The Price of Scarcity

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How much water does $7 billion buy?

In so many ways that it almost defies description, California’s lawmakers have relied flawed logic to justify recently passed laws that will impose punitive urban water rationing. Rather than undertake the Sisyphean task of enumerating them, let’s just focus on one critical factor: the opportunity cost.

California’s urban water consumption is already down from over 9 MAF/year in the 1990s to only around 7.5 MAF/year today despite adding 8 million people to the state’s population over the past 30 years. Practical conservation measures have already been taken, so now the state legislature wants us to kill “nonfunctional” lawns (and the trees that depend on lawn irrigation), and limit indoor water use to 42 gallons per day. The cost to implement these destructive, draconian edicts is estimated at over $7 billion. The benefit? An estimated savings of around 400,000 acre feet per year (this Dept. of Water Resources study estimates total savings of 340,515 acre feet per year – ref. page 61).

This is ridiculous. Not because Californians don’t face water scarcity. They do. The big reservoirs on the Colorado River, Lake Power and Lake Mead, stored over 50 MAF behind the dams 20 years ago, and now they’re nearly empty. As a result, California is likely to lose at least a million acre feet a year, maybe more, from its Colorado River allocation, because the water’s not there. In the San Joaquin Valley, groundwater pumping has long exceeded natural recharge by 2 MAF/year, and to restore those aquifers before they collapse, at least another 2 MAF/year has to stay underground. And then there’s the ever present threat of multi-year droughts.

So if we’re looking for 3 MAF/year or more just to eliminate acute water scarcity in California, isn’t there a better way to spend $7 million than merely to squeeze another 400,000 acre feet out of our urban residents? Let us count the ways.

Fish Friendly Delta Diversions: The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta encompasses about 500,000 acres of waterways, levees, and farmland. Imagine allocating a mere 200 acres on an existing Delta island to divert up to 30,000 acre-feet per day into aquifer storage for subsequent use by farms and cities. Because these islands are below sea level and protected by levees, infiltration beds of gravel covering perforated water harvesting pipes could be built, with a parallel levee constructed to form a channel. Once that work is complete, openings could be cut into the existing levee on both ends of the new channel to allow water to flow through. Extensive study has already been performed on this project, with the next step being a pilot project to serve as final proof of concept. The cost for the pilot? Under $1 million. The estimated cost to implement? The total project cost for an infiltration channel, settling ponds, pumps, and new aqueduct transport to aquifer storage with interties to major existing north-south aqueducts: under $5 billion. During storm events even in dry years it would be possible to divert and store 2 MAF/year using this system, much more in wet years. Why isn’t every water worrier in California talking about this?

Build Desalination Plants Everywhere: Cue the skeptics. But the choice of the word “everywhere” wasn’t merely trolling. Credible plans to build inland plants to desalinate the Salton Sea are being taken seriously by environmentalists, as they should be. And to reduce the salt even in a reduced and managed Salton Sea would require a massive desalination plant; one mainstream study put the needed capacity at 100,000 acre feet per year. That is twice the capacity of the Carlsbad desalination plant that supplies up to 10 percent of San Diego County’s water. Desalination is a burgeoning, welcome salvation, providing desperately needed water in every other arid, ocean bordering metropolis on earth. For $7 billion, even using Carlsbad prices, Californians could construct desalination plants with a total capacity of 350,000 acre feet per year, and altogether they would only draw 140 megawatts of electricity. With emerging technologies – and perhaps some welcome regulatory reform – desalination plants would use even less energy and cost far less to build.

Build the Sites Reservoir – Now: When the decision was made in 1963 to build the San Luis Reservoir, the 2 MAF behemoth was completed in four years. It was part of the 1957 Water Plan. Also part of that plan were 48 other prospective locations for off-stream storage. For nearly 70 years, the Sites Reservoir has been the on-again, off-again twin to San Luis. Scaled down to 1.5 MAF of capacity, and no longer planned to have a pump storage component, the Sites Reservoir is nonetheless a vital next step in delivering water security to Californians. At an estimated cost of $4 billion and an estimated yield of 500,000 acre feet per year, this reservoir should have been completed years ago.

Stop Leaving So Much Water in the Rivers: This unimaginable heresy defies the legislative momentum of decades, and threatens those institutions that thrive on conflict, litigation, scarcity, emotional arguments, and apocalyptic hyperbole. Setting aside that dark but accurate assessment of what we’re up against, let’s consider the case in favor of arresting the trend. To begin with, if we want to save salmon, why aren’t we raising the limits on bass fishing? Bass, a nonnative predator, eat salmon. And if we want to save smelt, why not put smelt hatcheries next to nurseries in managed wetlands that exclude the nonnative Mississippi Silverside predators, only releasing them once they’re big enough to evade them? Why aren’t we planting shade trees along our waterways to get the water temperature down that way? Why aren’t we upgrading our water treatment plants so we don’t have to goose the flow of the rivers just to flush nitrogen out of the SF Bay and elsewhere? Why don’t we thin our forests not only to prevent superfires, but so more rainfall will percolate, feeding the springs and streams? Why don’t we recognize that flood irrigation has its place in modern agriculture, not only because it desalinates the soil, kills rodents, and primes the ground for a winter cover crop, but because the water recharges aquifers, taking pressure off river withdrawals for farm irrigation?

There are a lot of things that can be done for $7 billion that increase the supply of water, instead of imposing restrictions on urban residents that diminish their quality of life. Lowering indoor water use is in many respects a pointless exercise anyway, since the supposedly wasted water flows to a treatment plant where it is put right back into rivers. Along the coast, these treatment plants are being retrofit so the wastewater is pumped right back into the system. How is indoor water ever therefore wasted, if Californians average a comfortable 60 gallons per day instead of the to-be-mandated 42?

The real opportunities to achieve water abundance in California will not come from cutting back urban water use by 400,000 acre feet per year at stupendous cost. And while it is tempting for critics of urban water rationing to point to the thirsty farms, consuming a much greater 30 MAF/year, that is dead end thinking. Yes, we can take a million acres of irrigated farmland out of production. That would save 3-4 MAF/year. But if that’s all we do, instead of seizing the opportunity to invest in more water supply projects, we will just add food scarcity to water scarcity. We are all in this together, North and South, farm and city. We should be working together, and speaking with one voice, demanding investment in abundance, rather than paying for imposition of scarcity.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

A Slavic Christmas

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Last week I had the extraordinary privilege of attending an annual Christmas event held at a Christian cathedral in Sacramento, California. And here in the political heart of the Left Coast, for a few moments I was transported into a different world, where Christian faith and Christmas joy are still firmly in the center of what we now are expected to call the “Holiday Season.”

Performing that night was the Slavic Chorale, drawing its singers and orchestra musicians from first and second generation Slavic immigrants, mostly from Ukraine, but also from Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Poland. The conductor spoke to the audience mostly in Ukrainian, and very occasionally in English. But you didn’t have to speak the language to feel the spirit in that music.

When the youth choir filed onto the stage, it was what one might imagine to be a typical scene in America 60 years ago. Children as young as five or six, scrubbed clean and wearing their Sunday suits and dresses, tow headed cherubs with blue eyes, heartbreakingly serious, singing their Christmas songs from memory.

The adult choir was also evocative of times long gone in America. There may be churches left with traditional values, but most of them are either mega churches with sermons that hybridize biblical teachings with motivational lectures on self-improvement, or they are defiantly traditional, forced to engage in political defense merely to carry on with what they believe. In many cases, of course, American churches have abandoned tradition, trying to be relevant by catering to woke ideology. But on this night, with these Slavic Christians, there was no agenda. It was a pure celebration of culture and faith.

