How Politicians Get Elected in California

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AUDIO:  California’s election laws permit ballot harvesting and same day registration. This has moved the outcome of elections even further into the hands of those campaigns with the most money and the best get-out-the-vote operation – 22 minutes on KSMA Santa Maria – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.

Parasitic Architecture is Not What it Seems

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The concept is attractive. Taking advantage of an existing superstructure and utility conduits, developers can simply add new units on the sides and top of a residential building. In theory, this can save money, preserve the original building and create new housing in areas where housing tends to be in short supply and high demand.

In practice, parasitic architecture often ends up being a controversial aesthetic experiment, wherein buildings of historic value have their exterior facades debased – or enhanced, depending on who you ask – with odd protuberances. Or it finds expression in “adaptive reuse” projects that rely on public subsidies to create overly expensive additional housing units.

A classic example of parasitic architecture blazing a path into the aesthetic frontier of urban design is the Museum of Military History in Dresden, Germany. In this case, a 135-year-old stone building had grafted onto its square, classical façade a massive steel and glass triangle that juts skyward like the prow of a ship. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. A Wall Street Journal architecture critic compared the new section to “a piece of shrapnel freshly fallen from the sky.”

Enthusiasts proclaim the beauty is in the incongruity, but the practice has many detractors. During the 1980s, architects saved the facades of many historic Washington, D.C. downtown offices and built superstructures behind them – spurring critics to refer to them as “facade-omies.”

There are plentiful examples of historic public buildings expanded with ultra-modern structures. The Pablo Serrano Museum was tripled in size in 2011, when a massive, Tetris-like conglomeration of irregular black cubes was grafted onto the top of an existing, much older building in Zaragoza, Spain. In Moscow, a luminous, futuristic bubble of translucent polygons was grafted into the space between two much older buildings, creating offices while leaving clear the road underneath.

These expansions dramatically increase square footage without increasing the footprint of the original building. But they’re not cheap. How a residential project in Beirut added 13 luxury units to a 1920s mansion exemplifies what architects encounter. As reported on the architectural website InHabitat, “The SOMA team created a plan to cantilever BOBO’s steel exoskeleton and concrete core over the protected home by excavating six floors below the gutted home, leaving the historic façade intact.”

Steel exoskeletons. Six story excavations. These buildings are high-end, avant-garde statements. But to the challenge of cost-effectively increasing the available housing in densely populated cities, they’re more like thought experiments than solutions.

If one steps back from the artistic exercise and instead prioritizes function, it seems that adaptive reuse might offer more affordable options. Why not add a few floors to an existing building and create new housing without having to start from scratch? Wouldn’t that save money?

Unfortunately, no. In California, the state and local governments have granted billions of dollars in subsidies to developers to convert aging urban structures into modern residences, but the per-unit price for these projects has consistently exceeded the construction cost of new homes and apartments. A newspaper investigation provides comprehensive evidence to support this.

“Last year, Sacramento officials announced an extreme makeover for the Capitol Park Hotel, the century-old building just a few blocks from the Golden 1 Center and K Street restaurant scene, that would bring life to a dilapidated building with newly renovated rooms for the homeless,” the Sacramento Bee reported in September 2020.

“The project has been hailed as an important step to house Sacramento’s homeless population. But transforming the Capitol Park Hotel will come at an extraordinarily high price to taxpayers and the nonprofit groups involved in the project,” the Bee continued. “The cost to redevelop the Capitol Park Hotel is more than $445,000 per unit for apartments that will be tiny – about 250 square feet. … If it stays on budget, the project will come to $1,100 per square foot — more than double the square-foot price to build a luxury home … .”

This is not an isolated case. Across California, a confluence of factors have made housing unaffordable, with adaptive reuse perhaps the most unaffordable housing of all. These factors include excessive building codes imposed by a state Legislature convinced that if they mandate enough solar panels, smart meters, appliances, faucets and electric fixtures, R-60 insulation, triple paned windows, and so on, California will turn into a green utopia.

They include punitive permit fees, and approvals delayed for years, from myriad agencies whose requirements conflict with each other and change constantly. They include endless litigation from well-funded environment pressure groups that exploit the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

And, sadly, they include an opportunistic complex of politically connected developers, public bureaucracies, and powerful “nonprofits” that have sprung up to milk this dysfunctional system for tens of billions of dollars of public funds with almost nothing to show for it apart from more homelessness.

As a solution to the housing shortage, parasitic architecture has an obvious appeal. But as a cost-effective solution, reality intrudes in the form of a regulatory environment that imposes a suite of restrictions that double or triple the cost of construction, especially for adaptive reuse projects.

As an aesthetic adventure, however, parasitic architecture is a vibrant new category of modernism, with provocative installations all over the world. Western cities should explore its potential.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

Green Bureaucrats Are Destroying California’s Ecosystems

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California’s political elite consider themselves, and the state they control, to be the most environmentally enlightened in the world. They’re not. Well intentioned but misguided policies, combined with hidden agenda from special interests using environmentalism as cover, have resulted in “environmentalism” often causing more harm than good to the environment.

Some environmentalist policies that might otherwise be obviously suspect are justified in the name of combatting climate change. The prime example of this is the hundreds of billions Californians are spending to convert the electricity grid to “renewable” energy. If it weren’t for their zero emissions claim, nobody would endorse carpeting the land with thousands of square miles of wind turbines, or hundreds of square miles of photovoltaic arrays.

But even if the climate emergency narrative is accepted, does it matter if the consequences to the environment from developing “renewables” is as bad, or worse, than any realistic climate crisis that we’re likely to confront in the next several decades? What is the long-term cost to the environment of doubling or tripling the amount of electricity generated in California, in order to convert the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors of the economy to use 100 percent electrical energy? What would the environmental cost be to accomplish this only using wind and solar energy technologies, meaning California’s existing wind and solar capacity would have to increase at least ten-fold?

The environmental cost of California’s determination to expand wind and solar capacity is already felt around the world, in poorly managed mining operations all over the world where desperately poor workers toil amid appalling toxicity. And the environmental price, even at one-tenth scale, has not begun to be paid in full.

How do Californians intend to recycle and replace these renewable energy assets, the solar panels and inverters, the turbine rotors and blades, the multiple gigawatt arrays of stationary storage batteries, along with millions of decommissioned electric vehicle batteries? Will they export disposal of these spent systems to further foul the rest of the world, as they have already exported the environmental consequences of producing them?

Exporting the consequences of environmentalist edicts doesn’t end with renewables. The supposedly forbidden energy technologies also leave their mark. Californians still derive 45 percent of their total raw energy inputs from petroleum, nearly all of it for transportation. But California imports 75 percent of this petroleum, despite sitting on some of the most plentiful reserves of gas and oil in the world. But rather than permit additional extraction of oil and gas, which would only be allowed under the most state-of-the-art environmental safeguards anywhere on earth, Californians are content to foul the Orinoco watershed in Venezuela, along with estuaries in Nigeria and rainforests in Ecuador, and other places on this fragile planet where virtually no environmental safeguards exist.

Right here inside California, environmentalist policies wreak environmental havoc. The destruction of California’s forests is the prime example. Thanks to environmentalists, the timber industry in California has been nearly driven completely out of business. California’s annual timber harvest today is less than one quarter what it was as recently as the 1990s. That wouldn’t be a catastrophe, if it weren’t for the fact that at the same time, Californians have become extremely adept at preventing and extinguishing wildfires, or, at the same time, environmental regulations have made it nearly impossible to do controlled burns, mechanical thinning of undergrowth, or graze livestock in the forests.

