POTEMKIN ENVIRONMENTALISM: California Dumps Nearly Half of Its Hazardous Waste out of State.

California is revealing new information to the public that shows that the eco-friendly state is dumping tons of toxic waste in other states every year.

Since 2010, California has dumped nearly half of its hazardous waste out of state—mostly in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—according to the state’s latest figures (pdf). Thirteen more states also have received California’s toxic waste but in much lower quantities.

In the past 13 years, the state has dumped 3.7 million tons of hazardous waste in Utah, more than 2.9 million tons in Arizona, and nearly 2.3 million tons in Nevada.

An investigation published by CalMatters in January found that one of the biggest out-of-state toxic waste dumpers was the state’s own Department of Toxic Substances Control.

The reason is that neighboring states don’t have as many environmental regulations for dumping hazardous waste, and it costs less.

There’s a pleasing circularity to California leftists using other states as their dumping grounds, since they also use the much more functional other states to help keep the lights on: California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.

A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.

And California’s garbage, as well.