Revitalizing the Los Angeles River

“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.”
Ezekiel 47:9

From the dawn of recorded history, humans built cities along rivers. Over 6,000 years ago, Sumerian city-states grew along the fertile banks of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers system, relying on these rivers for irrigation and transportation, water to drink and fish to eat. And in the millennia to follow, from the Yangtze to the Mississippi, across the continents, rivers have been the enabling arteries of civilization.

With the arrival of the industrial revolution came rapid population growth and an explosion of new technology. In 1800 the earth and its rivers sustained 990 million people; today, that number approaches 8 billion. As cities expanded along their rivers, to prevent winter floods, dams and levees at an unprecedented scale were constructed to contain them. And at the same time as many urban rivers were transformed into gigantic drainage culverts, their waters were fouled by contaminated runoff, poorly treated sewage, and outfall from industry.

The turning point in the desecration of urban rivers was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the modern environmental movement began in reaction to polluted air and water. A defining event of this era came in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it literally caught fire. The Cleveland Press at the time reported the Cuyahoga as a river so polluted that it “oozes rather than flows.”

Since then, significant progress has been made cleaning up urban rivers in America and around the world, although in nations that are still rapidly industrializing, progress has been more aspirational than actual. But concurrent with this progress, another trend emerged, starting in the 1980s, which is not only to clean up urban rivers, but to revitalize them. From Philadelphia to Portland, cities across America are rediscovering their rivers not only as waterways to be purified, but as aesthetic treasures to be restored.

Nowhere is the potential and complexity of urban river revitalization more evident than in the multifaceted, continuously evolving efforts to restore the Los Angeles River. It encompasses all the highlights of a universal story. In the beginning the river ran unobstructed from its headwaters in the San Gabriel Mountains into the Pacific. With many peaks in excess of 9,000 feet, and the crest barely 30 miles from the ocean, when clouds dumped rain against these ramparts the runoff dumped rich silt onto a broad floodplain.

Early settlers believed they were living in an Arcadian paradise, and as the city grew from a small pueblo into a bustling town, the Los Angeles River provided ample water for people and farms. But with the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which tripled the available water for the growing city, the value of water from the Los Angeles River became less appreciated, at the same time as its propensity to overflow its banks became a liability.

After two massive storms hit Los Angeles in early 1938, generating floods that caused massive damage and killed over 100 people, the citizens overwhelmingly supported a solution that would finally tame the volatile river. The 1930s was a decade characterized by big engineering projects in America, and into Los Angeles came the Army Corps of Engineers to channelize the entire 51 miles of urban waterway.

By 1960, with its transformation complete, the Los Angeles River had acquired its now iconic look. A gigantic culvert. Surrounded by high voltage power lines, industrial depots, sweatshops and prisons, it became a dystopian wasteland, its natural splendor erased. Apart from serving as the biggest prop in movie history, an often post-apocalyptic backdrop for hundreds of movies and television shows, the Los Angeles River was forgotten.

The national awakening to environmentalism in the 1970s brought renewed awareness by local residents to the Los Angeles River as an example of industrial disregard, and also, increasingly, as a neglected amenity with spectacular potential. Over the past 20 years, serious efforts have begun to transform the river into a glorious connective centerpiece of a great city. It’s not going to be easy.

Revitalizing an urban river is an undertaking that requires incorporating and balancing several potentially conflicting objectives. For starters, whatever transformation is ultimately realized must still fulfill the function offered by the giant culvert: major storms must not cause major flooding. To do that, either the flood channel needs to be left mostly intact, or diversions have to be created along the entire 51 mile length to buffer the runoff during extreme weather. Fortunately, those buffers also serve to accomplish other important objectives.

For example, “daylighting” the many smaller tributaries of the Los Angeles River, which means opening up below ground storm drains and turning them into above ground streams, permits rewilding sections of the urban watershed, percolation in the unlined new channels, diversion to additional storage ponds and spreading basins, and primary filtration of toxic runoff as it flows through vegetation. Daylighting, as described, also reduces the volume and velocity of runoff during storms.

Among the goals for the future of the Los Angeles River, the preservation of flood control cannot be overemphasized. In December 2021, in one day, 2.3 inches of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles. The downpour was that much or more across the Los Angeles River’s 823 square mile watershed, but even at that rate, 108,000 acre feet of rainwater fell from the sky, and most of it came down that river because it fell too fast to soak in upstream, and ran right off the paved surfaces in the urban area.

For comparison, 108,000 acre feet in one day is equal to 35 billion gallons per day, whereas wastewater treatment plants on the Los Angeles River which have restored a placid flow to middle portions of the urban river discharge 30 million gallons per day, one-thousand times less. Clearly to whatever extent revitalization reduces the river’s capacity to handle storms, diversions and storage must make up the difference.

An April 2022 study released by the Pacific Institute claims urban storm water capture could add as much as 3 million acre feet to the urban water supply. Doing that would require removing a laundry list of pollutants that are swept into runoff before it hits urban storm drains including nitrogen, phosphorus, copper, zinc, hydrocarbons, synthetic organics, pathogens; the list is long. But treating and storing runoff, while expensive, solves several problems simultaneously – it stores water for urban use, it prevents flooding, and the water that is released into the river is less contaminated.

Along with fulfilling its primary role as an actual river, however, comes the myriad demands of a massive city. The opportunities and challenges of lining its beautified banks with people friendly amenities. Accommodating the dreams of local politicians and investors. Respecting environmentalist concerns. Welcoming and coordinating participation from thousands of agencies and private interests. And then, somehow, weaving all of this into a coherent vision for a revitalized river and finding the money to pay for it all.

To this end, countless detailed proposals have been produced, of which at least three are influential planning resources. In 2007, the City of Los Angeles produced its “Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan.” In 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a “Los Angeles River Ecosystem Restoration Integrated Feasibility Report.” and in June 2022, the County of Los Angeles published the “LA River Master Plan.” All of these lengthy reports, each with predecessors and subsequent updates, constitute a blueprint for turning the Los Angeles River back into a river.

An encouraging theme shared by these documents is the recognition that no one entity will be able to fund all of the work or perform all of the work. To that end, for example, in the City of Los Angeles document, a “river management area” is defined, and a community planning framework is established to coordinate a relatively decentralized development effort involving government, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic sources of funding and implementation.

Along the entire river corridor, shared goals include restoring water quality, runoff capture and flood storage, and where possible restore a functioning ecosystem. Also, if possible, construct an unbroken river greenway complete with public access points, bike and walking paths, parks and wetlands, along the entire 51 mile stretch urban river from Canoga Park upstream all the way down to the estuary in Long Beach.

Nothing about this is going to be easy. Ironically, water quality and flow in the river began to improve when three wastewater treatment plants began discharging over 30,000 acre feet per year of clean, treated water into the LA River. This flow, which has created a perennial stream in the downtown section of the LA River, is now jeopardized as the cities operating these treatment plants make plans to upgrade the treatment to direct potable reuse. If those plans come to fruition, all that wastewater will no longer go into the river, but instead will go right back into the water mains to be reused.

This possibility highlights a reality facing any attempt to revitalize an urban ecosystem, which is that whatever vitality is created will not be the same as what was once there, and to the extent a perennial flow can be preserved in the river, it will require more money and face questions of sustainability. Should water be imported hundreds of miles into the LA Basin merely to maintain year-round flows in the Los Angeles River? Can treated water continue to be discharged into the LA River, but then be recaptured in downstream aquifers to minimize waste?