The infernos that have driven thousands of Californians from their homes and immolated thousands of square miles of forest in recent years are not primarily a consequence of “climate change.” Drought conditions and high summer temperatures are a factor, but the truly unprecedented hazard causing these superfires is the fact that, thanks to environmentalists, California’s forests are tinderboxes, with trees that are on average at least five times as dense as they’ve been for millennia, along with overgrown underbrush that small, natural fires used to keep in check. If superfires leave California’s forests obliterated beyond anything every thrown at them in the last 20 million years, don’t blame “climate change.” Blame environmentalism ran amok. Blame the litigators and legislators that created the tinderbox.

California’s rivers are another example of environmentalist stupidity, contagious by virtue of being emotionally compelling, and empowered by many green nonprofits whose entire business model depends on conflict to rally the small grassroots donors, and litigation to reap the big settlements. As humanity faces a global food crisis, the environmentalist lawsuit machine grinds on, stopping new water projects, and forcing existing reservoirs to reserve their water for summertime releases, even in drought years when historically, these rivers ran nearly dry.

If California’s politicians weren’t relying on biased studies, with their prearranged and paid-for conclusions, they would pay honest attention to many questions that as it is, only farmers and anglers are asking. Don’t many river ecosystems in California rely on summertime runoff to decline to a trickle, so the parasites in the river that kill fish will nearly die off instead of thrive and multiply? Aren’t there nonnative fish swimming in most of these rivers today, and aren’t they the primary source of endangerment to many of the native fish? Why are we protecting striped bass populations, when these nonnative fish prey on our cherished salmon?

Questions abound. Isn’t it possible to create new weirs, forebays and filters well upstream from the aqueduct intakes in order to minimize fish that get caught in the pumps and killed? Can’t we build more fish hatcheries to replenish the native fish populations? Why don’t we invest in better wastewater treatment, so it won’t be necessary to send additional millions of acre feet through the Sacramento Delta and into the San Francisco Bay every year, just to dilute and drive out nitrogen from inadequately treated outfall?

These policies, either debatable in the case of renewables and river flow, or clearly destructive in the case of forest management, are epochal in their impact. Decimating habitat to source raw materials for extremely resource inefficient renewables, which consume thousands of square miles. Incinerating entire forests beyond recovery, because fire suppression wasn’t balanced with other means of managing overgrowth.

Another consequence of environmentalism ran amok in California is the cost of living. It’s not news that California’s environmentalist bureaucrats have all but destroyed the state’s economy. In this huge and nearly empty state, only five percent urbanized, they’ve cordoned off the cities to protect open space, creating a shortage of land to build homes. And where’s the expert study correctly implicating the heat island impact of paved over urban infill, with rationed water and reduced trees and landscaping?

Environmentalists have blocked investment in new and upgraded energy, water, or transportation infrastructure, which further restricts the supply of new housing and makes all of those necessities more expensive. They’re squeezing out the energy industry despite California sitting on billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. They’ve nearly destroyed California’s once robust timber industry. All of this comes at tremendous economic cost, all of which is regressive.

It isn’t unreasonable to wonder why we can’t have spacious suburbs, which even if ten million new residents moved in, wouldn’t consume more than a fraction of the land currently earmarked for wind farms and solar farms. Exurban and low density suburban environments have ecosystems as well, as anyone observing the hawks and foxes, the vultures and coyotes, the racoons, rabbits, Canadian geese, seagulls, crows and possums, who own the night, own the skies, and own the vacant fields and riparian corridors in every neighborhood with undeveloped parcels. Let them be. We can expand out as well as up and in.

For decades, environmentalists have defined California’s policies affecting urban growth, housing, transportation, housing, forest management, water infrastructure and management, and energy development. But they’re not always right. All too often, they are the destroyers, instead of the protectors.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

California Water Facts for Legislators

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Everyone in California agrees that water policies need to adapt to changing times. There is even growing agreement that enforcing draconian reductions to farm water allocations (which will eliminate all but the most powerful corporate agribusinesses) and outlawing household outdoor watering will not only fail to solve the problem, but is a tough and undesirable solution. And so the debate over more rationing versus more water supply projects goes on.

Missing from the debate over water policy in California, however, especially among the state legislators who need to do something about it, are some basic overall metrics regarding how much water we need, what various types of water projects cost, how much potential capacity each type of project delivers, and how much energy is involved. Here’s a summary.

When quantifying macro variables of this nature, first it is important to note that for any project category, costs are not uniform. A wastewater recycling plant, for example, will cost more to construct and more to operate depending on the type of wastewater it has to process. The cost to build and operate a conveyance to deliver water from a recycling plant or desalination plant direct to the consumer or to a storage facility will vary depending on the length of the conveyance and any necessary elevation changes. So these are rough numbers. They are nonetheless vital to begin a more informed discussion of water policy options in California.

The primary measurement used to describe large amounts of water are units of one million acre feet (MAF). To provide an overall perspective, in a wet year, up to 300 MAF of rain falls within California’s borders. With the exception of the upper Klamath Basin, and a few lesser examples, California’s geography is such that our watersheds are roughly congruent with our state border. In a dry year, as little as 100 MAF of rain falls in California. This rainfall either percolates, transpirates, evaporates, or runs down the streams and rivers to the ocean.

Also each year, Californians currently divert about 75 MAF as follows: about 8 MAF to urban water consumers, 34 MAF to farmers, and 34 MAF of “environmental water” to maintain wetlands, river ecosystems, and the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. These numbers represent the seven year average between 2011 and 2018 as reported by the California Dept. of Water Resources.

During these same seven years, to divert 75 MAF each year, California got 5 MAF from the Colorado River, 19 MAF from groundwater extraction, 15 MAF from reuse and recycled water, 6 MAF from federal projects, and 7 MAF from local projects. For much more details on what’s behind these numbers, refer to the 2018 update of the California Water Plan.

To harvest more water from increasingly unpredictable rainfall, to recycle more water that would otherwise be treated and released into the Pacific, and to desalinate brackish water inland and ocean water on the coast, here are some cost estimates. As an aside, this is a hypothetical plan. Do not be alarmed. Plans change. Let’s all work together.

The total amount noted here, $118 billion, is not chosen by accident. The 1957 California Water Plan had a total estimated construction cost of $11.8 billion.  In early 2022 dollars, $11.8 billion is worth $118.5 billion. The state budget in 1957 was $1.9 billion, with capital outlay of $440 million, 23 percent of the entire budget. Through a combination of bonds and general fund allocations, back in 1957 the California state legislature resolved to spend an amount equal to six times their annual budget to build water infrastructure. Yet $118.5 billion is only 40 percent of today’s $286 billion state budget.

When evaluating the economics of water supply projects, the construction cost divided by the annual output (or “yield” in the case of a reservoir) is a useful ratio. For example, the projected cost to build the proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir divided by its expected annual yield is equal to $20,000 per acre foot, exactly the same as the cost/output ratio to build a desalination plant.

One may argue that Temperance Flat is on the extreme end of the cost equation – which by the way should not eliminate this critical south-of-the-delta reservoir opportunity from consideration – but desalination costs are also overstated.