Watching this community come together, and hearing echoes of America’s diminishing innocence and dwindling heritage in their robust chorus, made it achingly clear what we have lost. It also made clear what we are fighting for, when we push back against the indoctrination that has infected our public schools, our entertainment, our media, the uniparty, and nearly every civic commission, committee of “stakeholders,” or other mainstream institutions that today define American culture and determine America’s destiny.

This is a community we must fight for, right now, here in America. Innocent children, and hard-working parents who are raising them in faith. Does America still have a culture left that these Ukrainians care to assimilate into, or must we, if we can ever win, be thankful that their intact communities shall someday provide the model for us to restore our nation?

It was impossible to watch these people, on and off the stage that night, and not wonder what countless tales of tragedy they must carry. And it was impossible as well to not grieve that over there, on this same night, their relatives were still being slaughtered in a fratricidal war. Russians and Ukrainians share a great deal of common heritage, going back to the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. The clash that’s costing so many lives today was not inevitable.

It was not, for example, Russians who killed Ukrainians during the Holodomor, the horrific engineered starvation of an estimated 4 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. It was communists. Central planners, murderous communist fanatics who hijacked a nation, crashed the economy, collectivized – and destroyed – agriculture, then looted the grain producing regions of whatever food remained to supply the cities.

Russians today still remember the 1940s, when German armies overran 700,000 square miles, virtually all of Western Russia and Ukraine, in a war that took the lives of an estimated 14 million Russians and 7 million Ukrainians, along with 2.3 million soldiers and civilians from Belarus, 660,000 from Kazakhstan, and 550,000 from Uzbekistan. From the Mongols in the 13th century, to Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, the collective memory of invasions from east and west exerts decisive influence on the character of Russians.

It is in this historical context that Russians view the addition of seven Warsaw Pact nations to NATO between 1989 and 1999. Apart from East Germany, which was reunited with West Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were expected to remain neutral. Then in 2004, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were added to NATO. Russians had relied on all these states as buffers between their nation and the West.

It’s perilous to attempt to describe, much less judge the moral worth of each antagonist in the war today between Russia and Ukraine. But it is reasonable to suggest that most Russians, in exchange for their 1989 agreement to peacefully break up the Soviet Union and grant autonomy to their Eastern European satellite nations, did not expect to confront the prospect of NATO bases on their doorstep. A quick look at a map of NATO member states, labeled by year of entry, ought to convey how visceral the threat must seem to a people whose history is defined by apocalyptic invasions.

What can be said, however, is how disgraceful it is for neocon uniparty ghouls to stare into partisan, pro-war media cameras and tell us, here in America, how wonderful it is for Ukrainians to die fighting Russians, so that all we have to do back here in America in order to “weaken Russia” is send them weapons.

Ukrainian nationalism has been stoked and warped by the ambitions of American globalists. Stoked by agents, money and weapons, and warped insofar as Ukrainian nationalism is now a fractious, externally funded coalition with cosmopolitan neoliberals at one extreme and hard-right neo-Nazis at the other. Both factions are now heavily armed and trained and only united in their shared determination to defeat Russia.

The Russian seizure of Crimea, a region for which Ukrainian claims are at the very least debatable, was preceded by the Maidan protests, a pro-Western movement allegedly orchestrated by the Americans. Take a look at maps of the Ukrainian elections of 2010, 2012, and 2014. The pro-Russian candidates and moderately pro-Russian parties consistently prevailed in the south and the east, where, unsurprisingly, Russian speakers dominate. Ukraine was a divided nation in 2014, but might have peacefully forged a neutral path forward. It’s fair to ask which great power first decided that wasn’t acceptable.

And what of globalism, with “free trade,” and a “rules based international order,” or, as a cynic might sneer, the “globohomo” attempt to completely reinvent society? Would anyone today prefer life in Russia or China to life in the United States? That is unlikely, and consequently it is probable that most Ukrainians would rather be part of a Western globalist bloc than under the sway of the Russian Federation. But how long will that preference last?

Ask the Irish, the Dutch, the French, the Swedes, and the Italians, or the people of other European nations overran with migrants and overburdened with globalist restrictions on production of food and fuel. Don’t ask their political leaders, who supposedly speak for them. Ask the common man or woman living there. Ask the people who are now living in a nation they no longer recognize, where their voice is irrelevant, the religion of their ancestors is disparaged, and their votes are so pointless they may as well be living in a “managed democracy” such as they have in Putin’s Russia.

What is in store for Ukraine when this horrific war finally ends? If Zelensky and his Western backers prevail, what will be the fate of a land that’s been hollowed out as much by emigration as by war fatalities? Will they become a sanctuary nation, to be repopulated with African and Muslim refugees? Why not? Isn’t that the globalist playbook, and the obligation of compassionate Christians? And when does compassion become suicide? Shall any homogenous European culture survive the great reset?

These thoughts troubled me as I sat among these Ukrainians. But mostly I was inspired and energized by them. Scarcely acknowledging and profoundly immune to the darkness that eternally seeks to envelop the world, they live with fellowship and adhere to values that American leaders and institutions have abandoned. Their faith is unbreakable. It will never waver. Their joy is stronger than the tribulations they endure, because its source is not of this world. Peace will someday return to their homelands. Meanwhile, we Americans may be rescued by their example.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Eliminating Water Scarcity

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After the deluge that inundated California during our most recent water season, there is no chance Californians will confront a water supply crisis this year. Water levels, as reported by the California Data Exchange Center, are above the historical average for this date in every one of California’s major reservoirs.

But storms of scarcity remain on the horizon, and conservation is not enough. If conservation is our only approach, we will not conserve our way out of anything, not scarcity, poverty, inflation, or fragility, much less water. If rainfall totals are destined to permanently drop, then we must invest, innovate, and build. There is nothing Californians cannot do, so long as we apply our creativity and our wealth from an abundance mindset.

To reprise the theme that we believe will solve the problems of the world (nothing grandiose there), the only solutions that can deliver sustainability, equity, affordability and resilience in all things are policies that create abundance. Here are the some of the challenges that stand in the way of water abundance in California.

Overdrafted Aquifers: According to the Water Education Foundation, “on average, California uses about 2 million acre-feet of groundwater more than is naturally or artificially recharged. Much of the overdrafting has occurred in the agricultural Central and San Joaquin valleys.” Over the past ten years, Californians have, on average, pumped up 19 million acre feet (MAF) of groundwater per year. Based on these figures, to stop further depletion of groundwater, a 2 MAF/year reduction is needed. To recharge depleted aquifers, and possibly to account for less natural recharge if rain totals trend lower in the future, a much greater reduction is needed. To put this into perspective, California’s farmers require approximately 30 MAF/year and California’s cities consume another 7.5 MAF/year.

Diminished Colorado River Flow: If you wade through this very recent update from the Congressional Research Service, you will begin to understand the convoluted history (and future) of Colorado River management. To summarize, withdrawals for the past 20 years for urban and agricultural use have averaged 15 MAF/year, but total runoff has only averaged 12 MAF/year during that same period. The deficit was filled by nearly draining two of the biggest reservoirs in the U.S., Lake Powell with a capacity of 26 MAF, and Lake Mead with a capacity of 31 MAF. From both being almost full in 2000, by 2022 the lake levels had dropped down almost to so-called “Deadpool,” where the water is so low it can no longer flow downstream. The rain and snow last season brought lake levels up out of crisis range, but California’s 4.4 MAF/year share of Colorado River runoff is in jeopardy despite holding senior water rights. It is possible that future cuts could reduce California’s share significantly. More to the point, because we’re all in this together, experts at the Bureau of Reclamation and elsewhere have suggested that in the future the sustainable yield from the Colorado River could be as low as 9 MAF/year. That means California, along with six other states along the Colorado watershed, would have to find 6 MAF/year of cuts.