Another difficult paradox that revitalizing the river corridor brings is the impact of gentrification. By creating desirable green space along what had previously been a bleak concrete culvert, property values soar. As posh restaurants suddenly line the banks of an urban canyon where kayakers frolic below in whitewater rapids, riparian land values soar, and multigenerational families get priced out of their homes and apartments. How to redevelop a place without driving away the people who could only afford to live there before it became prime real estate is a classic riddle. The river in Los Angeles is no exception.

In what is perhaps the most thorough recent discussion of how the Los Angeles River may reinvent itself, in the journal Places, USC Professor of Landscape Architecture Alexander Robinson wrote “There remains an urgent need for further exploration of ambitious strategies.” That’s not easy, for at least two reasons. First, of course, because of the extraordinary complexity of the undertaking, with many goals inherently in conflict with each other that must be balanced.

But also because the world has changed. For better or worse, ambitious strategies to alter the urban canvas, however inspiring, encounter resistance that didn’t exist a century ago. More stakeholders. More litigation. Imperatives that perhaps should have been attended to in the old days, but we either didn’t know any better or didn’t care. Taking everything into account, the idea that a 21st century version of the urban planning autocrat Robert Moses could achieve his vision for the river in a few short years is laughable, however ambitious it might be.

On the other hand, the forces working to revitalize the Los Angeles River have steadily grown stronger and the broad consensus to make it clean and beautiful again will only build in the coming years. It will take several decades before the Los Angeles River has fully realized its new incarnation. The process will be painstakingly slow, but the tide has turned. Where for a time there was only an indifferent metropolis of concrete and steel, a ribbon of life will again nurture wild creatures and human souls.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions

When it comes to cost-effective ways to increase the supply of water to California’s cities and farms, every idea should be considered. The residential, commercial and industrial water requirements of California’s 40 million people add up to about 8 million acre feet of water per year. The nine million acres of irrigated farmland that produces the food they eat, requires another 30 million acre feet of water per year.

With droughts and increasing priority given to letting water stay in the rivers to maintain ecosystem health, this water supply is threatened. Water scarcity and water rationing, along with fallowing millions of acres of farmland, is the only answer California’s legislature seems to support. Efforts to increase the water supply have been incremental at best.

From a cost perspective, most supply solutions are financially viable, but nonetheless quite expensive. For example, only about one-third of California’s urban wastewater is recycled. Construction costs to upgrade every water treatment plant in the state that isn’t already turning sewage back into recycled water for landscaping or even for potable reuse would cost about $20 billion, and give back up to 2 million acre feet per year.

Desalination is another option, but is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about one million acre feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other options are there?

In an era that may involve warmer and dryer winters, with less rain and less snowpack, it is necessary to more efficiently harvest runoff from the storms that do hit the state. The traditional way to do this is via reservoir storage, but in-stream reservoirs cannot be allowed to fill from early storm runoff, because that would take away their ability to prevent flooding if there are late spring storms. Then if late sprint storms don’t materialize, there’s inadequate reservoir storage and another water shortage.

Off-stream reservoirs, by contrast, don’t block the flow of a natural river. they are typically constructed in arid valleys, and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. Using the proposed Sites Reservoir as an example ($4.0 billion for an annual yield of 500,000 acre feet per year), off-stream reservoirs could capture and release one million acre feet per year for a construction cost of $8 billion. But where will the water come from?

A new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley,” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200-acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre-feet per year or more, at a cost of $1 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre-feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to the Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California aqueducts, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

This idea has extraordinary potential. Its preliminary construction cost estimate of $1.5 billion to harvest and recover 2.0 million acre feet per year of Delta runoff is a rough order of magnitude lower than any other possible solution.

Moreover, it may well be feasible to safely harvest more than 2.0 million acre feet from the Delta every year. An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (italics added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

This is a very encouraging fact. Coming from some of the most respected water experts in California: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the Delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 million acre-feet per year.

An environmentally friendly Delta diversion project has several appealing aspects. Unlike the Delta pumps, these extraction channels would not harm fish, nor would they alter the current of the Delta which causes salt water intrusion. Their high capacity may make building the controversial Delta Tunnel unnecessary. Storing high volumes of water in San Joaquin Valley aquifers with a known capacity in excess of Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined would take away the need for more reservoirs at the same time as it would make possible almost a limitless capacity to store water from wet years to use in dry years.

The solutions offered by the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint will benefit farmers, but they will also benefit every coastal urban water agency in the state. Many Southern California water agencies have banked water in Lake Mead, and with that lake at a historic low, they are unable to access that water. Having large scale water banking available just over the hill in the Central Valley is a much safer and practical option. The next step for this project is to build a demonstration facility. And here is where reality already intrudes.

Every water expert consulted for opinions on environmentally friendly Delta diversions had the same answer: It’s a good idea, but it will require 25 years of environmental studies, endless litigation, and there’s a good chance at the end of all that, it still won’t get built.

This is the problem. It has nothing to do with nature and droughts and climate change and wildlife protection. It has to do with a special interest juggernaut whose business model is built on obstructionism and conflict. It doesn’t even have to do with the staggering and unnecessarily inflated cost for any water project undertaken in California, because this state can easily afford any one of the above solutions. Those problems are manageable.

But until California’s politicians, from Gavin Newsom all the way down to an elected board director at the smallest water district in the state, stand up to environmentalist extremists and the scarcity profiteers who pull their strings, there will never again be enough water.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Tyranny of the Minority

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison famously warned against the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is unlikely he could have envisioned what we face today. 21st century America is dissolving before our eyes, as our heritage and sovereignty is stolen by a tyrannical coalition of minorities. Not ethnic minorities – their American bequest is being stolen right alongside that of America’s shrinking white majority. Nobody is exempt, and everyone should unite to resist.

Minorities in this context refer to the elite vanguard of what Californian political writer Joel Kotkin has called the “Upstairs-Downstairs Coalition, a voting bloc that brings together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.”

At the top of the top are a few thousand of the super rich. At the bottom are a few thousand hardened fanatics, many of them professionals. These two super-minorities, working in tandem, currently control the destiny of America. Expertly manipulating the voters in the upstairs-downstairs coalition, they’re actively destroying everything we love and everything we need.

The minority occupying the top position in the Upstairs-Downstairs coalition are the plutocrats who run America. A 2017 analysis identified the top 0.01 percent (one in ten-thousand Americans) have an average income of over $30 million per year. A 2019 Stanford study of the top 0.1 percent (one in one thousand Americans) control a total net worth equal to the entire cumulative net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans. At the pinnacle, however, are America’s billionaires, a scant 735 of them at last count.

This is a vanishingly small minority of people, less than one in every half-million Americans. But their influence is decisive. Every year, these billionaires and the corporations they control disburse billions – often getting tax deductions for doing so – to maintain standing armies of activist groups to conduct lawfare, fund civil disobedience, run massive propaganda campaigns, engage in targeted “get-out-the-vote” activities, prop up financially dependent media properties, and produce “expert” studies with paid-for ideas.

The minorities at both ends of this up-down coalition are groups identifiable not by their ethnicity or ideology, but by their behavior. In every case, they constitute a minute fraction of the population, but in the name of compassion, equity, diversity, and environmentalism they are undermining and, unless stopped, will destroy America.

The Weaponization of Mental Illness

Michael Shellenberger, a Californian and former progressive activist, has become one of America’s most astute critics of the failed policies that are sowing social and economic chaos across the nation. In a series of recent articles with self-explanatory titles – Infantilization Of The Apocalypse, The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics, Narcissism In Climate & Woke Victim Movements, and others, in reference to militant activists, he argues that “global elites are encouraging them, which is exceedingly dangerous and irresponsible.” He’s right.