For example, raising the height of the Shasta Dam is an extremely cost effective way to secure more water supply, at $4,000 of construction cost per acre foot of yield. But that cost-effectiveness is matched by desalination projects in Israel today that are not subject to California’s insane regulatory environment, protracted permitting process, needlessly inflated materials costs, and endless and very costly litigation. Desalination projects cost one-fifth as much to build per unit of capacity in Israel as they do in California, and as with all infrastructure in this state, most of the difference is the result of political choices.

Surprisingly, surveying various proposals for urban water recycling to potable standards yielded a range of costs much higher than anticipated. These costs, however, also displayed the widest range of variation, depending on every imaginable factor – differing topography, real estate values, labor costs, design standards, the local political and legal environment, and the character of the wastewater being treated. In general, expect construction costs for wastewater treatment to cost less than desalination in most cases, but not much less. The $18 billion cost cited above to treat 2.0 MAF/year is based on a proprietary study examining a statewide solution. It’s a lot of money, but worth every penny.

What about energy?

California’s average electricity consumption is 57 gigawatts. Very best case, to convert all end user energy to electric – transportation, heating, everything – would require California’s grid to expand its capacity to deliver on average just over 100 gigawatts. What about the energy needed to increase California’s water supply?

Using electricity to pump a million acre feet per year via the California aqueduct to Los Angeles consumes about 400 megawatts of continuous power, less about 100 megawatts that is recovered as the water flows back downhill into the Los Angeles Basin.

Desalinating one million acre feet of seawater per year requires 400 megawatts of continuous power, which is a mere 0.4 percent of California’s 100 gigawatts minimum targeted future generating capacity. Therefore to deliver five million acre feet of new water in either of these manners would consume less than two percent of 100 gigawatts.

The energy cost to reuse wastewater is typically less than half that, i.e., about 150 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year. In the case of desalination and wastewater reuse, energy is also required to deliver the water, but because these facilities are typically located near municipal groundwater basins or municipal water systems, the required delivery energy is unlikely to ever require more than half-again as much power, i.e., no more than 75 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year; depending on the topography, potentially much less. Water pumped via aqueducts will typically develop enough pressure as it is pumped over the hills from inland sources and then piped downward into coastal cities to not require additional power for final delivery to consumers.

Providing general information on any specific water project is fraught with controversy. But the energy costs for new water can be easily debunked. If California’s politicians are committed to an electric age, the energy cost for more water is trivial compared to what’s going to be necessary to electrify the state’s residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors.

Critics of building more water infrastructure are also on thin ice when they claim it will cost too much money. Capital investments in water supply infrastructure yield long-term economic returns and greatly improve the quality of life for every resident. Spending $100 billion or more on these projects is well within the capacity of California’s economy to sustain. And at the risk of committing conservative heresy, putting $100 billion into the pockets of skilled construction workers will stimulate the economy in the short term, just as having all this new water will stimulate California’s economy in the long term. So channel some of those public education bucks into vocational training. We need the workers, and skills pay better than BAs.

If heavy and perennial rains return to California, spending $100 billion on these projects will ensure perpetual water abundance. But if rains don’t come back stronger than ever, spending this money will create secure climate resilience. Either way, it’s a win.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Pension Costs Are Still Eating Government Budgets

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About 20 years ago, I read an ad in a local Sacramento newspaper that said “Get a government job and become an instant millionaire.” The ad went on to describe how public bureaucrats in California enjoyed benefits private sector employees can only dream of, including a guaranteed retirement pension worth the equivalent of millions of dollars in a private 401K plan. I’d had no idea. Most people still don’t.

Pension finance, and how pension obligations affect government budgets, remains one of the most consequential elements of public policy that nobody has ever heard of. Until someone is elected to a city council, or a county board of supervisors, and sees first-hand how pension payments crowd out other budget items, the typical response to pension policy debates is one of befuddlement or indifference.

But as they say, even if you are indifferent to pensions, pensions are not indifferent to you. Also about 20 years ago, a series of pension benefit enhancements enacted by gullible elected officials, egged on by aggressive pension system managers and public employee unions, led to pension payments moving from a negligible portion of civic budgets to ravenous monsters that threatened to drive into insolvency every government agency in the state. The result has been higher taxes and fewer services, and everyone feels that.

To begin to cope with out of control pension costs, in 2013 the California State Legislature enacted PEPRA, the Public Employee Pension Reform Act, which reduced the pension benefit formulas for new government hires, and phased in a cost sharing whereby all active employees would contribute more to their pension systems via payroll withholding.

The PEPRA reform, while incremental, has helped to financially stabilize California’s public sector pension systems. But because the PEPRA reforms were primarily restricted to new hires, the savings generates will happen slowly and will take decades to be fully realized. Meanwhile, the cost to California’s cities and counties to pay their pensions has reached record highs.

To more thoroughly illustrate what California’s government agencies are up against, the following chart depicts the financial status of three representative entities, each of them a rough order of magnitude apart in size. All three are clients of CalPERS, the largest of California’s state and local pension systems, with nearly 1,700 active clients and assets that have exceeded $500 billion.

The statistics depicted below, although mind numbingly opaque to the uninitiated, nonetheless distill the financial obligation represented by pensions to a few key variables. With the exception of “Total Civic Budget” the context providing denominator offered in the final block of numbers on the chart, all of these figures come directly from CalPERS itself. For each of their clients, CalPERS provides a “Public Agency Actuarial Valuation Report.” They are highly reliable since they disclose exactly how much CalPERS intends to charge each of its clients. The data shown on the chart pertains to the 2023-2024 fiscal year, which begins in July 2023.

The first three rows of data on the above chart report (1) how much CalPERS has invested on behalf of each client, (2) the present value of how much CalPERS expects at this point in time to eventually pay out in pensions to each client’s retirees, and (3) the difference between these two values, which is the unfunded pension liability.

As can be seen (4), Santa Clara County and the City of Sacramento have only 77 percent funded pension accounts, and the City of Costa Mesa’s pension account is only 70 percent funded. Because of this, in addition to their regular ongoing payments to the pensions system to fund pension benefits as they are earned, these employers have to make catch-up payments to reduce their unfunded pension liability.

The next section of the chart depicts and quantifies these two types of contributions that agencies must make to their pension system. The so-called “Normal Contribution” (5) is how much money has to be paid to the pension system and invested each year to yield sufficient funds to eventually pay the additional pension benefits earned by active employees in that year. As can be seen (7), the employers – i.e., the taxpayers – pay about two thirds of the normal contribution. The PEPRA reform requires employees to pay half of the pension cost through payroll withholding, but, again, PEPRA only affects those hired after 2013. This means that in a few decades the taxpayer share of the normal contribution will come down to 50 percent.

The “unfunded contribution,” next on the chart (8), is what cities and counties have to pay to reduce their unfunded liability. For that amount, no employee contribution is required. The employer has to pay 100 percent of it. As can be seen, in all cases the unfunded contribution is far more than the normal contribution (row 8 compared to row 6). This means the employer share of the total contribution to CalPERS (normal and unfunded payments combined) is 79 percent of Santa Clara County’s total pension payment obligation, 82 percent of Sacramento’s, and 88 percent of Costa Mesa’s (row 10).