California’s North-to-South Aqueducts Depend on Delta Levees: The federally administered Central Valley Project employs a series of aqueducts to deliver water from Lake Shasta and other northern reservoirs down into the San Joaquin Valley. The California Water Project does the same thing, with Lake Oroville the centerpiece of a state-run system of reservoirs and aqueducts. Lake Shasta today has 3.0 MAF of water behind the dam, out of a total capacity of 4.5 MAF. Lake Oroville has 2.4 MAF currently stored out of a capacity of 3.5 MAF. But getting that water down to San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California’s coastal megacities requires transiting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. And safely moving fresh water through the delta requires intact levees. One major earthquake in the area – even as low as a magnitude 5 on the Richter scale – could cause “liquefaction” along multiple sections of the delta’s 1,000 miles of aging levees. Levee breaches would flood the “islands” protected by these levees – many now between 10 and 25 feet below sea level thanks to over a century of groundwater pumping. If that happens, salt water will pour into the delta from the San Pablo Bay, making north-to-south fresh water transfers impossible.

These are the big three – depleted aquifers, nearly empty reservoirs on the Colorado River, and a precarious network of century old levees that are one big earthquake away from catastrophic failure. And then there’s always the next severe drought. What can be done? Sacramento’s only consistent legislative strategy seems to be use less water. But exceptions exist.

Already approved by the State Assembly and set to go before the State Senate early next year, SB 366 includes encouraging language. If the state legislature, and, more to the point, the bureaucrats who will be tasked with implementation, can embrace the empowering imperative of abundance instead of the Malthusian tyranny of scarcity and rationing, there are words in the bill they can rely on. It directs the Department of Water Resources to “develop a comprehensive plan for addressing the state’s water needs and meeting specified long-term water supply targets…” and then, “require the plan to provide recommendations and strategies to ensure enough water supply for all beneficial uses.” Taken the right way, SB 366 can change the game.

California is at a crossroads. For every essential – not just water, but energy, infrastructure, housing, transportation, agricultural production, forestry, mining, ranching – the legislative and cultural bias has been to restrict production and ration consumption. The balance between the interests of California’s human population and needs of the environment has been lost, and, ironically, often these policies harm the environment more than they help. This Malthusian bias can and must change. It is out of character for Californians to think this way. And nobody, anywhere on earth, wants to copy this example.

Is it really preferable to carpet the land with solar panels, new transmission lines and battery farms, and saturate our coastal waters with thousands of offshore wind turbines, when two or three nuclear power plants and a dozen retrofit, ultra-efficient natural gas power plants could provide just as much energy with far less disruption to the environment?

Is it really preferable to spend an estimated $7 billion to implement SB 1157 (urban water rationing), in order to save an estimated 400,000 acre feet of water per year? For that amount of money, even at California’s inflated prices, you could build ocean desalination plants with the capacity to produce 400,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, and doing so would only consume 160,000 megawatts of electricity, a pittance. Desalination is the most expensive option to supply more water. Every other solution would cost less. Why are we preparing to put Californian households through this ordeal?

Resolute certainty can be the enemy of progress. There could come a day when we realize we impoverished our population while at the same time we spent countless billions to install what will have become a colossal pile of obsolete junk. Such is the danger of betting big on ephemeral technologies.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Netflix and the Erasure of History

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“Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
– Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy. Netflix streaming services currently offer around 3,600 movies, barely 3 percent of what could be found in their DVD archives. It’s easy to miss the significance of this loss for any American under 30 (or 40?). When it comes to mass entertainment, late millennials and members of Gen Z have spent their entire lives exposed to almost nothing but garbage – stylized violence, mandatory diversity, movies without plots; nothing but action, special effects, and political indoctrination. Why would anyone who hasn’t sampled the rich legacy of American film before the age of woke have any idea what they’re missing – not only what movies once were, but how they depict what life was once like?

For 25 years, Netflix gave us all a chance to touch the memories that defined us, the world we knew. Movies are an incomparable window into American history and culture, good and bad. They incorporate bits of everything, not merely the stories we told but the fashion, the music, the technology of the time. They show us what our nation looked like in each decade, who we were and how we lived.

The average American now spends two hours and 24 minutes every day on social media, typically either blowing out their emotional equilibrium in pointless, endless acrimony, or flipping through addictive, useless videos. The average American between the ages of 15 and 24 spends over an hour every day playing video games, equally addictive and equally useless.

Netflix, until September 29, offered something more. It not only offered a boundless oeuvre of cinematic drama, a glimpse into America’s soul, it offered long-form content devoid of cheap tricks and vacuous, agenda driven narratives. These old movies delivered intricate plots that required sustained attention.

With old movies we can see clearly how each decade brought a new way of looking at the past. What was dramatic and authentic then is often seen now as ham-handed and corny. In the early American Westerns, our portrayals of Indians were arguably toxic but also naive. A white actress would play the part of an Indian squaw, with incongruous blue eyes and red greasepaint on her face that the makeup artist didn’t even bother to extend to her hairline. White men would act the parts of Indians by wearing dark wigs with ponytails and neglecting to conjugate their verbs. And the music: a brass section ominously blasting pentatonic melodies in parallel fifth harmony every time an Indian appeared on the horizon or galloped up on horseback. There is value in seeing these tropes today. It reminds us how far we’ve come.

Old movies also remind us how far we’ve fallen. Movies show us what life was like before, for example, oligarchs started using “green” building codes to turn the U.S. into a rentier economy. Ward Cleaver today would not be strolling up a path surrounded by lawn to greet his wife and sons in a detached home with a yard. That man today would come home to a condo, his “owned” square footage part of a building with sixteen units per acre and no yard. He and his wife would both work full time to pay a mortgage that would consume every spare dime they could earn. Children, if they had any, would be holed up in a dark bedroom, glued to their screens.

Movies remind us of what we faced in more difficult times, and how we coped with challenges that dwarf – at least so far – the problems of today. Watch a young Sterling Hayden, a commander in the classic 1952 World War 2 drama “Flat Top,” whip his recruits into shape for air combat. Watch Henry Fonda try to keep his family together in “The Grapes of Wrath,” as they are displaced during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Watch Jimmy Stuart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fall into despair, then recover his optimism with the support of his small community, or watch the entire City of New York rally behind Edmund Gwenn’s character in “Miracle on 34th Street.” These and countless others were inspiring, sobering movies that have lasting relevance, produced by people who loved this country and wanted to encourage values of unity and selflessness. Movies made by people whose social consciousness expressed itself by presenting and upholding inspiring role models, traditional values, and patriotism, and by rejecting decadence. Try to find these classics on Netflix streaming. You might find a few dozen of the biggest hits. The rest, which are nowhere to be found, will fade further into obscurity, along with the culture that made them.

Movies from decades long past show what life was like in America before the nation simultaneously drowned itself in debt while its suddenly disenfranchised youth disappeared into an online stupor. They show us what life was like before, without anyone being consulted, and within just a few decades, we overturned our entire national ethnic composition at the same time as our ruling class decided to teach all of America’s new arrivals to view those of us who were already here as privileged racists living on stolen land. Movies made before this historic betrayal depicted a high trust society, flawed to be sure, but committed to a shared culture and shared heritage.

All of that is gone now. Without the ability to see our history, dramatized and made accessible through old movies, will enough of us tomorrow recognize the revolutionary intent of movies like Leave the World Behind? Its part in the movement to Fundamentally Transform America? Or will our history and our people have melted into an undifferentiated, timeless, Pavlovian, algorithmically curated now?

Netflix gave us something beautiful, then took it away. It was good while it lasted.

This article originally appeared on American Greatness.

