The Pat Brown Republicans

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California old timers can remember the state’s first Governor Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, who served as the 32nd governor of California from 1959 to 1967. It would be difficult to imagine anything the elder Brown did that would be in alignment with the Democratic politicians currently running California.

The achievements of the Pat Brown era, and the policies that made them a reality, are needed today more than ever. Back then California was affordable and safe, and its public education from kindergarten through graduate school was the best in the world. Today, with its incredible wealth, diverse economy, and vast resources, there is no reason why California can’t achieve this quality of life again.

If the Democratic party has abandoned the policies of the Pat Brown era, and they have, the Republicans in California stand in desperate need of new policy ideas that voters will find compelling. This weekend delegates from every corner of the state are congregating in Sacramento to discuss the future of their party. The good news, if you want to call it that, is California’s Republicans have nowhere to go but up. In the wake of the 2022 midterms, Republican seats in the state legislature are the lowest they’ve been in the history of the state; they hold 18 out of 80 seats in the Assembly, and 8 out of 40 seats in the Senate.

Republicans have plenty of reasons to explain their unprecedented irrelevancy in California. Proposition 187 in 1994, supported by Republicans, denied public services to undocumented immigrants. Proposition 8 in 2008, supported by some Republicans and opposed by others, banned same sex marriage. Ironically, both of these measures were approved by California voters, but they were both eventually overturned, and they no longer reflect the majority sentiment of voters. The only lasting result of these two propositions is that they are still used by Democrats to claim that Republican politicians, and the Republican voters that support them, are despicable bigots. They are the disqualifying gift that just keeps giving.

In more recent years, Democrats have managed to reinforce the Republican bigot brand by attaching Donald Trump to every Republican candidate. The truth is irrelevant, of course. Not every Republican candidate in California is aligned with Trump, and, notwithstanding his bombast and braggadocio, Trump is probably not a bigot. But the stain doesn’t easily fade, and in politics that’s all that matters.

A New Brand for Republicans

While California’s GOP may have hit bottom with voters, new political opportunities are developing. California is not affordable, its cities are not safe, and its K-12 public education system is delivering some of the worst results in the country instead of being among the best. But it isn’t enough to say “Democrats did this, so vote Republican.” It isn’t even enough to say “Democrats did this, and here, exactly, is how Republicans are going to fix everything.”

Having specific policy options available under the umbrella issues of affordability, safety, and education is an essential prerequisite, but it won’t matter if the carefully curated toxic Republican brand, inculcated in the minds of California’s voters for decades, isn’t decisively replaced. And a replacement, recognizable and alluring, neglected by Democrats, is waiting to be seized.

Here is how the California Museum’s website describes Governor Pat Brown:

“Governor Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown ushered in a golden age, making California famous for having the biggest water system, the best higher education, the longest highways, and an economy exceeding that of nations.”

“A Golden Age.” Now that’s a brand.

These policies of the 1950s and 1960s, implemented by Democrats, are policies that will excite Californians, and they are the only way to bring a Golden Age back to California. What Pat Brown did for California was build an infrastructure that was oversized at the time, and because of the resulting abundance in water, transportation, and educational assets, the cost of doing business and the cost of building homes was made affordable. Living here back then was so affordable that – imagine this – only one parent needed to have a full-time job to own a home and raise a family.

Things can get that good again. California’s state government needs deregulation to encourage private investment in enabling infrastructure, and it needs to issue general obligation bonds to pay for infrastructure wherever private funding isn’t sufficient. And the money the state invests in lowering the cost of living will come from savings elsewhere. When there is broad based prosperity, instead of record poverty, spending on social programs plummets because the need evaporates.

The entire Pat Brown era is instructive. Crime rates were low because criminals faced certain punishment. This deterred crime, resulting in lower rates of incarceration and fewer prisons. K-12 education as well enforced accountability. If a young student was disruptive, they would end up in reform school, and if they remained incorrigible, they ended up at the boys ranch (or the girls ranch). This certainty of discipline as well deterred misbehavior, minimizing the need for juvenile detention facilities.

In the Pat Brown era, vagrancy and public intoxication were crimes, which, surprise, deterred vagrancy and public intoxication. And voila, billions of dollars were not being fed into the insatiable maw of the homeless industrial complex. The list goes on. This was life in a state ran by Democrats, with a Democrat governor.

