB 375 program, run by California Air Resources Board (CARB). We asked regions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through better land use and transportation planning. We had clear targets, sophisticated models, and some of the smartest people I've worked with. But we know that the plans regions develop are never going to be implemented. Not because they're bad plans. But because the mechanisms to actually execute them don't exist. At some point, it started to feel like we were optimizing a recipe in incredible detail without asking whether the kitchen even had an oven. The recipe wasn't wrong. The kitchen just wasn't equipped to cook it. And here's the harder truth: We all knew this. Yet California is still spending tens of millions of dollars on this program.
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