Examining the Future of Fossil Fuel

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Here’s a question for every oil and gas producer in California. It is especially directed to the five “bad guys” — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP — that were recently sued by California’s grandstanding attorney general, Rob Bonta: When are you going to quit playing defense? As Alex Epstein has tirelessly expounded both in his book, Fossil Future, and in his ubiquitous (and suppressed) musings online, energy from oil and gas powers civilization. It is the primary reason a middle class lifestyle is affordable for billions of people.

Not only are oil and gas, and even coal, cheap and nearly inexhaustible sources of affordable fuel, still powering 80 percent of ALL energy used in California (barely better than the world average of 82 percent), but because it is so cheap, it remains affordable even if included in its price are funds to eliminate from emissions any unhealthy pollutants. And there is growing evidence that fossil fuels also have a much smaller environmental footprint than all other sources of energy with the possible exception of nuclear.

Which brings us to the boogeyman of this age, CO2. Are these oil companies willing to aggressively defend themselves even if that might generate bad PR? CO2 is life. After all, without CO2, every plant on earth would die. What if the overall health of our planetary ecosystems, on balance, would be better off with more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less?

With apologies, we are obligated to share this heresy, because it is our conclusion, based on overwhelming evidence (don’t try to find it on Google), that the menace of anthropogenic CO2 is not “settled science.” If you find this horrifying and offensive, consider the possibility that you simply have not been exposed to contrarian data and analysis, except maybe in the context of biased reports discrediting it. So this week, let’s dive deep into the scary, forbidden territory of climate crisis denial.

Mark Twain famously said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” So it is with climate alarm. We are expected to accept without question not only the crisis narrative, but literally anything proposed to supposedly save us from the alleged catastrophe. But as the distinguished climatologist Dr. John Christy explained at a meeting of water executives last October in Orange County, using unfiltered data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, there is no evidence that California is experiencing rapid or dangerous climate change.

Here are four books that are must-reads for anyone willing to engage in activism — or pass legislation — on the issues of climate and energy: False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, Unsettled by Steven Koonin, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. Along with providing useful summaries of the data and arguments in these books, the reviewer acknowledges Epstein’s unique contribution to the discussion over climate and energy, that extreme environmentalism has brought us to the point where “eliminating human impact, not advancing human flourishing, is the primary moral goal driving our knowledge system in the realm of energy.”

If you’re looking for nuance, which is sorely missing from mainstream policy discussions over climate, read Judith Curry’s website. Until a few years ago the Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Curry has a Ph.D in geophysical sciences, which makes her as qualified as anyone to opine on the multidisciplinary field of climate science. Curry has been dubbed a “lukewarmer” based on her acknowledgement – along with Christy and many others – that the planet is experiencing a moderate warming trend, but not an alarming one. Why isn’t Curry testifying before a legislative committee in Sacramento? When California’s state government prepares – to cite just one example of their irrational exuberance – to spend billions to subsidize hundreds of floating offshore wind turbines that are each longer (vertically) than a modern US Navy supercarrier, a dose of sanity is urgently required.

Also offering sanity is the CO2 Coalition. Behind their innocuous mission statement, “we seek to strengthen the understanding of the role of science and the scientific process in addressing complex public policy issues like climate change,” is an organization with a clear message that might be distilled to this: Atmospheric CO2 is too low, not too high, and the warming effect of each molecule of CO2 declines as its concentration increases. Those who are skeptical about these skeptics should review the group’s About page, where 132 coalition members are listed, along with their biographies. These are credentialed scientists willing to stand behind the claims made by the CO2 coalition. Earlier this year, the CO2 Coalition had its LinkedIn account cancelled for “misinformation.” Can that be justified? Read their material and make up your own mind.

While it is healthy to have contrarians among us, that doesn’t justify holding contrarian viewpoints merely for the sake of being contrary. But when a premise becomes so huge and so unquestionable that it becomes the bludgeon to enforce policies that might otherwise be considered insane and punitive, contrarian analysis is our only hope. So it is with the climate “crisis.” The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.

The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.

But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.

It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, as noted, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double. Recognizing these two immutable facts should make it clear that nothing is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance.

Regardless of what we conclude regarding climate science, an all-of-the-above energy strategy is the nonnegotiable destiny of the world. We must adapt, and set an example of clean and ultra-efficient gas and oil technologies that the world is willing to follow.

That is the message that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP should be conveying to California and the world.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Role of Unions in a Perfect World

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The optimal public policy regarding unions may not be realistic in states like California, but that shouldn’t prevent us from performing an occasional what-if. For anyone even slightly right-of-center, what unions have done to this state is a catastrophe. And even for those to the left-of-center, many are realizing, for example, that California’s failing system of public education is not because of inadequate funding, or due to the demographics of the students, but can be blamed primarily on a teachers union that has prioritized its political and economic agenda to the detriment of quality education.

It’s important, even if impossible to actually do anything today, to explore what might be the role of unions in California if the state legislature were ready to enact serious reform. Because not all unions are the same, and what has happened in California might happen elsewhere in the United States. We believe that preventing this is a nonpartisan imperative, and clarifying our intent may help prevent California’s plight from becoming America’s plight, and might even pave the way for eventual changes here.

This report is split into two parts, mostly to emphasize one main point, which is that public sector unions, representing government employees, are completely different from private sector unions, representing employees of private companies. It is necessary to expose once again how public sector unions, which should be illegal, have successfully pretended to face the same challenges and operate under the same constraints as private sector unions. Separately, it is necessary to explain how private sector unions have been corrupted, and have betrayed their own ideals and the aspirations of their members. We will begin with public sector unions.

Part One: Outlaw Public Sector Unions 

Money doesn’t guarantee victory in political campaigns. For proof, look no further than Meg Whitman, the California billionaire who in 2010 squandered $179 million in her futile campaign to beat Jerry Brown and become that state’s next governor.

When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to influence the presidential election outcome in an unprecedented way by spending $419 million on “get out the vote” efforts via left-leaning nonprofit organizations that go far beyond “traditional campaign finance, lobbying or other expenses.” Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.

This is a critical distinction. Imagine if a pro-Republican billionaire had, like Zuckerberg, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “nonpartisan” nonprofit organizations that in-turn used that money to launch get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavy with Republican voters. What are the chances the election offices in these cities would have cooperated?

Consider Maricopa County in Arizona, the City of Philadelphia, or the City of Detroit. Election office workers in these cities, and many others around the country, are represented by AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. In 2020, according to Open Secrets, 99.7 percent of AFSCME’s political contributions to federal election campaigns went to Democrats. Nationally, labor unions in 2020 spent a reported $1.8 billion on political campaign contributions, and of the public sector union share of that spending, 89 percent was spent to support Democrats.

Public sector unions don’t merely engage in political spending, their members occupy the bureaucracies that manage our elections. There are only five states that prohibit collective bargaining by public employees: Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The situation in Georgia exemplifies the power of these unions, because even there, while unions are not able to bargain, they are still permitted to recruit members and collect dues.

There is an inherent conflict of interest between the employees of government agencies and the interests of the general taxpaying public. When government programs fail, the natural inclination of a government employee is to protect their job security, which means they will claim not enough people were hired, not enough money was spent, and if more taxpayer dollars can get thrown at the problem, results will improve. This may or may not be true, but a taxpayer is much more likely to support programs that succeed, and to cancel programs that fail. From the perspective of a government bureaucracy, and the ambitions of the career bureaucrats that staff it, failure is an opportunity for growth and advancement.

This alone is reason enough to outlaw public sector unions. When a union agenda overlays onto what is already a built-in bias towards more government as reflected in the sentiments of government employees, that sentiment is buttressed with financial and political power, at the same time as it is corrupted further by the traditional union rhetoric that foments an adversarial relationship between employees and management. Which brings us to the next fatal flaw afflicting government unions: the fact that they elect their own bosses.