Co-opting potentially violent sociopaths, or as Shellenberger puts it, “weaponizing mental illness,” has long been a tool of authoritarian regimes. In the USSR during the Cold War, during the German Nazi era, and in police states throughout the 20th century, recruiting thugs and turning them on their own people was a common tactic, as it is still in Xi’s China today. What’s happening in America is only slightly more nuanced, and very effective.

To further explain who controls America’s current upstairs-downstairs coalition in a historical context, it is helpful to recognize the false dichotomy represented by the supposedly left-wing establishment Democrats and the supposedly right-wing establishment Republicans. “Establishment” is the key word here.

Gary Allen, in his 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, blew up the traditional paradigm whereby the “Left” is communism and the “Right” is fascism. In what he suggested is a more accurate political spectrum, all forms of authoritarian government, communism, fascism, and socialism, are to one extreme, anarchy is to the other extreme, and in the center is a constitutional republic with limits on government power.

The importance of this distinction is that it explains how there can be a shared agenda between outwardly antagonistic capitalists and socialists. Allen writes, “The seeming paradox of rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.”

Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below

Allen describes the upstairs-downstairs coalition as “pressure from above, pressure from below,” writing “Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support…the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the malefactors of great wealth.”

The hidden agenda is to sow chaos, triggering demands for more state control, allowing governments and corporations to further consolidate power and wealth. This agenda is proceeding on schedule.

The public agenda, incessantly marketed as something to be desired, is to erase America as we know it, replacing it with what is enthusiastically portrayed as a transnational, transhuman utopia. According to this vision, every person on earth will have achieved “equity,” i.e., equal outcomes, while at the same time, the footprint of human civilization will become ecologically benign and the planet will be saved.

This is an impossible charade. What they are actually imposing on the overwhelming majority of Americans is a terrifying dystopia. Private financial independence will become all but impossible, the economy will be centrally controlled, productivity will be rationed, and if anything, the health of planetary ecosystems will be worse instead of better.  But if you question any of it, you are a divisive bigot. But indoctrination campaigns escalate with every passing year.

For decades, intensifying with Obama’s presidency, establishment institutions in America have falsely condemned Americans as being racist and sexist, despite American culture for all its flaws being the most inclusive culture in the history of civilization. This ongoing propaganda war on social stability wasn’t enough, however, when starting in 2016 the MAGA movement began to attract Americans of all backgrounds. These MAGA Americans reject the narratives of systemic racism and sexism, and they reject climate doomsday scenarios.

To cope, the establishment began anointing the most troubled individuals among us as pioneering saints, destined to completely redefine normalcy. American culture is now at a tipping point, because American institutions are now opportunistically validating behaviors that are clearly destructive and obviously pathological.

The Useful Lunatics

The riots during the summer of 2020 highlighted the individuals who now constitute the vanguard of the downstairs cohort of the upstairs-downstairs coalition. For months on end, Antifa and BLM ringleaders, feted by the media and funded by plutocrats, orchestrated murderous rampages in dozens of cities. Looters and vandals were described by establishment press and politicians as “mostly peaceful,” and “victims of racism.”

Other members of the downstairs cohort include homeless drug addicts, psychopaths, and predators, who in their uncontained thousands have made life unpleasant, unsanitary, and dangerous for millions of people in cities and towns across America. But they are not held accountable for their actions. They are no longer arrested for vagrancy, public intoxication or even theft. In the name of compassion, these laws or no longer enforced. This only encourages and multiplies the worse elements, and further harms the genuine victims.

Climate militants, also a minute fraction of the population, have made common cause with BLM and Antifa militants. They commit acts of performative vandalism, their protests block freeways, they harass targeted politicians and executives, they have shut down energy pipelines, and their attacks on vital energy infrastructure are escalating. Their actions are encouraged by every mainstream institution in America, despite the destructive essence of their agenda.

No description of the activist minorities bent on erasing America as we know it would be complete without delving into the sexual revolution, which has taken a form that even hippies in the hedonistic late 1960s would scarcely recognize. Do you think women have penises, or that men menstruate? If you do not agree with those statements, American institutions ranging from Proctor and Gamble to the National Hockey League consider you to be a “divisive” individual, lacking empathy.

The preposterous extreme to which the woke gender warriors are trying to take America is incomprehensible to any sane person. Do you believe it’s appropriate for drag queens to recruit five year old children to learn how to twerk? Should states be boycott because their legislature had the courage to prohibit biological men from using a woman’s restroom, or participate in women’s sports? Do you object to hospital surgeons whacking the sexual organs off of children? Careful how you answer. Sanity is insurrectionary.

The public agenda of Antifa/BLM is “equity.” For the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s compassion. For climate militants, it’s saving the earth. For gender warriors, it’s to end discrimination. But in all of these cases, the hidden agenda is to advance the power of the state, to divide and demoralize the population, to destroy conventional traditions and norms, and consolidate private property ownership in the hands of a small elite.

From outraged parents swarming in to be heard at school board meetings to individuals, everywhere, merely wanting to protect their families, their homes, and their businesses, those who defended order and normalcy are now the “divisive” ones. Worse, they are now deemed dangerous, and are condemned by nearly every influential institution in the country.

A few hundred super-rich elites and a powerful handful of woke and climate activist ringleaders are the minorities that now tyrannize America. They are not defined by conventional ideological definitions, or by their faith, or by their ethnicity. With money and fanaticism they control establishment institutions and grassroots armies. The wealthy faction is united by greed, the woke and climate populists by nihilistic hatred. It is an axis of evil.

This cannot stand. There are too few of them, and too many of us. Resist.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Newsom’s Homeless Policies Require Radical Revision

California’s Homeless Industrial Complex was delivered a minor jolt last month, when Governor Newsom “issued a blanket rejection of local California governments’ plans to curb homelessness, putting on hold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.”

The panic was short-lived, however, when in a November 18 conference in Sacramento the governor relented and released yet another billion dollars to California’s cities and counties after their representatives all pledged that “in the next round, they commit to more aggressive plans to reduce street homelessness.”

Oh please. “We’re going to plan to make more ‘aggressive’ plans. Ok? Now give us the money.”

This is theatre, but it doesn’t have to be. Newsom is one of the few individuals in California with the power to completely upend the corrupt, phony compassion-spewing army of opportunistic bureaucrats, nonprofits, and politically connected developers who have squandered billions in order to make California’s homeless crisis worse than ever.

Newsom was right to reject funding requests that, on balance, claimed they would only reduce homelessness in California by two percent. But he is wrong to expect that “more aggressive policies” will ever be effective unless the fundamental model to combat homelessness is completely scrapped and replaced.

Homeless policy in California rests on premises that guarantee ongoing failure. The so-called “Housing First” doctrine, which requires the homeless to be given free housing without any behavioral conditions before they can be treated for mental illness or substance addiction, much less trained to develop marketable skills, is a failure.

The decriminalization of sociopathic behavior including public use of hard drugs and repetitive petty theft, along with court rulings that prevent police from removing people from public places unless they can offer them free shelter, is a failure.

And the conflation of the obligation to provide “supportive housing” with the prevailing scam whereby a few thousand units of housing are built at a cost of a few billion dollars, is an abject, scandalous failure.