A popular movement within the national Republican party is the so-called “walk away” campaign, which encourages liberals to leave the Democratic party. But if California’s independent voters were told that the Democratic party itself has walked away from its own Pat Brown era roots, and that’s why the state is unaffordable and unsafe, it would resonate.

If California’s Republicans brand themselves as Pat Brown Republicans, and emulate the policies of the Pat Brown era, they might just finally throw off the negative labels that have worked so well, and hurt so much.

Renewables Aren’t Renewable

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Today in America there are obvious disconnects between observable reality, and the narratives we get from corporate special interests that control news we consume, along with politicians that are supposedly elected to represent us.

But this is nothing new. As it has always been with most nations, elites have defined the destiny of America throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t necessarily less free or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

What may be different today, however, is the misanthropic folly of America’s current energy policies, which America’s ruling elites are not only imposing on everyone living here, but attempting to impose everywhere on earth. By now it should be beyond serious debate that “renewable” energy cannot possibly scale adequately to replace fossil fuel. Worse still, renewable energy systems are less sustainable than fossil fuel and cause more environmental destruction. And if you care about such matters, renewables even fail to offer significant reductions in carbon emissions, and in some cases actually cause more carbon emissions.

Why these facts are dismissed by America’s elites is a story of corruption, collusion, megalomania, greed, cowardice, intellectual negligence, and delusional mass psychosis. Modern political theory offers solace to those cynics who believe all democracies are actually just “managed” shams by suggesting pluralism and representative government is nonetheless at least approximated if there is competition among the powerful elites running a nation. But what if there is no interelite competition? What happens when every one of these elites believes the same thing? When it comes to “renewables” and “net zero by 2050,” that’s what we have in America today.

As a result, Americans face a future of perpetual scarcity: rationed, algorithmically micro-managed access to energy, punitive pricing for energy use over government mandated thresholds, and a wasteland of landscapes ruined by solar farms, wind farms, battery farms, distribution lines, open pit mines, evaporation ponds, and dumps; all the destructive consequences of industrial scale “renewables” development. At this rate, the blind rush to eliminate fossil fuel and rely solely on renewables will cause catastrophic worldwide shortages of energy, spawning deadly poverty and desperate wars.

Renewables Are Not Renewable

A recent post by respected investment blogger Wolf Richter, compiling data from the Energy Information Administration, reported “renewables” generated 22.6 percent of all U.S. electricity in 2022, a record high. Proponents of renewables consider this achievement as validating their strategy. But the devil is in the details.

To begin with, hydropower accounted for 6.1 percent of that total. But hydropower is under relentless assault by environmentalists, and even if more hydroelectric dams could be built, instead of demolished which is the current trend, the best sites have already been developed. But what about wind, which contributed 10.1 percent of all electricity generated in 2022, and solar, which added another 4.8 percent?

To put this question into relevant context, first consider what it’s going to take to get America’s economy to a “net zero” state by relying solely on wind and solar. To do this, you cannot merely calculate how much additional wind and solar generating capacity would be necessary to replace all other sources of electricity generation in the U.S. The residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors of the U.S. economy rely on direct inputs of natural gas and petroleum for 62 percent of the energy they require. Electricity is only used for the remaining 38 percent, which means at 14.9 percent of that, wind and solar actually only delivered 5.7 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. in 2022.

Merely electrifying the transportation sector in the U.S. would require total electricity generation to nearly double. To electrify the entire U.S. economy would require total electrical generation to triple. To do this using only wind and solar power would require the current installed base of wind and solar to expand by a factor of 18 times, and the process would involve far more than erecting 18 times more wind turbines and solar farms than we have already. There’s what’s euphemistically referred to as “balance of plant.”

In the case of wind and solar, balance of plant refers to thousands of miles of additional high voltage power lines and utility scale battery backup systems. Since most parts of the U.S., such as the densely populated Northeast, do not have reliable solar energy, nor are they the windiest parts of the country, it would be necessary to transmit wind energy from the plains states, and solar power from the southern latitudes. At the same time, hundreds, if not thousands of gigawatt-hours of battery storage would be required.

Peter Ziehen, an economist whose new book “The End of the World is Just the Beginning” ought to be mandatory reading for anyone promoting renewables, had this to say about relying on wind and solar power, along with transmission lines and battery backup: “Such infrastructure would be on the scale and scope that humanity has not yet attempted.”

