A Brief History of California's Future

California is a wonderful place. From the gold rush to recent technological revolutions, Californians have been a powerfully dynamic and pioneering group. However, as we look forward from our current place in time, we see challenges ahead of us that our foundation myths are ill-equipped to handle. Solutions will not be found by blasting open a hillside to look for precious rocks, and it will not be found in the garage of local college students. All Californians need to sit down, think critically, and talk to each other about our future.

The future holds a mythical quality for us. It has been visualized as a new horizon where there are opportunities for growth and development. If we hold onto these old myths, we run the risk of overstretch, and making our home state uninhabitable for our children. We need to establish new ideas about the future which promote prosperity and sustainability. This will be a long process which will not be successfully concluded when you finish reading this blog, or when you point your browser toward the next set of daily headlines or news factoids. Visioning the future of our state is a wildly important idea that I'd like us all to keep talking about.

In order to bring you back to this blog in the coming days, weeks and months, I'd like to give you a preview of the issues that we're going to discuss here:

Population
More than 36 million people live with us in our state. During the 20th century, no other developed region of the world experienced population growth rates as high as California’s. If these trends continue, most demographers predict that California’s population will be between 44 million and 48 million in 2025. Where will these new people live and work?

Economy
California has the world’s 5th largest economy. Can we expect future growth rates to match the meteoric expansion we’ve seen in the past? Can we safely assume that California’s strengths in the service and technology sectors will continue to produce increased economic opportunities for residents of the Golden State?

Good Governance
If the continued strength of our economy provides steady tax revenues, we have questions over how we will allocate it and how we will elect our leaders. These are broad and profound questions with many possible answers. Will it be more effective to focus first on ourselves or on our elected officials? How do we reach out to the half of the state that does not vote? Would removing term limits in the State Legislature encourage better long-term planning by our public officials?

Health Care
As reported by both the California Healthcare Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation, growth in health spending in California this past year increased more than twice as fast as workers’ wages and overall inflation. In fact, health care premiums have increased 87 percent over the past six years. Family health coverage now costs an average $11,480 annually, with workers paying an average of $2,973 toward those premiums, almost twice as much as we did in 2000. How do we find a long-term solution to our health care needs?

Education
California's economy is centered around a highly-educated workforce. It's ironic that during the recent budget crisis, the State of California cut spending on education, threatening our ability to provide a tax base for the future. During a time when our largest population increase has come from demographics that tend to be the least educated, can we reaffirm California's long-standing commitment to education?

Climate Change
Recent scientific research indicates that global climate change will profoundly affect the hydrology of the American West and we may suffer from decreasing water supplies, less hydropower and more wildfires and flooding. With possible decreases by as much as 90% by the end of this next century in the annual Sierra Nevada snowpack (which provides roughly one-third of California’s surface water), what kinds of impacts could we see in our daily lives?

Energy
Recent legislation commits California to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 25% by 2020. Will this legislation, along with rising prices for conventional energy, drastically increase the percentage of renewable energy sources in the state’s portfolio? Will it help us to break our current addiction to fossil fuels?

Housing
Our current land-use strategy is to pave over agricultural and wild lands to provide more sprawl outside our urban centers. This degrades the environment, lowers our agricultural productive capacity, impacts our water portfolio, increases commute times and carbon emissions, and makes the construction of mass transit corridors much harder (see below). Could we take a meaningful step toward introducing market forces into our planning paradigm by repealing the property tax provisions of 1978's Proposition 13?

Transportation
Assuming we successfully encourage more population density in our urban centers, we will increasingly rely on mass transit for our daily needs. As a jumping-off point for this discussion, the California Department of Transportation recently published their California Transportation Plan 2025. Looking forward 20 years, this report focuses on improving our state's environment, social equity and quality of life.