Finally, California’s neglected water, energy, and transportation infrastructure, its decimated timber industry, its offshoring of the sources for every necessary building material, its punitive policies of urban containment, its protracted, capricious, and extortionate process to obtain building permits, and its ridiculously overwrought building codes – all of this defined by fanatics and orchestrated by oligopolists – is the real reason housing is unaffordable.

If Governor Newsom wants to help the homeless, he will reject all of these premises. He will denounce the Housing First policy as unbalanced and ineffective, he will demand legislative and legal actions to reform laws that prevent police from arresting criminals and institutionalizing psychotics, and he will set a cap on how much a shelter bed will cost and challenge cities and counties to come up with solutions within that constraint.

All Newsom has to do to ensure cities and counties adhere to these new and radical revisions to homeless policy in California is withhold the money. All of it. It’s a lot of money. According to the LAO, last year the State of California “provided $10.7 billion to 50 housing and homelessness-related programs across 15 state entities.”

That probably isn’t all the money being spent. Deciphering state budget allocations, taking into account the many ways “housing” and “homeless” are categorized, perusing the general fund, capital accounts, bond financings, federal pass-throughs, special funds, and who knows what else, is a fool’s errand. There are infinite routes through the labyrinth, all of them yielding different results. Expect $10.7 billion to be the low number. That’s a pretty big Minotaur, but that’s only the state’s share.

Then there is the money California’s cities and counties are also pouring into the maw of the Homeless Industrial Complex. Earlier this year, the City of Los Angeles agreed to commit another $3 billion to house “some” of its homeless. In this current fiscal year, Los Angeles County has budgeted $532 million to “fight homelessness.” These totals don’t include additional spending on low income housing and rent subsidies. They don’t include spending on homeless and housing programs by the other 87 incorporated cities in Los Angeles County. They don’t include the rest of California’s cities and counties.

It isn’t necessary to wade through over 500 local budgets to know tens of billions of dollars have been squandered, because of political choices that created the homeless crisis, the housing shortage, and then made the problem worse instead of better.

Consider the KTLA report from February 2022, exposing a homeless housing project where each unit under development was going to cost $837,000 per unit. Consider what outraged residents in LA’s Venice neighborhood have dubbed the Monster on the Median, projected to cost over $100 million to construct, on land that’s worth at least another $50 million, in order to offer 140 units of subsidized housing.

This is blatant, deplorable corruption. It’s everywhere. And it’s all perfectly legal. Newsom, it’s time to go beyond words. Take this to the next level. End this. Now.

Estimates of California’s homeless population range in excess of 150,000 individuals. How much would it cost in an honest, functional society to get them off the streets? First, one must understand – and this is based on evidence gathered from people with extensive and direct experience working with the homeless – if California’s laws were revised to make laws against vagrancy, intoxication and theft enforceable again, half of the homeless (or more) would vanish overnight. They would return to domiciles they had previously spurned in favor of the freedom and unaccountability of the street.

The homeless that remained after changing the legal environment could be managed by reserving existing shelter space and supportive housing for those unsheltered homeless who can remain sober and accept counseling and job training. There is already enough capacity built to handle those homeless who are willing and able to work towards regaining their independence.

The rest – and this would be most of them – could be sorted according to their afflictions into cohorts of criminals, addicts, and psychotics. The addicts and the criminals could be removed to regional camps set up in inexpensive parts of the California’s urban counties. These camps could be set up for millions of dollars, not billions, using expertise on loan from U.N. personnel who have done similar work, overnight and on a budget, in conflict zones all over the world. To help earn their keep, they could participate in conservation projects and other character building work, and recover their sobriety, their dignity, and eventually their freedom. The truly mentally ill would have to be placed, involuntarily, in psychiatric hospitals.

Taking this approach to the homeless crisis would not be cheap. Expanding the capacity of psychiatric hospitals, in particular, will cost hundreds of millions. But overall, this approach would work, and it would cost far less than what is being spent today to execute policies that have merely turned California into a magnet for the indigent of the nation. Incremental shifts in homeless policy in California will never solve the problem. And Gavin Newsom knows it.

Do more, governor.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Creating Water Abundance in California

“And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.”
Ezekiel 47:9

Water is Life. For as long as there has been civilization, access to water has been an unyielding prerequisite. California is no exception. As its population grew, the state built one of the most remarkable systems of interbasin water transfers in the world. Every year, nearly 40 million acre feet of water is diverted from remote rivers and transported to magnificent coastal cities or used to irrigate rich farmland. But the whole system needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.

Here are some water projects that ought to be moving forward in California:

(1) Desalination at scale: There is only one major desalination plant in California, located just north of San Diego. At a total project cost of just over $1.0 billion, the Carlsbad Desalination Project went into operation in 2015 and desalinates 55 thousand acre feet of water per year. Desalination has the unique virtue of being an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. Every other water source, ultimately, depends on how much rain we get. In combination with wastewater recycling, building several more large desalination plants could enable California’s coastal cities to become nearly independent of imported water. Potential sites for their construction are already available.

New desalination plants could be co-located with existing natural gas power plants on the California coast, or co-locate with Diablo Canyon, or on the site of the former San Onofre nuclear power plant. These power plant sites have infrastructure already constructed that can be repurposed, reducing construction costs. Desalination construction costs about $20,000 per acre foot of annual capacity, which is grossly overpriced, thanks to gross overregulation and incessant litigation. Those excess costs are the result of political choices that the state legislature could fix. Desalination plants are getting built for one-fifth that amount in Israel today.

But even at inflated costs, having secure access to desalinated water would give urban water agencies negotiating leverage when purchasing imported water. And desalination plants can be designed to have a useful life that greatly exceeds the period of time needed to pay off the financing which represents about 70 percent of the annual cost for desalinated water.

The idea that desalination uses too much energy is a myth. It requires 400 megawatts of continuous power to desalinate 1 MAF per year of seawater. This is roughly equivalent to the cost to pump water from Northern California into the coastal cities of Southern California.

(2) Off-stream reservoirs: The virtue of an off-stream reservoir is that it will not block the flow of a natural river with a high dam. Instead, off-stream reservoirs are constructed in arid valleys and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. The water is then redirected to farms and cities as needed during the summer months. Here are three badly needed off-stream reservoirs:

The Pacheco Reservoir in Santa Clara County. This proposed reservoir – to be located in a remote valley that is watered by a small stream, but not a major river – will store water from the California Aqueduct for delivery to South SF Bay customers. At an estimated cost of $2.5 billion it will store 140,000 acre feet.

The Sites Reservoir north of the Delta. At an estimated cost of $4.0 billion, this off-stream reservoir will store 1.5 MAF, tapping storm runoff in the Sacramento River. In the proposal stage for decades, this reservoir has secured about half the funding needed for construction, but like all reservoir proposals, remains the target of vigorous opposition from environmentalists.

The Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir. This proposed off-stream reservoir will store 82,000 acre feet of water. It will collect water from the California Aqueduct. Estimated cost $500 million.

(3) Wastewater Recycling Projects: Construction of the proposed Carson water recycling plant in Los Angeles County needs to be fast-tracked, with immediate follow up to construct another one in order to recycle 100 percent of water imported into Los Angeles. At a projected cost of $3.4 billion, the Carson plant is currently planned to recycle 168,000 acre feet of water per year. This is just a fraction of the total available wastewater stream in the Los Angeles Basin.

The problem with treated wastewater, in the Santa Monica Bay and also in the San Francisco Bay, is primarily the negative impact excess nitrogen has on aquatic ecosystems. If all urban wastewater in California as recycled (if it isn’t already), that would add up to nearly 2 million acre feet per year to the water supply, as well as improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.