The impact of this burden can be put in context when considering how much these costs add to an agency payroll. The total employer payment for their pensions adds 29 percent to payroll costs in Santa Clara County, 38 percent in Sacramento, and a whopping 67 percent in Costa Mesa (11).

The Opportunity Cost

Another useful perspective from which to evaluate just how much pensions are costing taxpayers would be to consider the impact of transitioning every public employee to Social Security. At a cost to the employer of 6.2 percent of payroll, Santa Clara County would save 543 million per year, Sacramento would save $128 million, and the City of Costa Mesa would save $32 million. Why is this a far fetched scenario? Isn’t Social Security what private sector taxpayers must rely upon for their retirement security?

To take this one step further, even if along with the Social Security payment, you added an additional 6.2 percent of salary to be the employer’s contribution to each employee’s 401K – a level of generosity rarely found in the private sector – taxpayers would still save, per year, $399 million in Santa Clara County, $103 million in Sacramento, and $29 million in Costa Mesa.

It is fair to wonder how far $399 million would go towards repairing the roads in Santa Clara County, which are ranked, using data from the Federal Highway Administration, among the roughest in the nation. One might also consider how that money could be invested in more law enforcement, when violent crime has increased for the past two years in a row in Santa Clara County.

In the City of Sacramento, investing another $103 million in basic law enforcement would go a long way towards curbing violent crime in that city, where homicides were up over 30 percent in 2021 compared to 2021, and are on track in 2022 to exceed that. How many shelter beds could $103 million buy, as the homeless count in Sacramento County – most of them concentrated in the City of Sacramento – nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022? As it is, Sacramento’s projected $153 million outlay for pension contributions to CalPERS is more than they will spend on all of their capital improvement programs this year.

Costa Mesa might only save $29 million by replacing defined benefit pensions with a combination of Social Security and an exceedingly generous 401K plan, but with only 110,000 residents, Costa Mesa isn’t a very big city. The city’s general fund budget for 2022-23 is only $163 million. Saving $29 million would add 17 percent back to the city’s budget to tackle other challenges.

It is easy enough to criticize how California’s public agencies would spend the money they could save by adopting more equitable and financially sustainable retirement benefits. Current homeless policies tend to make the problem worse when more money is spent. More spending on law enforcement is wasted if criminals aren’t held accountable. Scandalous waste of public funds on road improvement projects is a perennial problem. But these examples of waste don’t obviate the fact that pension commitments have swamped civic budgets. While we’re fighting waste at city hall, we can give the savings on pensions back to the taxpayers.

Pension systems in California’s state and local government agencies today have achieved a precarious stability, thanks in part to PEPRA, and for the most part thanks to dramatically higher contributions demanded, and gotten, from taxpayers. But this stability has come at a terrific price in the form of lost opportunities for these agencies to better serve the public.

An edited version of this article was published by the Pacific Research Institute.

The Sustainable Alternative to Renewables in California

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Anyone serious about ushering California into an electric age, much less the entire world, faces immutable facts that are indifferent to passions and principles. With algebraic certainty, these facts lead to uncomfortable conclusions: It is impractical if not impossible to achieve an all-electric future by relying on solar, wind, and geothermal power, supplemented by more novel power generation technologies such as harvesting the energy in waves and tides. And even if it were done, it might not be the optimal solution for the environment.

A few years ago, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson, completed a report that quantified what it would take, in terms of the installed base of renewable generating and storage assets to move California to a 100 percent net zero energy economy. Relying primarily on over 20,000 wind turbines with an average capacity of 5 megawatts each, along with utility scale solar farms, an analysis published in March 2022 by the California Policy Center estimated the land requirement for this undertaking at over 10,000 square miles on land, mostly for wind farms, and over 15,000 square miles offshore, also for wind farms.

In theory, Jacobson’s recommendations would work, insofar as this stupefying quantity of wind and solar power, properly buffered with battery storage assets, would nearly double the capacity of California’s energy grid. Jacobson’s scheme estimates California’s average electricity output expanding to just over 100 gigawatts. In 2019, the most recent year for which complete data is available, California’s electricity grid produced, on average, 54 gigawatts.

To understand why a credible best case scenario would only require Californians to double their electricity output in order to go all electric, the following chart, prepared by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, can be helpful.

A detailed review of the data on this chart can be found in a July 2022 California Policy Center analysis, but for the moment, three critical variables are explanatory. California’s total energy consumption of 7,352 trillion BTUs, the “rejected energy” of 4,842 TBTUs, and the “energy services” of 2,510 TBTUs. What this describes is the overall efficiency of energy use in California. Of the energy Californians consume to power their residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors, 34 percent actually performs a service – heating, cooling, illumination, pumping, traction, etc. – and 66 percent (the “rejected energy”) is lost through friction, heat, wasted motion, leakage, etc.

The promise of electricity is that it can stand this ratio on its head. The appeal of electric power lies in its efficiency in conversion. Electric transmission losses are about 5 percent, with another 10 percent lost in a modern onboard battery’s charge/discharge cycle and the electric motor’s conversion of electrons into traction. Compare the electric car’s overall 85 percent efficiency to a gasoline powered automobile, which at best can achieve efficiencies of 35 percent.

The 2,510 TBTUs of energy Californians consumed in 2019 equate to 735 terawatt-hours, which in turn equates to an average output on the electricity grid of 84 gigawatts. This means that if every energy service in California were using electricity at 85 percent efficiency, a grid capacity of 100 gigawatts would be sufficient to power all of it. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the ballpark. It would require extraordinary engineering achievements as well as aggressive energy conservation programs. It is therefore the absolute minimum amount of electricity required for California to go 100 percent electric.

Disrupting the dream of accomplishing this goal while relying almost exclusively on wind and solar energy, however, are cold facts: Renewables aren’t renewable, and they aren’t sustainable. The footprint of wind and solar facilities on land and ocean, the battery farms to buffer their intermittency, the raw materials necessary to build them all, the maintenance, replacement, and recycling costs, are far in excess of anything Californians should have to endure, and far in excess of what the world’s resources have to give.

Imagine, for example, if the materials necessary for these wind, solar and battery assets were sourced here in California. Why not? California has many of the necessary raw materials ready for extraction. Are Californians willing to mine the lithium and quarry the concrete? More generally, are Californians willing to confront the fact that renewable energy technologies use orders of magnitude more natural resources than conventional energy?

The alternative to massively subsidized wind, solar and battery farms that despoil literally thousands of square miles of land and ocean is far more practical. Develop energy generation capacity using proven technologies, and further improve them. Californians should be pioneering the installation of the most advanced combine cycle natural gas generating plants and nuclear power plants. Instead of mandating all-electric cars, we should permit within the new mandates hybrid cars that retain range-extending advanced internal combustion engines. We should be allocating billions to upgrade our existing and proposed reservoirs to incorporate pump storage, which is still the most cost-effective way to store large amounts of renewable electricity.

This all-of-the-above approach to energy, on the surface, seems to be moving slightly away from climate purity. But a cradle-to-grave assessment of renewables may belie that first impression. Moreover, if California is serious about setting an example for the world, which after all will yield far more planetary benefits than going it alone, we must develop energy technologies that are practical.