Political spending by government unions inevitably favors the candidates who will advocate for bigger government: more laws, rules, regulations, fines, fees, and taxes. That fulfills the ambitions of the union and its members: more money, more staff, more programs, translating into growth in membership dues and public employee compensation. When government unions negotiate for better pay and benefits, the politician sitting across the table knows that if they resist, they will be targeted for defeat in the next election. In any close race, and even in races where the incumbent would ordinarily have an advantage, the injection of union money will make the difference. There is no comparison in the private sector, where management is appointed by shareholders, and is retained or dismissed based on the success of the company, not the preferences of the unions representing its employees.

Unions in the public sector differ from private sector unions in another critical respect, which is that in their negotiations for better pay and benefits, they are not constrained by market realities. In the private sector, unions know that if they ask for too much, it will leave the company unable to compete, and this has a self-limiting effect on what they ask for. There is no such constraint on public sector unions. When they ask for increased pay and benefits, they know that the politicians they have elected will either raise taxes to grant these demands, or face defeat in the next election.

The consequences of allowing public sector unions to completely dominate a state can be seen in California, where public sector unions now collect and spend nearly one billion dollars per year in membership dues. The control this brings is easily verified. To fund the 2020 campaign to elect the Speaker of the California State Senate, Toni Atkins, every one of the top 10 contributors was a public sector union. For the Speaker of the California State Assembly, Robert Rivas, every one of the top 20 contributors was a public sector union. This dominance is seen across every elected office in the state.

In California, public sector union money is used either explicitly to fund political campaigns all the way from the governor and U.S. Senators down to every local elected position including school boards, city councils, county supervisors, water agencies, public utility commissions, transit districts, judgeships, etc., or is used to fund “nonpolitical” public education campaigns and “nonpartisan” get-out-the-vote campaigns. The result? California has the highest taxes, the highest cost-of-living, and the highest rate of poverty and homelessness in the nation. But for government unions, failure is success.

California is also the epicenter of high tech, and the ability of Google and Facebook to manipulate public opinion and voter turnout in elections is well documented, as is the propensity of these companies to support Democrats. But this behavior, decisive as it may be, would not be a match for the power of union-controlled government if it were out of alignment. Just as the unionized, overwhelmingly Democrat federal bureaucrats during the Trump administration actively thwarted his policy agenda and executive actions, if big tech were using its power to promote Republican candidates and causes, agencies, regulators, judges and politicians would swiftly find a way to stop them cold.

There is an innate incentive for government employees to want to grow government. This makes any political party or politician that is devoted to the principle of limited government automatically their enemy. To add to that inevitable and perennial conflict, the power of organized unions tilts the balance and rigs the game.

Public sector unions are one of the root causes of government overreach and inefficiency in America today. As long as these unions can use their financial and political power to serve the interests of government bureaucrats, proponents of limited government are fighting a nearly impossible battle. They should be outlawed.

Part Two: Reform Private Sector Unions

Unlike public sector unions, private sector unions have a vital role to play in American society. But these unions have become coopted by the same special interests they were originally formed to oppose. The political agenda of America’s unions is almost exclusively leftist, and being part of America’s institutional “Left” is not what it used to be.

For this reason, pressure from the outside, for example to require right-to-work protection for those workers who don’t want to be compelled to join a union, is not sufficient. Private sector union reform has to also come from within, and most likely from the grassroots members themselves demanding changes at the top. These members must recognize that the politics of unions in America today are not in their best interests.

The biggest misconception in American politics today is that the political Left is fighting corporate power. Leftists may still attack corporate profits and demand corporations pay their “fair share,” but on every major issue affecting the economic freedom and prosperity of working families in America, these presumed antagonists are actually in perfect alignment.

Labor unions, originally formed to defend the interests of workers, are no exception. Their decades of de-facto support for unrestricted immigration is a prime example. From the SEIU, “Stay strong against Trump’s wall!;” from the AFL-CIO, “oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.” Rather than protect the interests of American workers by controlling the borders, unions demand something that is impossible to achieve when borders are overrun with millions of immigrants, a “universal social insurance safety net and strong worker protections that bolster the health, welfare and economic security of all working families.”

America’s unions deny one of the most basic of economic truths, that increasing the supply of workers will result in lower wages.

There’s another basic economic truth that eludes America’s union leadership, which is that there are two ways to secure the “economic security of all working families.” The first is to collectively bargain and when necessary strike for higher wages and benefits. But the other, which truly will benefit all workers, is to support policies that lower the cost-of-living. Towards this second goal, unions have been actively hostile, because they have accepted the “climate crisis” narrative.

There is irony in the SEIU’s official position, which states that “climate change is real and poses significant threats to people’s health and livelihood, and disproportionately affects working people, the poor and people of color.” They’re sort of right. But it isn’t climate change, but the policies implemented to supposedly mitigate it, which disproportionately harm working people and the poor.

The position taken by the AFL-CIO on climate change exemplifies how opportunism has replaced a concern for the welfare of all workers. A June 2022 convention resolution states, “In every forum, we will demand that clean energy technologies be mined, produced, constructed and operated under union contracts.” Just a month earlier, in May 2022, the AFL-CIO announced, “We’re here for the signing of the Project Labor Agreement between NABTU and Ørsted—the culmination of years of hard work on a game-changing partnership that will change the trajectory of the entire offshore wind industry.”

The trajectory, overall, goes something like this: We will negotiate project labor agreements that guarantee our members well paying jobs working on projects that will greatly increase the cost of energy in America. In the case of offshore wind, that cost became prohibitive, when in November 2023, Orsted, the largest offshore wind farm company in the world, ditched its two planned offshore wind projects along the south coast of New Jersey.

Earlier this year, in August, another giant wind farm company, Equinor, pulled out of the Trollvind project in the North Sea because of unforeseen challenges including “technology availability, time constraints, and rising costs that made the project commercially unsustainable.” Also in August, Equinor sought “a 54 percent increase for the price of power produced at three planned U.S. wind farms” off the coast of New York. In the face of a likely denial, Equinor announced it could cancel U.S. offshore wind projects. In November 2021, Equinor abandoned a 1.4 GW floating wind farm off the shores of Ireland.

Wind farm developments, costing hundreds of billions to build at scale, only make financial sense to developers if they’re awarded massive government subsidies. But for big labor interests, fleecing taxpayers and punishing ratepayers so multinational corporations can make billions in profits on offshore wind is of secondary concern, as long as union jobs are created. Offshore wind projects typify the synergy between government subsidies, mega-corporations, and big labor that is the true motivating force behind climate crisis policies.

In California, a state that has completely succumbed to climate crisis panic, the High Speed Rail project fulfills all these criteria. The state is well on the way to spending over $130 billion on a system with ridership projections that aren’t more than a rounding error in total air and vehicle miles traveled each year by Californians, but it delivers thousands of high paying jobs to unions and lucrative contracts to the corporations they work for.

If unions don’t start fighting for practical infrastructure projects that lower the cost-of-living, expect more of these boondoggles. Another union supported project that will squander hundreds of billions in subsidies and raise prices to consumers is “carbon capture.” In a nation where production of natural gas and hydraulic fracking are under relentless assault, and nuclear waste is the boogeyman of the century, the consensus between government, corporations, and big labor is that we need to pump literally gigatons of CO2 exhaust into underground caverns every year. Go figure.

The only explanation for what is an otherwise inexplicable alliance between big labor and big corporations is a shared preference for economic centralization. Corporations in America stopped believing in competition a long time ago, if they ever did. But the innate corporate drive to expand and monopolize markets was challenged and limited by the power of the American Left. Today that balance has been lost. After the anti-globalization marches of 2000, and the Occupy Movement starting in 2011, corporations realized they could coopt the Left by assimilating their agenda on the broad issues of diversity and the climate crisis. And as they must have known, this has actually worked to their advantage.

