Want a headline that sums up California in just a few words? Try “solar panels for illegal immigrants.”

That’s what’s wrong with our beautiful state, in a nutshell. We are chasing “green” dreams, giving away freebies to people who have no right to be here, while wasting our money and eroding the rule of law.

It’s all in one policy: the “Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program.”

As Christopher F. Rufo and Austen Hufford of the Manhattan Institute point out, the cap-and-trade (now “cap-and-invest”) program, which adds at least 20 cents to the cost of each gallon of gas in the Golden State, has allocated nearly $50 million to the solar panel program since 2019, and illegal immigrants are eligible to benefit from it.

You don’t even need an American ID. A foreign one will do. Contractors working for the state know that, and have done their best to advertise the benefits of solar energy to farmworkers, legal and otherwise. There are all kinds of potential conflicts of interest, at every stage of the program.

The only consolation: Like almost everything else California’s dysfunctional government does, this program doesn’t really work.

Only 2,000 households signed up, despite the promise of “free” solar panels. That’s partly because some farmworkers suspected the whole thing was a scam. That’s how California’s policies look to outsiders. You don’t need a degree from UC Berkeley or a DOGE department to know when something looks rotten.

The entire premise is faulty. Solar panels in California are not going to solve climate change. Our state’s carbon emissions are miniscule compared to China’s and India’s (except when we let our forests burn).

Workers, on farms and factories, need energy that is cheap and easily available. They don’t have the luxury of being able to wait for the sun to come out, or for batteries to charge, or for cold water to heat up.

And it is outrageous that tax dollars paid by hard-working Americans and legal immigrants are buying fancy technology for people who entered the country illegally or broke the law by overstaying visas.

By giving benefits to illegal immigrants, California is eroding the rule of law for the whole country, and increasing the incentives for migrants and smuggling cartels to keep breaching the border.

Add “free solar panels for illegal immigrants” to the list of things that the next governor of California needs to change on Day One.