There is enough wealth, and enough political will, for Californians to actually inflict upon themselves an all-electric future that rejects natural gas and nuclear power, rejects pump storage, and rejects advanced hybrid vehicles. But where the climate purists and their special interest puppeteers see a grand vision, history may only recognize hubris and corruption. Californians must put their impressive wealth and willpower into researching breakthrough technologies, while remaining practical in the meantime. That is how California can more effectively demonstrate effective leadership, and set an example for the world to follow.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How the Government Union Machine Conquered California and Corrupted Our Elections

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With the November 8 election already one week ago, we already are conditioned to accept that some final results will not be known until December 16, five weeks later. Counting proceeds at a crawl in counties up and down the state, and those among us with housebroken political sentiments are expected to be impressed at the diligent performance of our election professionals.

In truth, however, no major nation on earth takes this long to count ballots, and no state in America takes as long as California to count ballots. As of November 14, there were still 15 races for a seat in the U.S. Congress that remained undecided. Eight of them, more than half, are here in California.

What has happened to the election process in California is a travesty. For over 30 years, political power has steadily drifted towards what is now a one party state. Democrats control all the higher state offices, from Governor to State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and none of that will change. In the state legislature, Democrats control what is referred to as a mega-majority in both the assembly and the senate. Unlike a super-majority, where two-thirds of the seats in a chamber are occupied by members of a single party, a mega-majority means that three-quarters of the seats are controlled by one party. That, too, will not change once final results are announced.

The reason for this dominance by one party can be misleading, however, because it isn’t a party so much as a political machine, controlled by government unions, that exercises power in Sacramento.

Years of closed shop government employment union dues have gone to supporting campaigns to elect politicians obedient to these unions. After SCOTUS in a 2016 ruling relieved government employees of mandatory payment of union dues (or “agency fees”), union membership remains almost universal, enforced by intimidating in-house peer pressure by union operatives. Union dues now average over $1000 per government employee, and with over a million state and local government employees in California, these unions have over a billion dollars per year to work with. As the government workforce grows, so grows the financial underpinning of even more union domination.

In particular, the growth of SEIU along with the teachers unions has created the two primary sources of the political destruction of California, funded by our own tax dollars to work against us. We voted for “education,” and empowered the teachers union to destroy curricula in favor of indoctrinating a generation of young Californians to resent their nation, reject hard work, mistrust one another based on the color of their skin, and acquire narcissistic self-esteem instead of marketable skills. We voted for humane social services, and instead we got insatiable, inefficient SEIU hiring.

These unions move in unison, threaten one and the entire machine moves against anyone who dares to take them on.

Giving California away to government unions was phase one in the destruction of California’s democracy. Phase two was already underway as we entered a new decade in 2020, but the COVID pandemic enabled its full implementation in a matter of months. Winning elections that might otherwise be competitive has devolved into a formulaic contest where only one political machine has the money and manpower to participate; the government unions. The “reforms” they enacted rest on four fundamental changes: universal mailed ballots, early voting, same day voter registration, and ballot harvesting.

If early voting trends show the union backed Democrat is facing an opponent whose voters are turning out in stronger than anticipated numbers, they immediately invest more money in ballot harvesting during the weeks before election day. The ballot harvesters, using apps on their cell phones that are tied into proprietary databases, know which household residents have registered with which party. Early voting lets them know how many votes they will need, and ballot harvesting lets them control how many votes they will get. It’s all legal.

In cases where an election remains close in the final days prior to the election, same day registration is the next weapon deployed by the machine. Even though in the just completed election the last day to register to vote as a traditional voter was October 24, paid and volunteer operatives could assist people with same-day registration as a “conditional voter” right up until and through Election Day, November 8. They know exactly who to register. For example, the teachers union has ensured that the vast majority of young voters are thoroughly conditioned to vote for Democrats, and to despise Republicans. The machine has a profile for every eligible voter in the state. It knows where every person under age 30 is living, and if they’re not registered, it sends operatives to get them a same-day registration and a provisional ballot, which they can then harvest. And it’s all legal.

Such is the reality of elections in California today. If anyone questions the ethics of ballot harvesting, or the accuracy of the registered voter database from which ballots are mailed to everyone, or the injustice of taxpayer funded government unions recruiting candidates, paying for their campaigns, and using their massive political machine to scientifically ensure their victory, they are stigmatized as an “election denier.”

Expect to be very surprised if any of the close races in California, from the U.S. Congress to the local school board, end up going to a Republican. The system is a joke. To have a fair election, Californians must return to time tested methods. If you want to vote, you have to register six weeks or more before the election. Then on election day, you go to a polling center, present an ID, and receive a paper ballot. You mark the ballot manually to ensure the markings actually reflect what you were voting for or against. Then all these ballots are tabulated at the precinct and county level, reported at the end of the night, and saved for future audit. That is a corruption-proof voting process.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

Mob Rule and the Death of Trust

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It’s been clear to millions of Americans for decades that the media was biased, that the Democratic Party and their government employee union allies controlled and corrupted big city elections, and that the “climate crises” and the threat of “white supremacy” were being oversold. These and other annoyances were perennial. But for many skeptics, the level of mistrust remained tolerable. The system itself was resilient. Nothing is perfect. The tide can turn. The good guys could still win. The 2015 arrival of Donald Trump on the national political scene changed the rules. The system not only revealed itself to be even more fraudulent than most people had previously believed, but it became malevolent.

For over six years, representatives of every established institution in the country have stereotyped Americans who voted for President Trump as bigots, idiots, ignoramuses, haters, psychopaths, and traitors. The virulence of this condemnation has escalated each year, culminating during the 2022 mid-term election cycle with a full-court press to tag anyone who supports the former president as a fascist and and potential “domestic terrorist.”

Those who openly proclaimed their support for Trump, even if they expressed themselves with tact and rational arguments, focusing on his policies, and even while acknowledging Trump’s often confrontational persona, lost lifelong friends and faced threats to their livelihood. By the millions, they were made to feel unwelcome in their own country.

Anger breeds anger. Contempt breeds contempt. With Newtonian certainty, the disgust has become mutual. But on one side, with rare exceptions, the entire institutional weight of the most powerful nation in the world has lined up. The media, the search engine and social media platforms, the entertainers, the teachers and professors, the corporations, the government agencies, the politically active billionaires: Almost all of them proclaim Trump supporters to be horrible, dangerous people.

This asymmetrical assault is personal and profoundly alienating. Perhaps more than 100 million Americans now believe, with good reason, that they have been completely rejected by the nation in which they grew up.

Trump didn’t attract millions of Americans to support him because of his bombastic attacks on his opponents in politics and the media. That was comedic relief. Trump’s instant and enduring popularity owes to the way he speaks for millions of people who feel betrayed by the institutions they need to trust. Trump’s resiliency offers inspiration to them as he defies a mob that has destroyed the lives of countless individuals who dare to challenge a growing assortment of absurdities.

The Death of Trust

With good reason, millions of Americans now question the integrity of elections. Poorly maintained voter rolls, universal mailed ballots, early voting, same-day registration, ballot harvesting, and a host of other supposed “reforms” to eliminate “voter suppression” have turned Election Day into Election Month, which is really a circus of gaping loopholes for manipulation of votes—both legal and illegal. Nearly every race that’s close on election night breaks for Democrats after a few days, or weeks. As this is written, a week after the November 8 election, there are still eight seats in the U.S. Congress that have yet to be called. Six of these eight are in California. Nothing to see here, folks. Poke around too much, and we’ll call you an “election denier.”