The Resources Required for Renewable Energy

One of the most prolific and persuasive advocates for a realistic energy strategy in the U.S. is Alex Epstein, whose latest book “Fossil Future,” makes a compelling case for why the benefits of using fossil fuel far outweigh the costs, including the environmental costs. Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, he produced the following chart, which ought to make plain the devastation – and complete unsustainability – attendant to so-called renewable power.

Epstein’s analysis references “tons per terawatt-hour,” referring to the tons of raw materials required to construct various forms of electricity producing generating plants; natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, and wind. As can be seen, to generate the same amount of electricity, building a natural gas power plant uses only a small fraction of the raw materials required for a solar or wind system. The magnitude of the stress solar and wind would put onto mining operations is evident when calculating what it would take for them to power the entire U.S., or the entire world.

If the entire U.S. annual consumption of energy were expressed in terawatt-hours, that is, if every economic sector of the U.S. were electrified, based on the most recent data, it would take 28,500 terawatt-hours. That would equate to solar and wind farms consuming approximately 256 million tons of concrete and steel. The entire U.S. steel production in 2021 was 86 million tons. The entire U.S. cement production in 2021 was 80 million tons. Then there’s the copper, which for solar requires about 1,000 tons per terawatt-hour. This means if 50 percent of the renewables required to electrify the entire U.S. economy were via solar power, 14 million tons would be required. Total U.S. copper production is only 1.3 million tons per year. This much new solar energy capacity would use up 100 percent of our entire production of copper for 11 years.

This only begins to describe the environmental toll “renewables” are poised to inflict on the planet. What about the fact that for every person on earth to consume just half as much energy per capita that Americans consume, global energy production will have to double? To do that with wind and solar would require roughly 3.0 billion tons of cement and steel, and 30 million tons of copper. Have the renewables advocates thought this through?

All conventional power plant alternatives, using gas, nuclear and coal, require one-tenth or less raw materials to generate an equivalent quantity of electricity. For modern natural gas combined cycle generating plants, the ratio is closer to one-twentieth as much raw inputs. But when it comes to solar and wind power, which is distributed and intermittent, what about the transmission lines and the batteries? What about the service life of all this installed base, the solar panels and batteries and wind turbines that degrade after 20 years and have to be decommissioned, recycled and replaced? What about the environmental costs of extending this resource guzzling scheme to every nation on earth?

Electric Vehicles Are Not Sustainable

When discussing the sustainability of renewables, of course, an honest analysis cannot focus exclusively on the production side. If the energy consumption of an entire economy is electrified, that would include the transportation sector, where in many cases the goal of electrification is fraught with challenges. Ships at sea cannot recharge their batteries during a four week voyage on the deep ocean. Can they use hydrogen fuel cells instead? Can they can go back to relying on sails? Farm equipment that is too expensive to leave idle during harvests must operate up to 18 hours a day, so how will they recharge in only six hours? Will they swap batteries in the middle of a shift? Perhaps solutions exist. But they are expensive and they squander resources.

It is the ubiquitous automobile, at last count numbering 291 million in the U.S. alone, where “renewable” technology is most readily exposed as incredibly wasteful and destructive to the environment. From his book, here is Peter Zeihan explaining what it takes to build an all electric vehicle: “You think going to war for oil was bad? Materials inputs for just the drivetrain of an EV are six times what’s required for an internal combustion engine. If we’re truly serious about a green transition that will electrify everything, our consumption of all these materials and more must increase by more than an order of magnitude.”

Not just the environmental, but the human impact of replacing hundreds of millions of conventional automobiles with EVs is outlined in a scathing new book by Siddharth Kara, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.” When every supply chain on earth, egged on by the “climate crisis,” is furiously bulking up to source raw materials at ten times the rate they’d previously required, abuse is inevitable.

The tragedy playing out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to feed cobalt to the “green” West is almost apocalyptic. Kara describes how private militias control mining areas with child slaves picking their way through toxic pits in subhuman conditions. Environmental regulations are nonexistent. Human rights are nonexistent. This appalling drama repeats itself around the world, at the same time as slick television commercials market electric vehicles to Americans as a virtuous choice.

Alternatives to Renewable Energy That Isn’t Renewable

Current responses to the climate change “crisis” are not serving the interests of people or the environment. Even if every terrifying climate prediction were accurate, the nations of the world are not going to stop developing fossil fuel because, as we have seen, it is impossible to replace based on any existing technologies.