In both cases, new barriers have been erected to exclude emerging smaller competitors. In every industry, the burden of hiring based on race and gender quotas instead of competence, and the expense of operating an expanded human resources department to enforce these quotas and fulfill the new reporting requirements, has given very large companies a decisive advantage. Unlike smaller companies, they can spread the expense over a much larger base of revenue.

This is equally true with environmental regulations, where the overhead and investment and additional operating costs necessary to comply will destroy the financial viability of smaller companies, at the same time as the big corporations easily have the resources not only to comply, but to buy up the smaller companies and further grow their market share. As for “renewables,” the more they cost and the more access to conventional energy is restricted, the more money pours into the industry from customers forced to pay the higher prices. The idea that major energy companies oppose renewables is ridiculous. It is in their economic interests to see the price of energy go as high as possible.

Unions support corporate consolidation and centralization of economic power because higher wages and benefits for their members become part of the overhead that drives smaller, non-union companies out of business. Big companies with captive markets are able to offer the highest compensation packages to union workers, because they have eliminated their competitors and can therefore pass the increased costs to their customers.

For unions in the United States to once again fight for the interests of all American workers, they will have to recognize hard economic realities. An unlimited supply of new residents in America will either drive down wages or overwhelm the welfare state; both of these outcomes are undesirable. Current environmentalist policies are too extreme, and while they benefit corporations, government, and labor unions representing workers in certain heavily subsidized industries, they are driving the cost-of-living out of reach for the vast majority of American workers.

Delivering an optimal standard of living to all Americans is only possible with controlled immigration, practical infrastructure investments, merit-based hiring, a regulatory environment that doesn’t wipe out competition between corporations, and policies with respect to energy and the environment that don’t inflict economic harm on working families. Unions might also recognize that most “renewables,” certainly including wind energy, biofuel, and battery manufacturing, are devastating to the environment.

These are facts that unions must face, and the agenda that unions should adopt. Such a reform is unlikely, but possible if they return to their founding principles. If unions were to adopt these principles, it would not only benefit all Americans. It would also restore America’s strength and enhance America’s standing as an example and an inspiration to the rest of the world, and offer again a model for other nations to follow.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.

What Motivates American Globalism?

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It is too easy, and dangerously misleading, to examine the most controversial globalist policies combined with America’s most obvious weaknesses and conclude that American power, and the future of globalism is in jeopardy. In both there is nuance and hidden strength. Understanding this ambiguity offers both hope for the future and a clearer sense of what choices face Americans today.

It is important to recognize that while other Western Nations from New Zealand to Sweden are participants in globalist policies, and that globalist theories may have originated from Europe, the influencers and institutions turning them into policy and pushing them onto the rest of the world are almost all American.

This distinction matters, because it frames the entire question of globalism in a manner that contradicts the term. Globalism is less about the dissolution of nations, and more about the extension of American global hegemony. Globalism, in this sense, isn’t global. It’s the latest iteration of American imperialism. This is expressed in every “globalist” imperative, from rapid and mandatory sacrifices to cope with a “climate crisis” to “equity” and racial redress, to trans ideology, gay rights, and mass immigration.

The motivation for American globalists demanding action to prevent “global boiling” is almost transparently imperialistic. By denying financing to nations in the Global South to develop economically viable energy solutions, they are condemned to become dependent on “renewables” which require a level of technological sophistication that only America and the West can offer. At the same time, of course, the elites in these nations are seduced by the promise of massive foreign aid to compensate for the “climate crimes” allegedly committed by Western oil companies, and bribed by the royalties attendant to massive new mines to extract the minerals necessary to build more resource intensive renewable energy technologies.

When pondering what could possibly motivate America’s globalist elites to push mass immigration, it is difficult to dismiss the possibility that it may stem from outright malevolence towards the legacy population descended from European settlers. After all, these new immigrants arrive almost exclusively from failed states, all too often bringing conflict and trauma with them. They receive what are by their standards exceedingly generous government support that burdens taxpayers and stretches public services. And they are constantly exposed to a narrative that blames colonialism for the problems in the nations they came from, and blames institutional racism for whatever challenges they may face here in America.

There is another reason, however, that also might explain the motivation for a policy of mass immigration. American birthrates are nowhere near sufficient to maintain a healthy balance between old retirees and young workers. While automation might solve the productivity challenge that comes with an aging population, automation cannot replace the dynamism that comes with a young population.

This argument – healthy nations need to have a young population and a growing population – has become a truism among neoliberal economists. And if the only place to find young people is in the few but still teeming pockets of fecundity left on earth – Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America – then that’s where they’ll be found. By the tens of millions. And since these new residents have linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and religious characteristics that diverge more profoundly from America’s legacy citizens than at any point during America’s prior waves of immigration, “equity” and multiculturalism must become the new establishment doctrine.

One still must ask, however, why assimilation can’t be tried with the same vigor with which it was successfully applied in previous centuries. And again, the answer is nuanced. Partly, again of course, because the leftist liberal mentality in America requires an excess of abashed regret and repentance on the part of all conscientious white people for their racist history.

But there may be more at work here. What better way for American globalists to extend American global hegemony than by making America a nation that overwhelms its own population by inviting in millions of migrants and catering to them in every possible way, economically and culturally? Do any of the impoverished multitudes eking out a life in Nigeria, or Honduras, dream of going to China? Russia? Or to they long to come to America, where they will have an apartment that is palatial by their standards, a car instead of a scooter, and free public education?

Perhaps, therefore, mass immigration and multiculturalism are part of the American globalist strategy to woo the world. Forget about Russia and China. They’re unwelcoming and racist, and we’re the good guys. Your future is with us.

The economics of America’s globalist strategy is deceptively effective. We may have trade deficits because we outsourced manufacturing, but there’s a sly but profound upside to these deficits. They help preserve the global appetite for dollars. We flood exporting nations with dollars when we buy their products. Then we balance our trade deficit by accepting foreign held dollars to purchase American assets, and as our swelling population creates demand driven price increases for everything from farmland to residential real estate, this domestic collateral for our otherwise fiat currency is worth more.

So it is as well with dollars we blithely print and ship overseas in the form of foreign aid, climate reparations, remittances sent by immigrants to their families overseas, Venezuelan oil, and ransoms to the Mullahs of Iran. With all these schemes, dollars pour into overseas accounts, our currency continues to circulate around the world, and so long as that’s true, we can print as many dollars as we want.

All of this, however, requires an expansionist, increasingly authoritarian government in America. Enforcing environmentalist restrictions – which also drive up prices for American assets as collateral for the dollar – diminishes America’s middle class. Hence the story must be tightly controlled. The climate catastrophe is happening now, and to cope we must accept that our middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. The foundation of American prosperity is racist exploitation and to atone requires reciprocal abuse and demographic replacement. White privilege and toxic masculinity are oppressive and must be broken.

You can’t sell this story to hard working families unless you censor news and social media and successfully divide the population by race instead of by class. And that is exactly what America’s institutions are trying to do.

On every level, geopolitical, demographic, cultural, corporate, and economic, a logic can be found in the American establishment’s choice of globalist policies. They may well succeed, erasing any possibility of an eventual multi-polar community of sovereign nations. But why? Why are they making these choices?

Why have American institutions promoted censorship to quash open debate over the policies they’ve chosen, policies destined to dramatically reduce America’s middle class and erase economic and political freedoms that have been taken for granted since the nation’s founding? Why have American institutions nurtured every cultural variant that might collapse birth rates; encouraging the sterilization of “trans” youth, encouraging homosexuality, stigmatizing women who prioritize motherhood over careers, and attacking traditional families as patriarchal anachronisms? Why have they chosen mass immigration as the demographic alternative to encouraging people to have more children? Or why not encourage immigration, but restrict it to applicants who speak English, have valuable skills, and a preexisting desire to assimilate? Why not allow everyone – including Americans – to develop natural gas and nuclear power, to lower the cost-of-living and more rapidly spread prosperity everywhere?

Are these choices merely the latest expression of the perennial human urge to build empires, the corruption of power? Or are they a product of genuine but misguided altruism, an elitist belief that only by wielding absolute power can they successfully cope with the climate crisis and the scourge of racism? Maybe all of this is merely a combination of megalomaniacal greed and megalomaniacal altruism. If so, there is still hope that an enlightened population can resist and overcome the incipient tyranny. But not so fast.

At this point the reader may howl with laughter, but what if the reasons for America’s current globalist strategy are not of this earth? In a recent X video, and with his usual lack of inhibition, Tucker Carlson raised the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors have negotiated agreements with the American deep state. That would explain a lot. Someone coming from another planet, visiting Earth and imbued with a dispassionate disregard for individual human life, might urge the global hegemon to cull the herd. It’s a nice planet you’ve got here, but there are too many of you. Clean it up, or we will.

That’s as good an explanation as any.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California’s 2023 Legislative War on Affordability and Democracy

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As we move into the final month of 2023, it is appropriate to review recent legislative actions that will have a significant impact on California’s ability to deliver abundant and affordable energy and water to its residents. 

There isn’t much good news. Almost without exception, the California Legislature is making energy and water scarce and expensive, the opposite of what ought to be an obligation of government policy. And to make it harder for voters to take matters into their own hands, our lawmakers have also targeted the initiative process. Here are some of the year’s biggest bloopers, courtesy of our green saviors in Sacramento. 

In April 2022 the California Natural Resources Agency issued a report titled “Pathways to 30×30 California. It provided a plan to “preserve” 30 percent of California’s land and 30 percent of California’s coastal waters by 2030. Following the recommendations made in this report, earlier this year Senate Bill 337 was signed into law. Because the state can’t afford to purchase so much land, through this law it empowers state agencies to enact what are in effect zoning restrictions and to support private investments in conservancies. 

But will turning 30 percent of all land and coastal waters in the state over to government bureaucrats and environmentalist nonprofits actually help nature? The most mismanaged land in California is our 20 million acres of National Forests, and the healthiest and most biodiverse forests are the roughly 4 million acres of industrially managed private timberlands. This land (and sea) grab by the government is no guarantee that biodiversity will be preserved, but it will take away the ability for people to live there or benefit from its resources.

In moves that ought to be viewed as anathema to the goals of wildlife and wilderness preservation, the Newsom administration, in coordination with the Biden administration, has declared a goal for California to install 25 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2045. Doing this would require a minimum of 2,500 wind turbines (10 megawatts each, which is probably bigger than they’ll end up using), each one over 1,000 feet in height and 20 miles offshore, each one dangling a high voltage power line and at least three tethering cables anchored to the sea floor 4,000 feet down. 

But never mind the details. The California Offshore Wind Energy & Jobs Act, signed by Governor Newsom last month, will require the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, to recommend a “seaport readiness strategy,” and “to conduct a study on the feasibility of achieving 50% and 65% in-state assembly and manufacturing of offshore wind energy projects.”

Offshore wind developments, at the gigawatt scale proposed, will be an environmental and financial catastrophe. There’s a reason developers have already pulled out of projects in the North Sea and off the East Coast of the U.S. But they’re confident California will hand over sufficient billions in subsidies to make it happen.

And then there’s the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, also signed last month by Governor Newsom. Any corporation with worldwide revenue in excess of $1 billion, from now on, will need to report their greenhouse gas emissions to the State Air Resources Board if they want to continue to do business in California. 

This legislation is a gift to the burgeoning carbon accounting industry. Imagine having to come up with a report, every year, on all this: “emissions activities that include, but are not limited to, company operations, supply chain activities, employee and consumer transportation, goods production and movement, construction, land use, and natural resource extraction.” Also in the bill, annual independent audits of these reports and emissions reduction plans. How many more businesses will leave the state rather than perform this costly, intrusive, and very subjective exercise? And how long before this law applies to smaller companies?

In another strike at “emissions,” and heedless of any reasonable cost/benefit analysis, last year California’s state legislature passed Senate Bill 1137, which would have taken effect in January 2023. It poses an existential threat to California’s oil and gas industry. It defines “health protection zones” as any area within 3,200 feet of an inhabited dwelling or business open to the public. It then prohibits new drilling for oil or gas in these designated areas, and imposes punitive regulations on any existing wells. 

Again, never mind the facts. Arriving on emissions spewing tankers from half a world away, California now imports 75 percent of its oil, and 90 percent of its natural gas. Rather than encourage clean drilling to set an example for other nations, SB 1137 is just the latest attempt by California’s state legislature to eliminate in-state production of oil and gas. The industry is fighting back, with a must-win referendum to repeal SB 1137 that they’ve qualified for the November 2024 ballot. And that, of course, cannot be tolerated.

To prepare for the day when a majority of Californians recognize that the state legislature has done everything in its power to make life unaffordable for hard working families, AB 421, which proponents call “Referendum Reform,” is now in force. 

The inspiration for AB 421 and the motivation for its passage is direct retaliation to the oil industry’s pending referendum, but its impact is much broader. It takes aim at a right enshrined in the California constitution, the ability to pass citizen initiated legislation. It will make it nearly impossible for anyone, including grassroots groups, to ever successfully qualify a referendum, or an initiative, ever again. 

Moreover, in a display of stunning hypocrisy, it waves its essentially prohibitive requirements if the “grassroots” group of volunteers gathering signatures happen to be members of a labor union. No bias there. No double standard. Right? The significance of AB 421, its naked, power grabbing betrayal of democratic principles, cannot be overstated.

Here are highlights of AB 421, the bill that killed direct democracy in California.

1 – Would reduce from 180 days to 90 days the time allowable to gather signatures on petitions if the initiative measure proposes to repeal or amend, either directly or indirectly, a statute or portion of a statute enacted by the state legislature within the last two years. This means that any initiative that the Attorney General deems to indirectly affect enforcement of existing legislation will be treated as a referendum, cutting in half the days allowable to gather signatures.

2 – Require paid signature gatherers to register with and receive training from the state. Inevitably, this will severely limit the number of available signature gatherers. For signatures to count, every signed petition must include the circulator’s unique registration number.

3 – Require 10 percent of signatures to be obtained by volunteers rather than paid signature gatherers, unless the circulators are members of a union.

4 – Petitions circulated by volunteers must have, in bold, printed notification that a volunteer is circulating the petition, whereas petitions circulated by a person who is getting paid require a different notice, disclosing that a paid circulator is working. This creates a need for proponents to print and distribute at least two versions of the petitions. This adds expense, creates almost unavoidable potential for inadvertent errors, and introduces ambiguity – what if the petition is included in a direct mail appeal?

5 – Every petition must have a unique number to “facilitate administrative efficiency.” The practical impact of this is to eliminate the threat of a campaign whereby voters could download and print initiative petitions, and force centralized printing and shipping of petitions.

6 – Requires an “official top funders” sheet to accompany petitions, requiring anyone signing a petition to fill out an acknowledgement that they have read the funding disclosure. This and the other requirements make it much more likely some technicality will be violated, invalidating a higher percentage of signed petitions.

California’s Democratic lawmakers, wielding their mega-majority in both houses of the state legislature, claim to care about the health of the environment and the welfare of working families. Judging from their actions, however, they don’t care about either. 

Some of their politically favored projects, in particular offshore wind and biofuel, are environmental catastrophes. The mere fact this is up for debate is a travesty. All renewable technologies, for that matter, are resource guzzling hogs that still have a long way to go before we can call them sustainable. 