In Northern California, all of the wastewater recycling plants along the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta need to be upgraded. These urban areas cumulatively are probably contributing nearly one million acre feet per year of treated but nitrogen rich discharge into the San Francisco Bay. Upgrading these plants would not only proportionately reduce the amount of water these cities have to import from the State Water Project, Hetch Hetchy, and elsewhere, but, crucially, these upgrades would improve the water quality in the San Francisco Bay. This in turn would lessen the quantity of floodwater that must currently be allowed to flow through the bay to dilute and wash out the pollution coming from these treatment plants.

The estimated cost to upgrade all urban wastewater plants in California to reusable standards (either irrigation or indirect/direct potable reuse) is $20 billion. I expect the real number is higher. It must be done.

(4) Environmentally Friendly Delta Diversions to San Joaquin Valley Aquifers: An exciting new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley” is a work-in-progress, authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French Drains within channels created inside Delta Islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, flood water could be safely harvested from the Delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200 acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 million acre feet per year or more, at a cost of $1.0 billion.

The Blueprint also relies on construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the Delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 million acre feet. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California Aqueduct, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

These four projects have the potential to eliminate water scarcity in California forever. If Californians are destined to endure decade long droughts, where there is minimal snow and only a few big storms each year, these projects will ensure that sufficient water is harvested and stored to keep cities and farmland green.

These water projects aren’t the only desirable investments Californians should make to create water abundance. Also needed, for example, are facilities for harvesting urban storm runoff, and provisions to return some of this runoff to reservoir storage to maintain river flows. The Los Angeles River, for example, currently flows year round in the upper urban portion of the river, thanks to three wastewater treatment plants, which once upgraded, will no longer offer perennial outfall.

This evinces another crucial consideration; new water supply infrastructure, and water abundance, is also necessary to maintain ecosystem health. In barely two centuries, a civilization, now 40 million strong, has descended on what had been a nearly empty state. Massive civilization has a massive footprint, and nature in California will never be the same as it once was. Effectively nurturing the natural ecosystems of California requires recognizing they too require artificial, human inputs and human management. Against a backdrop of abundance, why shouldn’t desalinated water flow down a revitalized Los Angeles River? Why shouldn’t water stored in reservoirs guarantee perennial flows in the San Joaquin River?

It is possible to deliver 40 million acre feet per year to California’s cities and farms, while also diverting and releasing additional millions of acre feet every year to sustain flourishing aquatic ecosystems. Investing in water abundance, by upgrading California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century, can make this a reality.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Africans Harmed the Most by the “Climate” Agenda

AUDIO: The avoidable hardships that the climate mitigation agenda have imposed on the Western nations is nothing compared to the catastrophe they’re wreaking on emerging African nations. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.

Looming Deficits Present Opportunity to Find Solutions for California

Less than six months ago, California’s state legislature approved a record breaking $300 billion state budget. Within that total, and to finance most of the state’s ongoing operations, was a general fund allocation of $235 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023.

Record breaking budgets are nothing new. Only ten years ago, California’s general fund was $93 billion, which adjusted for inflation would be $118 billion in today’s dollars. Meanwhile, California’s population over the past ten years has only grown from 38 million to 39 million. This means that inflation adjusted per capita general fund spending in California has increased from $3,124 back in 2013, to $6,023 today. California’s state government is spending twice as much money today per resident as it did just ten years ago.

This explosion in spending has yielded dubious benefits. By nearly every measure, things are worse off today in California. Obvious examples include expensive and unreliable energy and water, failing schools, rising crime, unaffordable housing and college tuition, and an exploding homeless population, but that’s hardly the entirety of the worsening challenges facing Californians. The decade-long run of record tax revenue spawned an avalanche of new regulations, driving up prices, discouraging expansion of big business and driving small businesses under. Through its spending priorities California attracts the dependent and repels anyone striving for independence. It’s grotesquely inequitable.

This is the context in which to view the latest revenue projections coming from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Analyst. The concern here should not be that our state budget for 2023-24 now faces a potential $24 billion deficit. The concern should focus on why there has been an explosion of state spending, yielding nothing but growing dysfunction.

As it is, LAO’s projection of a $24 billion deficit is a baseline case, relying on several assumptions that could go sideways, tumbling the actual deficit into much more troubling territory. For example, LAO acknowledges the likelihood of a deepening economic recession, but does not factor the impact of a recession into their tax revenue estimate. They write, “Were a recession to occur soon, revenue declines in the budget window very likely would be more severe than our outlook.” In the section of their analysis where LAO projects worst case scenarios, they project general fund revenue dropping as low as $180 billion in 2024-25, which based on merely maintaining the current general fund budget reflects a deficit of $55 billion.

If the events of the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that consequences of pivotal events are often only obvious in hindsight. In June of 2020, did anyone really think that COVID shutting down half the economy would lead to a boom in tech company valuations? Did anyone at that time realize how uniquely beneficial the tech stock boom would be to California’s state general fund tax revenue? It’s easy today to look back and recognize the chain of causes, but it wasn’t easy to predict them when the COVID ordeal first began. It’s also easy, and probably accurate, to say that over this time period, the state legislature’s blithe ambition to make sure spending kept pace with revenue growth was blissfully unaware of just how improbable and fleeting the gift was that they were squandering.

Another lesson from the past three years, however, is to be wary of excessive pessimism. Unsustainable economic models work until they don’t work, and as long as the US Dollar is the least afflicted currency in the world and the US is the most secure investment haven in the world, and as long as inflation continues to reliably erode the principal value of a nominally exploding federal debt, massive deficit spending to stimulate economic activity may remain a viable strategy. If only more of that spending would be invested in practical infrastructure. Nonetheless, this could go on for decades. It could take forms we can only imagine. We simply don’t know.

The question therefore isn’t how to cut spending and raise taxes in order to balance the budget. The likely truth is that California’s state legislature is going to muddle through one way or another. The prevailing question should be how does California’s state legislature start to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing with all that money? They’ve doubled per capita spending in the last ten years, and ordinary hard working Californians can’t afford to live here any more. Clearly, so far they’re doing everything wrong.

LAO warnings of an impending general fund deficit are a good time to not only talk about how California’s state legislature is on the wrong course, but exactly how it can change its course. If you want to realign the state’s politics, it isn’t enough to say taxes, crime, and prices for everything are too high, and educational achievement and the supply of housing are too low. Propose concrete solutions. Very few Californians would mind paying their taxes if the state was affordable and effectively addressing the challenges of crime, homelessness, education, housing, water, transportation, energy, and education.

Solutions exist, but lack politicians with the courage to promote them and the charisma to effectively convince voters of their efficacy.

Offer state vouchers to parents to use to send their children to any accredited school, public or private.

Rescue public education by replacing woke curricula with classical education would save billions and rescue a generation from a failing system.

Fast track approval of nuclear power plants, natural gas fracking, and refinery expansions to force competition for energy and lower the prices for fuel and electricity.

Fund more water supply projects and practical freeway improvements, using tax and bond funds to yield long term economic dividends.

Approve housing developments in weeks instead of decades and reduce California’s absurdly overwritten building codes to lower the cost of housing.

Turn the timber industry loose again to thin California’s dangerously overgrown forests.

Build inexpensive minimum security facilities to incarcerate drug addicts and petty thieves to curb crime and end unsheltered homelessness. Use these facilities to teach inmates vocational skills so upon release they can fill hundreds of thousands of high paying construction jobs.