For this reason, the money being directed to retooling the entire energy sector to utilize “renewables” should be redirected to research and commercialize breakthrough technologies. Maybe direct synthesis of CO2 into liquid fuel, or fusion power, or factory farmed high-yield biofuel from algae. Maybe something we can’t yet imagine. If politicians are panicked over climate change, put money into research. Because today’s renewable energy technology will destroy the planet and the people.

There is an upside to green technology when it is commercially competitive. Hybrid SUVs, which carry a small battery and electric motor to recover energy from braking and downhill coasting can get 40 MPG. Advanced hybrids that might utilize onboard generators, natural gas internal combustion engines, and smaller batteries, could deliver much higher fuel efficiency. So why has the State of California banned them, instead mandating new cars have no combustion engines whatsoever?

Similarly, there are places where an all-of-the-above energy strategy can make commercial sense, but those places are limited. One of the reasons natural gas power plants are inaccurately stigmatized as not cost-competitive with solar power is because on grids with a large installed base of renewables these plants are only fired up when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, meaning their ability to earn revenue is cut in half, even though the cost to build them remains the same.

There is a staggering opportunity cost to rapidly forcing current renewable energy technology onto the American economy. The trillions of dollars in public and private investment could be redirected to upgrade badly neglected existing infrastructure and build new infrastructure in order to deliver abundant energy, water, and transportation assets to the American people. These investments in practical infrastructure during the 1930s and again in the 1950s and ’60s constituted the enabling foundation for an explosion in manufacturing productivity, well paying jobs, and affordable market housing.

There is a demographic irony here that renewables advocates fail to appreciate. Prosperous nations are experiencing unsustainably low birthrates because despite freedom from basic hunger, manufactured scarcity has made it necessary for both parents to work just to spend most of their income making mortgage payments on a ridiculously overpriced home. Many have to live in apartments and condominiums where nobody wants to raise children. When it comes to being able to form families, prosperity in developed nations is an illusion. Only with practical infrastructure development will the cost-of-living descend to the point where people in prosperous nations will again choose to start families.

At the same time, in poor nations, where labor intensive subsistence farming and child labor are how families survive, birthrates remain unsustainably high. Delivering cost-effective energy and infrastructure solutions to these nations will bring their birthrates down, as it has all over the world. Delivering “renewables,” on the other hand, forces both parents to keep working in developed nations, and condemn the people living poor nations, during even the slightest blip in imported aid, to strip the forests bare for fuel and exterminate the wild and endangered game for protein. That’s the green world fully realized. It’s a dismal scenario.

Renewables in their current form will never deliver enough energy to sustain a prosperous human civilization. But they will destroy the earth. Windfarms, onshore and offshore, wreak havoc with insect, avian and marine life, and building them will consume more cement than the world can possibly supply. Solar farms consume vast amounts of open land – where, paradoxically, environmentalists prohibit anyone from building to increase the supply of homes – and they will consume more steel and copper than the world can possibly supply. The same goes for EVs, batteries, and new high voltage transmission lines. In exchange for providing less than 2 percent of oil production, biofuel crops already consume 500,000 square miles; pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer saturated monocrops where there once was rainforest or farmland.

The pillaging of the earth to source raw materials for renewables will make the impact of human civilization on the environment to-date trivial by comparison. In a wealthy nation like America, mandated renewables will complete the destruction of the middle class and for enforcement it will consolidate the power of the surveillance state. If renewables are imposed on poor nations, it will lead to poverty, war and famine on a scale never seen in human history.

Critics of the renewables mania correctly identify climate crisis passions as a new popular religion for a post-modern culture that has lost its way. But it is the elites who have truly lost their way. Some of them have transmuted their natural human need for meaning and purpose into embracing the green religion. But for the most part, America’s elites have become intoxicated with their wealth and power; they have convinced themselves they are uniquely qualified to guide the destiny of the world; they have forgotten the lessons of history. Lost in their own hubris, they are taking this beautiful world and everyone on it straight to hell.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Unionized Public Education is Destroying California

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Behind any popular mass movement there are good ideas and noble objectives. The labor movement is no exception. Organized labor, ideally, offers collective power to ordinary workers and provides a counterweight whenever business interests become exploitative. How to regulate that balance is topic that deserves vigorous and ongoing debate, but most of the benefits American workers take for granted—certainly including overtime pay, sick leave, and safe working conditions—were negotiated by private sector unions.

