Yes!

Scream it from the roof tops. Most think California is green. What they did was outsource energy production to other states. This allowed them to move "dirty energy" from their balance sheet. But moving your coal plant to another state does not reduce GHG production. It only moves it across state lines.

EDIT: [1] Here some context with a link about the different types of GHG measurement methods.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396

EDIT: the gist being that if we moved to "B. (Absolute) GHG footprint accounting" we wouldn't be creating policy based on false accounting and those "loopholes" would be obviously misguided.

A large amount of California environmentalism is air quality, as measured in California; moving to cleaner sources within the state and dirtier sources outside the state helps tremendously with air quality as measured in the state. Of course, it doesn't help air quality near those other sources, and global measures aren't helped by simply moving coal plants elsewhere.

It's also not great for grid reliability to increase the watt miles used (is there a real term for that?).

It's a bit worse than that, from a GHG perspective, because of additional waste in transmission line losses. Mid-single digit percentages are typical.

Yes

Not actually solving the problem, just shifting it elsewhere. Nice.

Yes, we're talking about California.

Excess power from any source. California has imported power from hover dam forever, for example.