Evidence of lost integrity in American institutions is everywhere. During the COVID pandemic, doctors were thrown off social media and threatened with professional sanctions merely for proposing early treatment protocols. These doctors correctly asserted their obligation to do more for their patients than simply send them home with some Tylenol and instructions not to seek further medical help until they were mortally ill and needed to be hooked up to a ventilator and would probably die. It was reasonable for a conscientious doctor to conclude that was an inadequate approach, and to try to come up with something more.

It doesn’t matter if many treatments these dissident doctors advised were experimental or even useless. As it turned out, many early and alternative treatments were effective. The betrayal was the lack of any official suggestions for early treatment, the persecution of doctors who tried to fill the void, and suppressing the exchange of information. It was obvious and inexplicable.

The establishment mob, nurtured by social media and condoned if not supported by mainstream institutions, has betrayed and destroyed the careers of college professors who refused to postpone exams or lower standards in deference to militant students who claim victim status. It has marginalized doctors and other medical professionals who question the wisdom of providing “gender confirmation” drugs and surgeries to minors including preadolescent children. It has ruthlessly attacked the reputations of qualified meteorologists who counter the “climate emergency” narrative, all but silencing them.

Examples of absurdity multiply in lockstep with demands we must accept all of it or live as pariahs. Mistrust grows, and morphs into fury.

Why America’s Elites Betrayed the Rest of Us

Americans who feel betrayed look for answers. That’s a normal and sane response. And the answers aren’t pretty. For the last 50 years, America’s economic policy has been to export manufacturing jobs at the same time as its immigration policy has been to import unskilled workers. This robbed millions of people of middle-class jobs while forcing these displaced American workers to compete with millions of immigrants for lower-paying jobs.

At the same time Americans were losing their ability to earn a living wage, environmentalism ran amok and caused the cost of living to explode. Recent events have made this unmistakable, but it’s been going on for decades. Needless restrictions on urban growth; failure to construct new and upgraded water, energy, and transportation infrastructure; perpetually multiplying regulations making it harder to build or manufacture anything; endless litigation; shutting down pipelines, mining, and drilling—all of this done in the name of saving the planet—have made life in America much more expensive and unpleasant.

What is also clear by now to millions of Americans is who benefits from all these changes. Corporations take manufacturing offshore for cheap labor, and import destitute migrants into America to drive down wages for the remaining service jobs. Government agencies acquire more money and more mandates to provide aid and subsidies to fill in wherever people can no longer manage economic survival through their own private efforts. Drug companies make a killing on new vaccines, lifelong prescriptions for “gender confirmation” drugs, opiates, and anti-anxiety medications.

Financial institutions buy up homes nobody can afford anymore and rent them to the newly dispossessed. Billionaires and hedge funds buy up land for the water rights and sell the water back to displaced farmers and desperate towns and cities. Mediocre graduates with otherwise unmarketable degrees get positions as diversity commissars in major corporations and across academia.

The dysfunction is ubiquitous. The scope of this betrayal is life-changing.

America’s elites have used lies about race, gender, health, climate, environment, and energy to gut the middle class, explode the dependent class, and transfer trillions in national wealth upwards into their pockets. They’ve used the mob of aligned and very powerful institutions to enforce this, at the same time as they’ve manipulated social media and permitted brainwashed mobs of grassroots leftist activists to rampage through the streets.

Are you a conspiracy theorist if you think the establishment was sending a clear message in the summer of 2020 when tens of thousands of people burned down cities across America? Wasn’t the message “you elect Trump, and we will burn down the rest of the country”? Or is it naïve to think that was not orchestrated? There is plenty of evidence that these mobs were receiving cash from major corporations and wealthy activists, and as well that they were encouraged by Democratic politicians all the way up to the vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Trust is lost whenever someone questions these dubious actions and assertions, and in response, the term “conspiracy theorist” is thrown at them, as if that terminates their credibility and ends the discussion. It’s maddening and absurd. Does accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist somehow negate the possibility that conspiracies can even exist? And in any case, why must any of this be the result of a conspiracy? It’s no conspiracy that Americans are being betrayed, or that lies are necessary to sell the scam. It’s a consensus openly proclaimed by America’s elites and their international counterparts. They don’t think an American middle-class lifestyle is sustainable, and they want to take it away. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s the publicly acknowledged plan.

Countering the Mob—Offering a Better Way

The ultimate betrayal of Americans by their institutions, however, is that the institutional consensus is just plain wrong. For example, the establishment narrative on race in America invites social conflict. Our cultural institutions, starting with the public schools, are now teaching schoolchildren that if they’re white, they’re oppressors, and if they’re not, they’re disadvantaged victims. Meanwhile, in barely a half-century, America’s population has gone from almost 90 percent white to nearly 50 percent of all 2021 newborns being nonwhite. In a country that is transforming its national population that fast, you must discard the incorrect and racist message of oppressor and victim, and instead inspire all Americans to believe they have opportunities in a nation that is fundamentally not racist.

When it comes to energy and the environment, the institutional consensus is putting the entire world economy at risk of a catastrophic implosion. Here again, there is an alternative message of hope. Develop all forms of energy, using it as responsibly as possible, because abundant and affordable energy is the prerequisite for broad-based prosperity. Let renewable energy technologies and alternative methods of farming compete with conventional solutions and put faith in the perennial, proven ability of humans to adapt and thrive. As prosperity grows, population growth slows. There aren’t too many people. The planet isn’t about to perish. The future is bright.

This optimism is another trait, rooted in common sense, that has been a consistent subtext in all of Trump’s speeches, easily recognized by his supporters and frightfully elusive to his opponents, most of whom only see Trump’s lowlights as selectively clipped by the media. But the mob that attacks Trump and his supporters are attacking much more than that. They are even attacking more than Trump’s policies, or the desperately needed policies of a movement that transcends one man.

The anti-MAGA mob is attacking a way of viewing the world. It is a worldview that rejects the fear they’re selling: fear of disease, fear of racist and sexist oppression, and fear of an environmental meltdown. They are attacking a worldview that is practical and optimistic and embraces an economic and social strategy of abundance in all things, material and ephemeral. That joyful destiny, that broad-based prosperity and freedom, that unmanaged and pluralistic future, is a mortal threat to the established wealth and hegemonic power of America’s elites. All they offer is fear and the mob.

Mistrust is warranted. They must not prevail.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

How to Be a Successful Politician in California

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The following conversation never happened. It is for the reader to decide to what extent, however, this conversation reflects political reality in California today.

Candidate: It’s a surprise that you contacted me. I never thought I would run for office, I don’t know how to run a campaign, and I’m not well informed on any of the things I might have to manage if I get elected.

Government Union Operative: That doesn’t matter. We have profiled you and determined you will be a viable candidate and develop into a politician we can count on.

Candidate: But I don’t even know how to begin this process!

Government Union Operative: Don’t worry about that, either. Here are all the forms you need, already filled out. We’ll just put in your name and personal information, and then you’ll sign them. We will submit them. We will follow up.

Candidate: Where will I get my money to campaign? Where will I find a campaign manager?

Government Union Operative: We do everything for you. We’ve found a treasurer who will process all of your donations and expenditures, and all you have to do is approve them. We have a campaign consultant who will run your campaign for you. And we will run a separate independent expenditure campaign which allows us to avoid campaign contribution limits, and you will not have to do anything.