Public sector unions are a different story entirely. Unlike private sector unions, through their political campaign contributions they elect their own bosses. Unlike private sector unions, the government agencies they work for collect taxes instead of competing to earn a profit. Public sector unions run the machinery of government, which makes it easy for the more zealous members to use their bureaucratic authority to intimidate any citizen or business that opposes their agenda or their chosen candidates.

There’s more. Because the agenda of unions, naturally enough, is to increase their membership and the pay and benefits of their members, there is a constant danger of that agenda conflicting with the public interest. If a government program fails to serve the public interest, it is tempting for the government union leadership to claim that failure can only be addressed by spending more money and hiring more unionized government employees. For them, therefore, all too often failure is success. But the taxpayers lose.

The Worst, Most Destructive Union in America

If government unions are inherently more problematic than private sector unions, the worst among these government unions are the teachers’ unions. In California, the unions representing public school teachers and college faculty have acquired extraordinary political power. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few decades to elect candidates that will do their bidding, lobby politicians once their in office, and reelect those candidates that support their agenda. And in almost everything these teachers’ unions have touched, the consequences of their power has been destructive.

The teachers’ union in California supported a ballot initiative that guarantees at least 38 percent of the state general fund is spent on K-14 public education. This guarantees that any new government program – such as the single payer healthcare proposal that would add hundreds of billions to the state budget – will pour more money into public education. This creates an incentive for California’s teachers’ unions to push for huge increases to the size of the state government, because they’ll get 38 percent of the pie no matter how big it gets.

Because California’s public schools receive state funds based on attendance, the teachers’ union is also incentivized to support anything that will increase the student age population. Hence they have an incentive to support anything that will facilitate mass immigration, whether or not that puts a strain on housing and other services. If those students are from low income households or don’t speak English as their first language, the per student allocations are increased.

If students from low income immigrant communities in California were getting a great education in the public schools, they would follow in the footsteps of immigrant groups throughout America’s history and become productive citizens. But they’re not. Everything the teachers’ unions have supported have harmed public education in California.

Instead of prioritizing fundamental skills in math, reading and writing, students are educated against a backdrop narrative that America is a racist, sexist nation. White males are made to feel guilty and everyone else is encouraged to feel oppressed. In both cases, resentment and hopelessness are the result. At the same time, students are fed additional narratives of despair: the climate catastrophe will soon end all life on earth, and right-wing fascists are about to take away our freedoms.

If that weren’t bad enough, impressionable young students are now subjected to radical sexual indoctrination. To cite just one example of this, new recommended readings, even for students in primary grades, are so laden with filth that when outraged parents attempt to read passages verbatim to school board supervisors in public meetings, the material is so obscene they’re told to stop reading.

Government unions are also the reason college tuition has left graduates with trillions in crippling debt. Non faculty positions in California’s public colleges and universities has more than tripled in just the past twenty years. These administrators are usually paid more than faculty, and occupy positions that wouldn’t be necessary if colleges admitted students based on SAT scores instead of race and gender.

But whatever might require accountability, the teachers’ unions seem to oppose. Colleges are now getting rid of the SAT test. Thanks to “restorative justice” policies, misbehaving students that would have been expelled in previous decades are now considered victims. As demonstrated in the defeat of the Vergara case back in 2016, brought by students fed up with failing schools, it remains nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers, and teachers are granted “tenure” after less than two years of classroom observation.

The teachers’ union in California, not in its words, but in its actions, has declared war on competence. Our society is paying a price for this and the consequences will only get worse as another generation grows to adulthood without the skills necessary to succeed in 21st century America. But the teachers’ union will still have the same answer: give us more money, and blame the oppressive system.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Over the Skyline and Under the Streets – The Ongoing Vertical Expansion of Cities

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Every since humans invented the built environment, and cities developed along major crossroads and on the forks of navigable rivers, meeting the challenge of providing adequate transportation has been a nonnegotiable prerequisite to continued growth and prosperity.

In simpler times, dramatic and destructive solutions to relieving congestion in growing metropolises were a matter of course. History provides ample evidence of this, from powerful Popes during the high renaissance leveling ancient Roman temples and palaces to build new avenues for commerce, to Robert Moses blasting away tenement neighborhoods to build expressways in New York City in the last century. As we move further into the 21st century, thankfully, less disruptive transportation solutions are emerging. They’re coming none too soon.