New solutions. An entire new alternative vision. This is the real discussion that California needs. Not just how to balance the budget. Rather, how to allocate the budget, and how to deregulate the economy. Where are politicians who are ready to step up with more than criticism of the failures of California’s one-party state, and offer solutions?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Climate Skeptics Have Ready Allies in Africa

So when you say stop to your fossil fuel, what’s the alternative?
Fortune Charumbira, president of the Pan-African Parliament, November, 2022

his is a question without an answer. But for nearly three weeks in November, over 35,000 people including heads of state and the global corps d’elite, pretended they were solving what they claim is the most urgent crisis in the world—the climate emergency—while ignoring the only relevant question. What is a practical alternative to fossil fuel?

Also ignored at the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, an event sponsored by some of the world’s biggest corporations and covered, uncritically, by the biggest media conglomerates on earth, was the primary reason for environmental challenges in the 21st century. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s population trends.

How patterns of population growth and population decline among the nations of the world intersect with the necessary trends in per capita energy use to eliminate global poverty is by far the most relevant variable affecting the future of humanity and the planet. But nothing in the program of COP27 explicitly focused on either of these genuinely existential challenges.

The imbalance in population demographics between wealthy nations, in which the native populations are failing to reproduce, and poor nations, which continue to explode in population, is easily apparent. The decline in birthrates in wealthy nations is well documented, even if it is rarely discussed. But what is almost never discussed, because it invites accusations of racism, is the unchecked population growth in nations that still have not managed to emerge from poverty.

Global Population Trends: Feast and Famine

According to the most recent World Bank data, the population of “low-income” nations has quintupled since 1960, whereas “high-income” nations have seen their populations over the same 61 years increase by only 60 percent. China’s population has more than doubled, and India’s population has tripled, while the population of the United States is up by 80 percent. But the most rapid population growth is in the Middle East and Africa.

These are nations that are the least equipped to handle massive population growth. The Middle Eastern nations have money but no water, the African nations have water but no money. In many cases, such as in Pakistan or any Sahelian nation in Africa, they don’t have nearly enough of either. But that isn’t stopping them from reproducing. In fact, thanks mostly to Western foreign aid, heavy on food and medicine, their populations continue to explode.

For example, Pakistan’s population has increased from 44 million in 1960 to 225 million today. Nigeria’s population has grown from 45 million people in 1960 to 211 million today. Sudan’s population is more than six times greater than it was in 1960, up to 45 million from only 7 million. Uganda’s population is up more than seven times, from 6 million in 1960 to 47 million today. And there is no end in sight.

In terms of current rates of population increase, the populations of Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Angola, Uganda, Burundi, Chad, Gambia, Tanzania, Mali, Zambia, and Equatorial Guinea are all over three percent per year. At that rate, the populations of these nations will double in just 20 years. These are staggering numbers. Today, in Niger, the average woman of childbearing age has seven children. In Somalia, the Congo, Mali, and Chad, the average is six, and in Angola, Burundi, Nigeria, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Benin, Mozambique, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Senegal, South Sudan, and Zambia, the average is five children per woman. Today.

On the list from the World Bank of the most fertile nations as measured by births per woman of current childbearing age, the first 25 nations are all in Africa. At number 26 is the Solomon Islands at 4.3 children per woman. Of the top 50 nations in terms of current fertility, 39 of them are in Africa. The only nations of any size occupying the top 50, outside of African nations, are Afghanistan (28), Yemen (45), and Iraq (46). And for that matter, the only large African nations that are not in the top 50 are just outside that distinction; Zimbabwe at 52, Kenya at 53, Namibia at 55, and Egypt at 56. These nations all have female fertility still around 3.5 per woman. The only outliers are South Africa (85), Libya (98), and Tunisia (103).

The practical impact of these demographic facts is stupefying. Global population has just reached 8 billion. By 2050 it is expected to reach 9.7 billion. Africa, all by itself, is projected to account for 1.2 billion of that 1.7 billion increase. Every one of these African nations is riven with conflict or potential conflict. Some of them, such as Somalia, or any nation in the Sahel region, would be grievously challenged to support their existing population with the resources currently available in their nations, even if they were politically stable.

Meanwhile, nations experiencing population decline are invariably high-income nations with high rates of per capita energy consumption. High energy consumption enables prosperity, and with prosperity comes lower birth rates. The worldwide trend is unambiguous. Prosperous societies in Europe, North America, and East Asia are all experiencing population implosions. Italy and Greece have fertility rates of 1.3. Spain’s is 1.2. Throughout Europe the picture isn’t much better. Germany’s is 1.5, the U.K. is 1.6, and France’s is 1.8. Across the Atlantic, the United States is at 1.6. Japan is down at 1.3 and South Korea is at 0.8. These nations will either dramatically increase their birthrates, or admit millions of immigrants, or they will disappear.

This is the demographic reality in the world today. It’s feast or famine. The developed nations are dying, while Africa’s population is exploding. The biggest Asian nations, China (1.7 average births per woman) and India (2.2), are on the same trajectory as the developed nations, but their populations are so big, their immigration policies so restrictive, and their governments so nationalistic, it is unlikely they will substantially alter their demographics merely to keep their populations from declining.

There is a difference between thoughtlessly yielding to a Malthusian reflex by claiming all civilization is unsustainable and recognizing that, in some cases, population growth is unsustainable. African population growth is not sustainable at the current rate without major political and economic changes. The solution being implemented by the Western-led international community rests on dubious foundations.

The consensus of Western elites is to facilitate mass immigration into Western nations from every destitute country that is experiencing rapid population growth, under the pretext that developed nations have caused climate catastrophes which in turn has led to the hardships these nations are experiencing.

Lies Are the Consequences of Denial

This is a preposterous lie. An example of this lie, and there are countless examples, is how the recent flooding in Pakistan was reported as so terribly severe due to climate change. That is false. Yes, they had a lot of precipitation. But in 1960, with only one-fifth as many people living there, there would still have been forests to stabilize the hillsides and absorb runoff, there was a much smaller area covered with impervious surfaces because the cities were much smaller, there weren’t nearly as many people living in areas prone to flooding, and there was far less built out property to sustain damage.

Compounding this lie, however, is an even bigger lie, which is that it is possible to stop developing fossil fuel without destroying the global economy. The Western-dominated climate agenda, reinforced once again at COP27, is to require “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 relative to the 2019 level.” The COP27 “implementation plan” also calls for “about USD 4 trillion per year to be invested in renewable energy up until 2030 to be able to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and, furthermore, a global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investment of at least USD 4–6 trillion per year.”

Take a look at the presenters at COP27. Note their affiliations: international NGOs, investment banks, government agencies, renewable energy companies, service providers, consultants, carbon emissions trading firm executives, and professional activists. Imagine the slavering anticipation with which these ambitious individuals and the organizations they represent intend to grab their slice of $10 trillion a year.

These are the thought leaders whose marketing and propaganda stochastically nurture militant climate warriors who stage “die-ins” on the streets of European capitals, or throw milkshakes onto art masterpieces, or shut off energy pipelines, or occupy the offices of elected officials. These are the people who fund the studies that feed the doomsday narrative, amplified by activist journalists, and used to manipulate voting populations while terrifying a thoroughly indoctrinated generation of school children. Don’t expect these people to explore honest alternatives to their sanctimonious proclamations. Trillions of dollars are on the table.

