Klein: What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?

Golden State has become notorious not for what it builds, but for what it fails to build.

By the time I talked to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he was clearly frustrated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “These guys write reports and they protest. But we need to build. You can’t be serious about climate and the environment without reforming permitting and procurement in this state.”

It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining together to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California.

For Newsom, it’s a wounding break. “I licked envelopes for these nonprofits as a kid. My father was on the board of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund for more than a decade,” he told me. “This was my life. But this rigidity and ideological purity is really going to hurt progress. I did the climate bills last year, and these same groups were celebrating that. But that means nothing unless we can deliver. That was the what; this is the how.”

The environmental movement is dealing with a bit of dog-that-caught-the-car confusion these days. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into infrastructure for clean energy, and decarbonization targets that were once out of the question are being etched into law. That’s particularly true in California, which has committed to being carbon neutral, and to running its electricity grid on 100% clean energy, by 2045.

Hitting these goals requires California to almost quadruple the amount of electricity it can generate — and shift what it now gets from polluting fuels to clean sources. That means turning huge areas of land over to solar farms, wind turbines and geothermal systems. It means building the transmission lines to move that energy from where it’s made to where it’s needed. It means dotting the landscape with enough electric vehicle charging stations to make the state’s proposed ban on cars with internal combustion engines possible. Taken as a whole, it’s a construction task bigger than anything the state has ever attempted, and it needs to be completed at a speed that nothing in the state’s recent history suggests is possible.

California has become notorious not for what it builds, but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he told me. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”

But Newsom’s immediate problem is the Biden administration. Because it, too, has become focused on how difficult it has become to build — and not just in California. “These delays are pervasive at every level of government — federal, state and local,” John Podesta, a senior adviser to President Joe Biden on clean energy, said in a speech last month. “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”

Adding to Newsom’s problems is that California’s recent surpluses have turned to deficits. He needs federal money, and lots of it, to make good on his climate promises. If California falls short on those grants, it falls short of its goals. “We’re going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo,” he told me. “The state can’t backfill that. And we’re losing some of it to red states! I’m indignant about that. The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues, and they’re getting the projects. We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.”

I’m a little skeptical that Newsom’s package is consequential enough to merit the controversy it has created. But the fight isn’t just about this package. Everyone involved believes there are many permitting reforms yet to come, as the world warms, and the clock ticks down on California’s goals, and the federal government begins to apply more pressure.

These are the beginning stages of a transition from a liberalism that spends to a liberalism that builds. It’s going to be messy. Until now, progressives have been mostly united in the fight against climate change. They wanted more money for clean energy and more ambitious targets for phasing out fossil fuels and they got it. Now that new energy system needs to be built, and fast. And progressives are nowhere near agreement on how to do that.

Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist.