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I have two cars. Both are electric. And, that’s the problem. Because, I haven't paid for a gallon of gas in months. California has the most expensive gasoline in the country, roughly $1.50 a gallon above the national average as of 2025. Some of that is a straightforward gas tax. But a lot of it is the cost of three well-meaning climate programs (i.e. the CARBOB clean-fuel blend, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and cap-and-trade) passed through at the pump. Cap-and-trade alone now adds about 25 cents a gallon, up from around 10 cents when it started. That’s a lot! I spent years inside California's climate agencies. I believe in these goals. And, they are good goals. But every month I don't buy gas, someone else (who probably don’t afford an EV) keeps paying that premium. Wealthier Californians buy EVs. Lower-income Californians keep filling the tank. The policy gets more regressive the more "successful" it looks. A new BESI white paper out of Berkeley (Sam Trachtman, June 2026) puts a name on this pattern: "regressively funded progressivism." The idea is straightforward. We pursue good things (i.e. clean air, fire safety, quality child care) by raising the price of essentials. The costs are hidden, spread thin, and land hardest on the people who can least afford them. I'd add one thing to that argument, from the evaluation side. We mandate. We rarely measure.Look at what's happened to electricity. California's rates went from about a third above the national average in 2015 to more than 80% above it by 2024. Two big drivers, per recent research: rooftop solar subsidies and wildfire spending. The numbers are not small. UC Berkeley's Severin Borenstein estimates the rooftop-solar cost shift makes up 12–15% of a PG&E residential bill. The state's Public Advocates Office puts the total shift at $8.5 billion in 2024, up from $3.4 billion in 2021 — money moved from people without solar onto their neighbors' bills. On the wildfire side, the big utilities collected roughly $27 billion in cost recovery between 2019 and 2024, now 10–24% of a typical bill. None of these goals is wrong. Solar is part of the transition. Hardening the grid against fire is necessary. The problem is the funding structure — a ratepayer bill is one of the most regressive ways to raise money we have. But the deeper problem is this: We almost never check whether the thing worked before we make everyone keep paying for it.
Is’nt it strange? Sam Trachtman’s white paper points out that CARB has never produced a rigorous, public cost-benefit analysis of the LCFS even as a growing share of the credits flow to out-of-state biofuels that may displace no California fossil fuel at all. When the Legislative Analyst's Office reviewed 22 of the state's formal regulatory impact assessments from 2013–2016, it found costs and benefits were often unmeasured, and that agencies generally didn't estimate who on the income ladder actually pays. That's not a climate failure. Climate goals are good. That's an evaluation failure. And it shows up everywhere once you look: Housing. California's building code runs to several thousand pages. The two-stairwell requirement on mid-size apartments alone adds roughly 10% to costs with no measurable safety benefit — New York, Seattle, and Honolulu have allowed single-stair buildings for decades without excess fire deaths (Pew, 2025). Occupational licensing. California licenses 74% of low-to-middle-wage occupations — third-highest in the nation — costing the average worker 827 days to get licensed (Institute for Justice, 2022). The Little Hoover Commission concluded a decade ago that most of it protects incumbents, not consumers. Colorado licenses 33% of the same jobs. Child care. Infant care in California averages nearly $22,000 a year, and we impose some of the strictest credentialing rules in the country — even though the research doesn't show those credentials improve outcomes for kids.
Different sectors. Same shape. A rule with an emotional rationale, a hidden and regressive cost, and no one whose job it is to ask: is this actually working, and who's paying for it? The tradeoff we keep refusing to nameRegular readers know I reach for the Triangle when an argument earns it. This one earns it on the Tradeoffs axis. The reason these rules accumulate isn't stupidity. It's that naming the tradeoff is politically expensive. Saying "this climate rule raises gas prices on poor people and we're not sure it cuts emissions" sounds, in California, like you've switched teams. So the path of least resistance is to add the requirement, bury the cost in a bill nobody itemizes, and move on. Political scientists have a name for it too — concentrated benefits, diffuse costs — and it produces a one-way ratchet where costs only ever climb. But here's the Triangle logic: Without naming the tradeoff, you can't measure it. Without measuring it, you can't build the trust that lets you reform it. Clarity, tradeoffs, trust — they're a chain, and we keep skipping the first two links.
We are, as a profession, good at dreaming and not as good at delivering. I'd add a third: we're pretty bad at checking. The number that says the most here is institutional — the LAO, the legislature's analytical arm, has 43 analysts. CARB, one agency among many, has over 1,700 staff. And, most if not all of them are pretty dedicated staff! We've built enormous capacity to make rules and almost none to evaluate them. From idea to impactThe fix isn't to stop pursuing good things. California should keep being California. The fix is to fund progressive goals progressively — through the general fund, not the gas pump or the electric bill — and to put real cost-benefit and distributional analysis upstream of the rule, with retrospective review after. Measure the benefit. Name who pays. Then decide.
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