And here is where the words of Fortune Charumbira, president of the Pan-African Parliament, carry profound meaning. African nations want to develop their ample reserves of natural gas and build a gas infrastructure to generate electricity and enable urban residents to cook meals with clean-burning gas. They want nuclear power plants. They want water projects to irrigate land and treat water that they can safely drink. Instead, at a cost that would have paid for all of that and then some, they’re going to get wind and solar farms.

The Rest of the World Rejects Western Energy Denialism

The established policy of wealthy European nations and the United States is to impoverish their citizens in order to develop “renewables.” At the same time, these nations will pressure Africans to renounce rapid economic development, triggering a massive diaspora, one that will make current migration pressures appear trivial by comparison. It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to wonder how long the citizens of either sphere will tolerate this. But meanwhile, the rest of the world is not going to stop developing nuclear power, gas, oil, or coal.

The biggest consumer of coal in the world, by far, is China. Consuming an estimated 86 exajoules of coal last year, the Chinese accounted for 54 percent of all coal consumption worldwide. In second place was India, at 13 percent of all global consumption of coal. The entire rest of the world only accounted for a third of all coal consumption. But why would nations like Pakistan, whose per capita energy consumption is only 1/16th as much as the average American, choose not to burn coal, the cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel?

When examining patterns of energy use by nation, it is obvious that renewables can’t possibly deliver the amount of energy nations are demanding. They cost too much, and the environmental penalty for digging up all the required minerals is far greater than simply developing more fossil fuels.

Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, is so energy poor that the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy doesn’t even track it individually. The only nations in Africa for which there is enough of an energy economy to track individually are South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria. For the remaining nations in Africa, BP estimates the per capita energy consumption at 2.42 gigajoules, compared to 279.89 for the United States. This is an incredible disparity. In 2021, the average American consumed 115 times as much energy as the average African.

The geniuses of COP27 want Africans to shut up, build windmills, stay poor, have lots of babies, and migrate to Western nations. That’s their solution to the very real challenge of energy, and the very overstated and exploited problem of climate change.

To quote out of context a famous Democratic politician known for his climate conformity, the Western elites who think Africans are going to accept energy poverty are going to “reap the whirlwind.” A productive strategy for anyone committed to energy sanity in the West is to recognize that Africans are also rejecting the COP27 narrative. Climate skeptics may rest assured that “allyship” with Africans like Fortune Charumbira will be of mutual benefit.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

How to Unify the GOP and Realign America

If Republicans hope to unify their party and realign American politics in their favor, they’ll have to do more than pour billions of dollars into television ads that highlight rampaging looters and the despairing jobless. They have to offer hope, tied to an achievable vision. Americans are ready for an alternative to Democratic fearmongering and stagnation. Give it to them.

Standing in the way of Republicans developing a comprehensive agenda they can agree on is the deepening rift within the party. On one side is the legacy party, represented by McConnell and Romney and other so-called moderate Republicans. Opposing them is the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump and backed up, among other things, by the Freedom Caucus which now constitutes a majority of the House Republicans.

The opportunity to heal this rift lies with the American voters themselves, whose sentiments on a few fundamental policy issues are coalescing into a consensus bigger than the political parties that supposedly speak for them. Embracing these unifying issues and emphasizing them will hand Republicans a populist bloc of voters that will include almost all grassroots Republicans, along with Independents and Democrats. It will attract voters irrespective of their income or group identity and it will cross ideological lines.

These core premises that might enable Republicans to realign American are on the issues of education, immigration, affirmative action, and climate change. In every case, powerful special interests among Democrats and Republicans will consider these policies, which have the potential to unify grassroots voters, to be mortal threats to their agenda. But only if they are promoted without compromise, and only by leaning in to the controversy and the heresy, will Republican politicians and their party acquire the credibility they’re going to need to be successful.

Success on these four issues will realign America, leaving the country far better positioned to address every other challenge. Restoring quality education will create high information voters and a skilled workforce. Merit based immigration and merit based college admissions and business hiring will build individual character and industrial competitiveness. Replacing the “climate agenda” with realistic energy and infrastructure policies will save small businesses, make America affordable again, reduce international tensions, disempower an out-of-control oligarchy, and even refocus attention on genuine environmental challenges. Specifics matter.

For example, in education policy, Republicans should stand for school choice, where parents receive annual payment vouchers they can redeem at public or private schools. And even more to the point, traditional public schools should be completely restructured, with curricula based on classical education methods that emphasize developing fundamental skills in math, reading and writing, as well as character development and a firm grounding in the virtues of Western Civilization.

With immigration, it isn’t enough to regain control of America’s borders, although that must happen before anything else. It is necessary to completely revamp America’s immigration policies to prioritize admission of people who bring skills that our nation needs. Most immigration into America should be based on merit. It is not possible for America to absorb the world’s poor. If altruism is a value Americans want to incorporate into foreign policy, than aid and investment in poverty stricken nations can help hundreds of millions of people far more cost-effectively than mass immigration.

Moral arguments can frame every plank of a coherent new Republican agenda. Rejecting the false premise that America is still an inherently racist nation is the moral justification for eliminating affirmative action and other supposedly anti-racist and anti-sexist policies that persist in American society. At the same time, however, Republicans must explain that meritocracy is the only possible way for a society to provide equal opportunities to everyone, and it is the only way to ensure that individuals will recognize hard work and learned competence as the path to success in life. Without meritocracy, the character of individuals and of society is corrupted. Meritocracy is tough, but there is no alternative.

The biggest threat to freedom, and the biggest false premise that Republicans must replace, is that climate change, caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, poses an existential threat to the planet. It does not. And in rejecting that premise, Republicans must replace it with a new premise: Oil, gas and coal, extracted and clean burning using the most advanced technologies, is the pathway to peace and prosperity, and is more sustainable and causes less harm than so-called renewables.

The climate agenda, pushed by nearly every politician in America, reduces the standard of living of all but the wealthiest Americans. Along with extremist environmentalism in general, it concentrates wealth in the hands of multi-national corporations and billionaires, and all but wipes out the middle class. Misguided, extreme environmentalist policies have already taken away the ability of ordinary Americans to purchase homes and build generational wealth. The regressive impact of environmentalist laws and regulations is an attack not so much on private property, as it is an attack focused on private property that isn’t owned by corporations and billionaires. Denying Americans ownership opportunities takes away the incentive to work hard and achieve. It is another way that meritocracy is undermined.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but they are probably the biggest issues for which there is the potential to unify a supermajority of Americans. Republicans have to embrace these four controversial premises without reservations: Classical education and school choice. Merit based immigration. Replacing affirmative action with meritocracy. And replacing climate change alarm with a commitment to prosperity through an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power.

President Trump is firmly in favor of all these policies. Republicans are challenged to find other leaders of national stature who will back them just as unequivocally. Without collective agreement on these basic and radically differentiating positions on the issues of education, immigration, meritocracy, and energy and the environment, Republicans are indeed merely RINOs, members of the uniparty, participating in the inexorable demise of a great nation.

The people who have supported Trump have supported these policies. They deserve leadership that demonstrates the courage to promote all of them, not just one or two of them. Voters should demand that Republican candidates answer four questions:

“Will you fight for (1) school choice and classical curricula in public schools, (2) secure borders and merit based immigration, (3) an end to race and gender based discrimination of all kinds, and (4) unrestricted development of clean fossil fuel and nuclear power?” There are plenty of other important issues, but these four are all profoundly disruptive while retaining the ability to attract American voters of all backgrounds and ideologies. If these four goals are fulfilled, many other issues will resolve themselves.