Candidate: What about my opponent?

Government Union Operative: Don’t worry. We will outspend your opponent by whatever amount necessary to ensure victory. They have to do everything themselves, knowing they’re going up against us. They have to raise money from small contributors. They have to constantly hold petty fundraisers. They haven’t got access to our government union contributions, and the corporations won’t help them because they’re all afraid of us. Unless your opponent is wealthy and willing to burn through a good chunk of their own personal fortune, they won’t have nearly enough money to compete with you.

Candidate: What will I campaign about? What will I say?

Government Union Operative: Don’t worry! We will tell you what to say. We will write your campaign literature. We will build your campaign website. We will handle every detail. We have all the money we will ever need, so we hire the best political consultants. We’ve learned exactly what voters respond to, and we will attack your opponent as an extremist.

Candidate: But shouldn’t I have ideas of my own? Shouldn’t I stand for anything?

Government Union Operative: No. Leave it all to us. Just be available for photos and to sign documents and checks.

Candidate: What if it’s a close election? Won’t all this be for nothing?

Government Union Operative: It probably won’t be close, but if it is, we know exactly what to do. If early voting trends show your opponent’s party turning out in stronger than anticipated numbers, we will invest more money in ballot harvesting during the weeks before election day. Our ballot harvesters know which household residents have registered with our party. Early voting lets us know how many votes we need, and ballot harvesting lets us control how many votes we’ll get. And it’s legal. You can’t lose.

Candidate: Can’t my opponent’s party do the same thing?

Government Union Operative: Theoretically, yes. But it costs a lot of money to engage in science-based ballot harvesting. And you see, ha ha, they haven’t got any money. What’s really funny, though, is that we’ve convinced Californians that we don’t have very much money, that we’re the underdogs, and that our opponents are spending us into the ground because they take contributions from “corporations and billionaires.” And guess what, we’re the ones who get almost all the contributions from corporations and billionaires, and they don’t.

Candidate: What if you can’t find enough households with voters registered to your party who haven’t voted yet, and early voting trends still show that I could be behind?

Government Union Operative: Relax. We have a lot of tools in our toolbox. Even though the last day to register to vote as a traditional voter is October 24, we can assist people with same-day registration as a “conditional voter” right up until and through Election Day, November 8. We know who to register. For example, our teachers union has ensured that the vast majority of young voters are thoroughly conditioned to vote for our party, and to despise your opponent’s party. We have a profile for every eligible voter in the state. We know where every person under age 30 is living, and if they’re not registered, we can get them a same-day registration, then we’ll harvest their ballot.

Candidate: Isn’t it kind of weird that California permits early voting to begin a full month before the November 8 election and allows counting and certification to last all the way up until December 16? Doesn’t it allow you to manipulate the election outcome during this extended voting period?

Government Union Operative: So what? It’s legal. We control the politicians, which means we write the laws, and we made all of this legal.

Candidate: What if my opponent questions the fairness of same-day registration and ballot harvesting to ensure victory?

Government Union Operative: You’re a quick learner, but you still don’t get it. We have all the winning messages. If your opponent questions the ethics of ballot harvesting, or the accuracy of the registered voter database from which ballots are mailed to everyone, or the injustice of taxpayer funded government unions recruiting candidates and paying for their campaigns, we will just call them an “election denier.”

Candidate: Oh, yes! I’ve heard that phrase a lot lately. Those people are fascists!

Government Union Operative: Right you are. Welcome to the team. Now just sign here.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Shared Scarcity Agenda of Predatory Investors and Extreme Environmentalists

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In a long-planned rally at the California State Capitol last month, San Joaquin Valley farmers protested new laws that impose taxes on their irrigation wells. In Madera County, where most of these farmers came from, the new tax is as high as $246 per acre of farmland. If you’re trying to irrigate a few sections of land to grow almonds, that tax adds up fast.

It would be bad enough for these farmers merely to restrict their access to groundwater, particularly since new laws are also restricting their access to river water. But the timing of this tax couldn’t be worse. The cost for diesel fuel has doubled, fertilizer cost has tripled, and shipping bottlenecks prevented farmers from selling their produce to export markets, flooding the domestic market and driving the price down.

Less revenue. Higher costs. And now a per acre tax on wells. Speaking at the farmer protest, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado exposed the hidden agenda behind the ill-timed regulatory war on farmers. “Financial speculators are buying farmland for the water rights,” she said, “and then they turn around and sell your water right back to you.”

Hurtado is right. The immutable algebra of this predatory financial strategy goes like this: As regulatory oppression drives farmers out of business, investors move in and buy their land. Meanwhile, these investors support environmentalist restrictions on river withdrawals for irrigation and oppose water supply infrastructure projects (using environmentalist justifications), in order to create a shortage of available water. Next, they use water rights to sell water back to corporate farmers who move onto the acquired properties, as well as to other farmers and municipal customers. Then they blame the inflated prices on “climate change.”

The accelerating movement of speculative investment capital into American farmland is well documented. According to the USDA, foreign investors by 2019 had purchased over 35 million acres of U.S. farmland. To put this in perspective, there are nearly 900,000 square miles of agricultural land in the U.S. (the entire lower 48 is 1.9 billion acres), but the impact of these purchases aren’t evenly distributed. Foreign investors favor prime irrigated farmland, of which there are only about 58 million acres in the U.S. Ground zero for this is California, with 9.6 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Because of California’s politically contrived water scarcity, farmland investment gravitates to California and is motivated as much by the desire to secure the lucrative water rights as it is to grow food. And while foreign investors are part of the mix, most of the purchases are being made by American firms. For example, while Saudi investors are buying land for the water rights in the Imperial Valley, Harvard’s $32 billion endowment is buying land for the water rights in Central California. American hedge funds and investment firms including Trinitas Partners, LGS Holdings Group, Greenstone, and others are also buying out California’s financially stressed farmers. Their profit model relies on water scarcity.

One of the primary sources of water for the American Southwest is the Colorado River. With decades of runoff stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, water is released downstream to sustain the cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with countless smaller cities and large-scale agriculture, primarily in Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley. California alone imports more than four million acre feet per year from the Colorado River. And decades of reservoir overdrafts along with a prolonged drought are about to force a massive reduction in how much water can be taken from the Colorado.

Public investment in water supply projects could have prevented the looming water crisis. Big new off-stream reservoirs such as the proposed Sites Reservoir in Northern California, could capture and store flooding runoff from the Sacramento River. Raising the height of the Shasta Dam, along with several other existing dams, could cost-effectively increase California’s water storage capacity. Spreading basins—and a return to flood irrigation—could also capture runoff along the entire western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and store millions of acre feet each year in underground aquifers. Urban water recycling could reduce the amount of water required by California’s cities by several million acre feet per year. Desalination plants can offer a perpetual, drought-proof supply of water to California’s coastal cities.

Instead, the only solution proposed by California’s policy makers is water rationing against a backdrop of chronic water scarcity and high prices. But it’s important to know what’s behind this, because the operative ideologies often have little to do with the classic liberal vs. conservative, capitalist vs socialist schisms. The powerful special interests who profit from water scarcity are speculative investors who use environmentalists to stop water supply projects. And while leftist environmentalists rhetorically attack capitalists, they have a symbiotic alliance with these investors. Both want water scarcity.

