> you need to substantially reduce your standard of living
California's per capita electricity consumption has stayed flat since 1970. That's in part due to strict energy efficiency standards. By contrast, per capita electricity consumption in the rest of the country has increased 50%, and that's despite California's standards indirectly improving efficiency elsewhere.
Today per capita consumption in California is nearly half that of the rest of the country, but the standard of living (modern conveniences, etc) is hardly less than elsewhere. Note that California's temperate climate does not explain this away. Home heating is still largely fossil fuel based in most of the U.S., including in California. And most of the population growth in California since the 1970s has been in the Central Valley and Southern California, places where air conditioning is as ubiquitous as anywhere else. Shifts in industrial makeup helped some, but the same industrial sectors also became more energy efficient. In general, most of the relative improvements are a product of better energy efficiency. And that was accomplished primarily through non-politicized regulators quietly and steadily mandating marginal efficiency improvements over the decades.
See https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS... and https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/31/1864690...
Suffice it to say that there's alot of pandering to the environmental lobby among Californian politicians. And lots of tension about the cost and viability of various environmental efforts. But as with politics anywhere, the importance of the objects of these fights is usually blown way out of proportion. The most consequential and productive regulations were quietly working in the background for decades, and didn't come with huge price tags.
EDIT: Apropos HN, one of the key personalities working behind the scenes to improve energy efficiency standards was physicist Arthur Rosenfeld. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_H._Rosenfeld and https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/the-cal.... His research work gave rise to the eponymous Rosenfeld Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld_Effect) and Rosenfeld's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld%27s_law). The latter states that "From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of about 1 percent per year".