Leaders who commit to these four goals will be condemned just as Trump was condemned, even if their rhetoric is tactful and their logic impeccable. When that day comes, voters will realize that it has not been Trump’s personality that invited seven years of relentless attacks on him and all his supporters. It was the policies he fights for.

The power and promise of these ideas, expressed without reservations or compromise by a united Republican party, will attract majorities across all voting segments. When you realign the electorate, the entire biased and rigged system cannot stop the weight of the landslide.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Rick Caruso’s Missed Opportunity to Save Los Angeles

Karen Bass’s victory over billionaire Rick Caruso epitomizes what Californians are up against if they are to have any hope of rescuing their state. Bass, with her political origins as a communist activist and community organizer, and more recently as a Democratic Congresswoman, is now the incoming mayor of the City of Los Angeles. God help us all.

Rick Caruso, long-time Democrat who recently became a Republican, has proven yet again how money and consultant curated, moderate rhetoric do not win elections. In terms of spending per voter, Caruso’s $105 million campaign, financed with over $80 million of his own money, easily exceeds Meg Whitman’s $170 million outlay, squandered in her failed 2010 bid to become California’s next governor.

Like Whitman, Caruso tried to position himself as a centrist, hoping that moderate voters would join the small fraction of conservative voters to get him to a majority. But nothing Caruso had to say was explicit enough to excite conservatives, or differentiate him from Bass in the eyes of moderates.

Nonetheless, with Karen Bass. Angelenos are just going to get more of the same, whereas Caruso would have shaken things up at least a little bit. To illustrate how bad things have gotten, consider the “permanent supportive housing” proposal that relentlessly approaches groundbreaking in LA’s Venice Beach neighborhood. Everything about this project screams authoritarian corruption masquerading as compassion.

Dubbed by outraged Venice residents as “the monster on the median,” the proposed structure will look more like a prison than an apartment building. Sporting an architecture that might charitably be described as neo-brutalist, this concrete blockhouse will occupy the entirety of what is now a three acre public parking lot, two blocks from the beach. For years this city owned property has served as a farmers market, as well as a parking lot where families can leave their cars when having a day at the beach.

The tone-deaf unintentional irony of this architecture would be amusing if it weren’t so out of place and so abominable. Instead of ample windows that might offer ocean views, in order to be “energy efficient,” the windows are small horizontal slits. On one corner, a 70 foot watchtower is planned that will cantilever outwards as it rises to hover above the street, but since it’s dubbed a “campanile,” we are expected to perceive it as aesthetically titillating instead of simply sinister.

This monstrosity will cost over $100 million to construct, on land that’s worth at least another $50 million, in order to offer 140 units of subsidized housing. That’s over a million dollars per unit.

Rick Caruso would have cancelled this project. With Karen Bass at the helm, it will proceed. And therein can be seen everything wrong with homeless policy in Los Angeles. If all you do is construct subsidized housing in expensive neighborhoods, you will never build enough units to house the homeless. Moreover, even a homeless person, even if their mind is half-gone from substance addiction, can correctly interpret what they’re being herded into – a supervised (at additional tremendous expense), lock-down capable, minimum security prison. So what if it’s two blocks from the beach.

During his campaign, Caruso told voters that he intended build more free housing for less money per unit. This is hardly an inspiring thing to say to voters, most of whom are working hard to pay rent or stay current on their home mortgages. Caruso should have reminded voters that 70,000 people, the equivalent of more than four full strength infantry divisions, nearly all of them either drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals, psychotics, or all of the above, have occupied their city and have terrorized them, and Karen Bass is going to make things even worse. He should have explained that Karen Bass isn’t about to defy the homeless industrial complex, that coalition of politically connected developers, powerful nonprofit service organizations, and public bureaucrats, who have fleeced taxpayers for billions of dollars while making the homeless problem worse instead of better.

A candidate who wants to win in Los Angeles against such entrenched power cannot just say he can save a few bucks building free housing for an army of homeless that have destroyed the quality of life in Los Angeles. He needs to say he intends to clear them out in weeks instead of decades, for millions instead of billions. How would this work?

Caruso could have said he would comply with the 9th Circuit ruling that prevents enforcement of vagrancy laws, but he would be more creative and less corrupt in how he interprets that law. The Jones vs City of Los Angeles ruling compels law enforcement to allow “camping in public places” unless the local government can provide the homeless free “supportive housing.” Caruso could comply with this ruling by directing homeless housing funds to be used to swiftly construct safe tent encampments in inexpensive parts of Los Angeles County, possibly on publicly owned rural land. For assistance he could hire a few experts from humanitarian United Nations missions who have built low-cost per occupant refugee camps, overnight, all over the world. Once these camps were built, Caruso could sweep the homeless up and offer them a choice – go stay with friends or family, or come with us. If that were done, it would probably surprise everyone how so many would melt away, returning to domiciles they’d previously spurned. The rest, separated by their various afflictions, would be in the new camps, off the streets, and getting the help they need. That is compassion. For everyone, including the homeless.

Doing something like this is not, unfortunately, part of Caruso’s public persona, even if he personally knows that it’s the only thing that’s going to work. Caruso has spent too many years of his life talking nice with public officials and appeasing “stakeholders” in order to build luxury shopping malls. He was not able to shift gears enough to beat the machine, because he’s spent too many years inside of it.

Critics of socialism are slowly coming around to the realization that in the 21st century, the leftist socialists and the supposedly right-wing corporations are promoting agendas that are more in alignment than in opposition. When socialists on the LA City Council impose a moratorium on evictions, it doesn’t harm the big corporate landlords who have the financial resiliency to ride it out. But it pushes the small families that might own an income property into a distressed sale. Regulations always help big corporations squelch the competition and raise prices to captive markets. Socialists love regulations.

When socialists on the LA City Council fund public housing projects, claiming such actions protect citizens from corporate real estate speculators, financial special interests simply invest in the private sector development corporations that build these projects, the private sector vendors that sell engineering plans and building materials, and reap huge tax deductions by donating to (and hence controlling) the nonprofit organizations that administer the projects. These private investors also increase their profits because the projects they’re investing in are partially subsidized by taxes and bonds issued to help the homeless.

Socialist rhetoric has become a tool of oligarchic capitalists. Explaining that novel new reality should be the task of every politician that seeks to break both the Democratic Socialist grip on the Los Angeles City Council and the homeless industrial complex’s grip on homeless policy. They are two sides of the same corruption. “Compassion” is the seductive emotional foundation for socialist rhetoric, but in practice, the socialist expression of compassion has the opposite result. It is not compassionate to allow drug addicts and psychotics to exist “free” by camping on sidewalks. Nor is it compassionate to force hard working responsible citizens to live in fear of being robbed or attacked by a homeless person desperate for money to feed their drug habit.

Instead of involuntarily moving the homeless into inexpensive, supervised compounds where they can get help, the corporate socialist remedy is to build a surveillance state and turn the entire city into a prison. Their solution is to build what are for all practical purposes minimum security prisons, at stupefying expense, in expensive neighborhoods, and try to induce homeless people to occupy them without coercion. Some will comply, enough to fill a few hundred beds at a cost of a few hundred million. Everyone in power in Los Angeles today is profiting from this hideous dysfunction. The subsidized builders, the public bureaucrats, the sanctimonious nonprofits. Only the homeless lose, along with every hardworking citizen of Los Angeles.

That’s the story Rick Caruso didn’t tell. And all the campaign money in the world couldn’t erase the fact that Angelenos wanted to hear tough common sense, instead of focus group calibrated, urbane and ingratiating tepidity.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.