The irony, and the broken stereotypes, run deep. Consider the typical libertarian reaction to public investment in water supply infrastructure. “Let the market decide,” they will decree. But in many ways, the market is broken. Like many libertarian pieties, “the market” only works perfectly in a perfect world. In California, public funding of water supply projects results in a permanent lower cost for water and allows a water market to function against the backdrop of water abundance. This, in turn, enables a more decentralized ecosystem of competing farmers, selling more diverse agricultural products at lower prices, while still making a profit. At the same time, water abundance takes away the incentive for predatory investors to exploit water scarcity and turn the farming industry into the latest victim of what some call rentier capitalism.

State Sen. Hurtado, a Democrat whose district embraces the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, sees this clearly. So does embattled farmer John Duarte, running as a Republican to represent California’s 13th Congressional District. Duarte coined the term “Lords of Scarcity” to explain the phenomenon. A partisan assessment of these two politicians would place them squarely in the opposing camps of liberal and conservative. But they both recognize this phenomenon when they see it, and are equally committed to fighting its parasitic impact.

The organizers of the farmers’ protest also exemplify the new, stereotype-breaking coalition that is forming to oppose the financialization of agriculture. The leadership came from the Punjabi American Growers Group, nearly all of them family farmers who arrived in California within the last 50 years. What they found, until the Lords of Scarcity began the great squeeze, was a land where with hard work you could buy land and grow food and earn generational wealth. That way of life is threatened today, and these Punjabi Americans, along with millions of Americans of all backgrounds and ideologies, are waking up.

Solving water scarcity and preserving a diverse, decentralized, competitive, and profitable agricultural industry in California will require new coalitions, willing to expose the scarcity agenda that is shared by speculative investors and fanatic environmentalists. That new coalition is forming, and it can’t happen a moment too soon.

In a long-planned rally at the State Capitol last month, San Joaquin Valley farmers protested new laws that impose taxes on their irrigation wells. In Madera County, where most of these farmers came from, the new tax is $246 per acre of farmland. If you’re trying to irrigate a few sections of land to grow almonds, that tax adds up fast.

It would be bad enough for these farmers merely to restrict their access to groundwater, particularly since new laws are also restricting their access to river water. But the timing of this tax couldn’t be worse. The cost for diesel fuel has doubled, fertilizer cost has tripled, and shipping bottlenecks prevented farmers from selling their produce to export markets, flooding the domestic market and driving the price down.

Less revenue. Higher costs. And now a per acre tax on wells. Speaking at the farmer protest, State Senator Melissa Hurtado exposed the hidden agenda behind the ill-timed regulatory war on farmers. “Financial speculators are buying farmland for the water rights,” she said, “and then they turn around and sell your water right back to you.”

Hurtado is right. The immutable algebra of this predatory financial strategy goes like this: As regulatory oppression drives farmers out of business, move in and buy their land. Meanwhile, support environmentalist restrictions on river withdrawals for irrigation, and oppose water supply infrastructure projects (using environmentalist justifications), in order to create a shortage of available water. Use water rights to sell water back to corporate farmers who move onto the acquired properties, as well as to other farmers and municipal customers. Blame the inflated prices on “climate change.”

The accelerating movement of speculative investment capital into American farmland is well documented. According to the USAD, foreign investors by 2019 had purchased over 35 million acres of U.S. farmland. To put this in perspective, there are nearly 900,000 square miles of agricultural land in the U.S. (the entire lower 48 is 1.9 billion acres), but the impact of these purchases aren’t even. Foreign investors favor prime irrigated farmland, of which there are only about 58 million acres in the U.S. Ground zero for this is California, with 9.6 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Because of California’s politically contrived water scarcity, farmland investment gravitates to California, and is motivated as much by desire to secure the lucrative water rights as it is to grow food. And while foreign investors are part of the mix, most of the purchases are being made by American firms. For example, while Saudi investors are buying land for the water rights in the Imperial Valley, Harvard’s $32 billion endowment is buying land for the water rights in Central California. American hedge funds and investment firms including Trinitas Partners, LGS Holdings Group, Greenstone, and others are also buying out California’s financially stressed farmers. Their profit model relies on water scarcity.

One of the primary sources of water for the American Southwest is the Colorado River. With decades of runoff stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, water is released downstream to sustain the cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego, along with countless smaller cities and large scale agriculture, primarily in Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley. California alone imports more than four million acre feet per year from the Colorado River. And decades of reservoir overdrafts along with a prolonged drought are about to force a massive reduction in how much water can be taken from the Colorado.

Public investment in water supply projects could have prevented the looming water crisis. Big new off-stream reservoirs such as the proposed Sites Reservoir in Northern California, could capture and store flooding runoff from the Sacramento River. Raising the height of the Shasta Dam, along with several other existing dams, could cost-effectively increase California’s water storage capacity. Spreading basins – and a return to flood irrigation – could also capture runoff along the entire western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and store millions of acre feet each year in underground aquifers. Urban water recycling could reduce the amount of water required by California’s cities by several million acre feet per year. Desalination plants can offer a perpetual, drought proof supply of water to California’s coastal cities.

Instead, the only solution proposed by California’s policy makers is water rationing against a backdrop of chronic water scarcity and high prices. But it’s important to know what’s behind this, because the operative ideologies have little to do with the classic, outdated, liberal vs. conservative, capitalist vs socialist schisms. The powerful special interests who profit from water scarcity are speculative investors who use environmentalists to stop water supply projects. And while leftist environmentalists rhetorically attack capitalists, they have a symbiotic alliance with these investors. Both want water scarcity.

The irony, and the broken stereotypes, run deep. Consider the typical libertarian reaction to public investment in water supply infrastructure. “Let the market decide,” they will decree. But the market is broken. Like many libertarian pieties, “the market” only works perfectly in a perfect world. In California, public funding of water supply projects results in a permanent lower cost for water, and allows a water market to function against the backdrop of water abundance. This, in turn, enables a more decentralized ecosystem of competing farmers, selling more diverse agricultural products at lower prices, while still making a profit. At the same time, water abundance takes away the incentive for predatory investors to exploit water scarcity to turn the farming industry into the latest victim of rentier capitalism.

California State Senator Hurtado, a Democrat whose district embraces the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, sees this clearly. So does embattled farmer John Duarte, running as a Republican to represent California’s 13th Congressional District. Duarte coined the term “Lords of Scarcity” to explain the phenomenon. A partisan assessment of these two politicians would place them squarely in the opposing camps of liberal and conservative. But they both recognize rentier capitalism when they see it, and are equally committed to fighting its parasitic impact.

The organizers of the farmers protest also exemplify the new, stereotype breaking coalition that is forming to oppose the financialization of agriculture. The leadership came from the Punjabi American Growers Group, nearly all of them family farmers who arrived in California within the last 50 years. What they found, until the Lords of Scarcity began the great squeeze, was a land where with hard work you could buy land and grow food and earn generational wealth. That way of life is threatened today, and these Punjabi Americans, along with millions of Americans of all backgrounds and ideologies, are waking up.

Solving water scarcity and preserving a diverse, decentralized, competitive and profitable agricultural industry in California will require new coalitions, willing to expose the scarcity agenda that is shared by speculative investors and fanatic environmentalists. That new coalition is forming, and it can’t happen a moment too soon.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.