But in obeisance to the special interests that collect billions in state subsidies to profit off these scams, California’s legislature has made the state unaffordable, and undermined one of its most cherished democratic institutions.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Reform Private Sector Unions

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Unlike public sector unions, which are inherently corrupt and need to be outlawed, private sector unions have a vital role to play in American society. But these unions have become coopted by the same special interests they were originally formed to oppose. The political agenda of America’s unions is almost exclusively leftist, and being part of America’s institutional “Left” is not what it used to be.

The biggest misconception in American politics today is that the political Left is fighting corporate power. Leftists may still attack corporate profits and demand corporations pay their “fair share,” but on every major issue affecting the economic freedom and prosperity of working families in America, these presumed antagonists are actually in perfect alignment.

Labor unions, originally formed to defend the interests of workers, are no exception. Their decades of de-facto support for unrestricted immigration is a prime example. From the SEIU, “Stay strong against Trump’s wall!,” from the AFL-CIO “oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.” Rather than protect the interests of American workers by controlling the borders, unions demand something that is impossible to achieve when borders are overrun with millions of immigrants, a “universal social insurance safety net and strong worker protections that bolster the health, welfare and economic security of all working families.”

America’s unions deny one of the most basic of economic truths, that increasing the supply of workers will result in lower wages.

There’s another basic economic truth that eludes America’s union leadership, which is that there are two ways to secure the “economic security of all working families.” The first is to collectively bargain and when necessary strike for higher wages and benefits. But the other, which truly will benefit all workers, is to support policies that lower the cost-of-living. Towards this second goal, unions have been actively hostile, because they have accepted the “climate crisis” narrative.

There is irony in the SEIU’s official position, which states that “climate change is real and poses significant threats to people’s health and livelihood, and disproportionately affects working people, the poor and people of color.” They’re sort of right. But it isn’t climate change, but the policies implemented to supposedly mitigate it, which disproportionately harm working people and the poor.

The position taken by the AFL-CIO on climate change exemplifies how opportunism has replaced a concern for the welfare of all workers. A June 2022 convention resolution states “In every forum, we will demand that clean energy technologies be mined, produced, constructed and operated under union contracts.” Just a month earlier, in May 2022, the AFL-CIO announced “We’re here for the signing of the Project Labor Agreement between NABTU and Ørsted—the culmination of years of hard work on a game-changing partnership that will change the trajectory of the entire offshore wind industry.”

The trajectory, overall, goes something like this: We will negotiate project labor agreements that guarantee our members well paying jobs working on projects that will greatly increase the cost of energy in America. In the case of offshore wind, that cost became prohibitive, when in November 2023, Orsted, the largest offshore wind farm company in the world, ditched its two planned offshore wind projects along the south coast of New Jersey.

Earlier this year, in August, another giant wind farm company, Equinor, pulled out of the Trollvind project in the North Sea because of unforeseen challenges including “technology availability, time constraints, and rising costs that made the project commercially unsustainable.” Also in August, Equinor sought “a 54 percent increase for the price of power produced at three planned U.S. wind farms” off the coast of New York. In the face of a likely denial, Equinor announced it could cancel U.S. offshore wind projects. In November 2021, Equinor abandoned a 1.4 GW floating wind farm off the shores of Ireland.

Wind farm developments, costing hundreds of billions to build at scale, only make financial sense to developers if they’re awarded massive government subsidies. But for big labor interests, fleecing taxpayers and punishing ratepayers so multinational corporations can make billions in profits on offshore wind is of secondary concern, as long as union jobs are created. Offshore wind projects typify the synergy between government subsidies, mega-corporations, and big labor that is the true motivating force behind climate crisis policies.

In California, a state that has completely succumbed to climate crisis panic, the High Speed Rail project fulfills all these criteria. The state is well on the way to spending over $130 billion on a system with ridership projections that aren’t more than a rounding error in total air and vehicle miles traveled each year by Californians, but it delivers thousands of high paying jobs to unions and lucrative contracts to the corporations they work for.

If unions don’t start fighting for practical infrastructure projects that lower the cost-of-living, expect more of these boondoggles. Another union supported project that will squander hundreds of billions in subsidies and raise prices to consumers is “carbon capture.” In a nation where production of natural gas and hydraulic fracking are under relentless assault, and nuclear waste is the boogeyman of the century, the consensus between government, corporations, and big labor is that we need to pump literally gigatons of CO2 exhaust into underground caverns every year. Go figure.

The only explanation for what is an otherwise inexplicable alliance between big labor and big corporations is a shared preference for economic centralization. Corporations in America stopped believing in competition a long time ago, if they ever did. But the innate corporate drive to expand and monopolize markets was challenged and limited by the power of the American Left. Today that balance has been lost. After the anti-globalization marches of 2000, and the Occupy Movement starting in 2011, corporations realized they could coopt the Left by assimilating their agenda on the broad issues of diversity and the climate crisis. And as they must have known, this has actually worked to their advantage.

In both cases, new barriers have been erected to exclude emerging smaller competitors. In every industry, the burden of hiring based on race and gender quotas instead of competence, and the expense of operating an expanded human resources department to enforce these quotas and fulfill the new reporting requirements, has given very large companies a decisive advantage. Unlike smaller companies, they can spread the expense over a much larger base of revenue.

This is equally true with environmental regulations, where the overhead and investment and additional operating costs necessary to comply will destroy the financial viability of smaller companies, at the same time as the big corporations easily have the resources not only to comply, but to buy up the smaller companies and further grow their market share. As for “renewables,” the more they cost and the more access to conventional energy is restricted, the more money pours into the industry from customers forced to pay the higher prices. The idea that major energy companies oppose renewables is ridiculous. It is in their economic interests to see the price of energy go as high as possible.

Unions support corporate consolidation and centralization of economic power because higher wages and benefits for their members become part of the overhead that drives smaller, non-union companies out of business. Big companies with captive markets are able to offer the highest compensation packages to union workers, because they have eliminated their competitors and can therefore pass the increased costs to their customers.

For unions in the United States to once again fight for the interests of all American workers, they will have to recognize hard economic realities. An unlimited supply of new residents in America will either drive down wages or overwhelm the welfare state; both of these outcomes are undesirable. Current environmentalist policies are too extreme, and while they benefit corporations, government, and labor unions representing workers in certain heavily subsidized industries, they are driving the cost-of-living out of reach for the vast majority of American workers.

Delivering an optimal standard of living to all Americans is only possible with controlled immigration, practical infrastructure investments, merit-based hiring, a regulatory environment that doesn’t wipe out competition between corporations, and policies with respect to energy and the environment that don’t inflict economic harm on working families. Unions might also recognize that most “renewables,” certainly including wind energy, biofuel, and battery manufacturing, are devastating to the environment.

These are facts that unions must face, and the agenda that unions should adopt. Such a reform is unlikely, but possible if they return to their founding principles. If unions were to adopt these principles, it would not only benefit all Americans. It would also restore America’s strength and enhance America’s standing as an example and an inspiration to the rest of the world, and offer again a model for other nations to follow.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Climate Discussion at Orange County Water Summit 2023

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AUDIO: The climate change panel at the Orange County Water Summit, October 13, 2023. My remarks begin at 14:20, 30:45, and 48:25. Main point? Senate Bill 1157, which will limit indoor water use to 42 gallons per person per day by 2030, will cost an estimated $7 billion (before overruns) and save an estimated 413,000 acre feet per year. This yields an extremely poor cost/benefit. That amount, 413,000 acre feet, is less than one-half of one percent of the water Californians withdraw, on average in dry years, to serve the needs of the state’s farms, cities, and to maintain ecosystems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_KVyruHqhs&t=748s