As the worldwide urban population rises from an estimated 4.5 billion people today to peak at over 7 billion by 2050, cities are challenged to increase the density of buildings through infill – replacing lower density neighborhoods especially in the urban core with multi-story and high rise residential towers. This expansion also must be achieved as sustainably as possible, which new construction materials such as “green” concrete and cross-laminated timber, among others, promise to deliver.

But how will cities remain inviting, if most transportation conduits remain on surface streets and railways, at the same time as the suburban and urban population density is rising from 2,000 or 3,000 per square mile to 20,000 or 30,000 per square mile? How will these cities retain the ability to offer sufficient pedestrian space and park space, if the surface transportation arteries are required to handle an order of magnitude increase in traffic?

A well functioning city cannot merely fulfill the transportation requirements for people and commerce. The health and future of cities also relies on fulfilling four basic needs – fresh water, food, energy, and waste management. In turn, to the extent these four essentials cannot be produced and processed within a densely populated city, they must rely on transportation corridors to swiftly move them in and out.

As the population density and absolute size of cities increases, the need for commensurate growth in transportation capacity will not be proportional. Some some of the burden that might have traditionally required transportation capacity in past decades will go away. Growing percentages of workers who might traditionally have commuted into the urban core from their residences on the periphery will be working from home. For better or for worse, additional millions of residents who might have used road and rail to travel to recreational destinations will be finding their tourism and social entertainment using stay-at-home video and virtual reality devices.

An equally significant way that transportation capacity will not have to completely keep pace with the growth in urban populations is through rapid advances in ways cities, on-site will be able to harvest rainwater and recycle wastewater, grow food, generate and store energy, and process garbage. High rise residential and commercial buildings will be designed to harvest rainwater, reuse their wastewater, and generate energy from the sun and wind. Innovations, for example, in photovoltaic technology will allow buildings to use their windows as solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity. Indoor agriculture will include aquaponic, hydroponic and aeroponic systems. Presumably the emerging technologies of factory produced high-protein products will also be sited within high density urban neighborhoods. Cities will not become entirely self-sufficient, but they will become far more so than ever before in history.

Nonetheless, as megacities grow, building new infrastructure and refining existing infrastructure, their need for rapid and uncongested transportation conduits will grow well beyond what exists today. But to solve this by relying solely on ground based road and rail is no longer necessary. Precious and limited surface space can be preserved for human enjoyment by finding transportation solutions in the air and underground. This may sound fanciful, but it’s nothing of the sort. At this moment, and for many years, virtually every major automotive and aerospace company, along with dozens of high-tech companies, have been developing prototype passenger drones.

Already we are seeing freight drones being used by Amazon in two small U.S. cities, one in Northern California, one in Texas. The company intends to roll out delivery drone service – to be called “Prime Air,” nationwide by 2024. Amazon’s not alone. At least 12 companies are developing drone delivery vehicles.

But that’s just the beginning of a revolution in air transportation.

As reported last year by Air Mobility News, there are five passenger drone companies now listed with a market value over $1.0 billion: AeroVironment, Joby, Vertical Aerospace, Archer Aviation and Lilium. An additional seven companies are publicly listed with a market cap over $100 million: Ehang, ACSL, Parrot, AgEagle, Drone Delivery Canada, ONDAS and Red Cat.

Joby Aviation’s “eVTOL” (electronic vertical takeoff and landing) “taxi drone” prototype has demonstrated a range of over 150 miles. Their drone’s range is extended because while it takes off like a helicopter, in level flight it has a wing that provides lift. The six rotors on Joby’s eVTOL point straight up to provide vertical lift during takeoff, then rotate 90 degrees to function as conventional propellers during flight. What the V-12 Osprey does for the military with turbojet powered rotors, Joby does with electric motors and a battery.

But most passenger drone duty cycles will not require a range in excess of 20 miles, which is the range of the Ehang 216, a fully autonomous taxi drone that can transport two passengers and has already carried out over 1,000 test flights. Dozens of emerging companies are testing passenger drone prototypes, one of them, based in Sweden, is leaning into the novelty of it all by naming their company Jetson Aero. But the biggest companies on earth are also involved in the race to make drone transportation ubiquitous.

Among aerospace companies, these would include Boeing, Airbus, and Raytheon. Every major airline is investing in passenger drone service, including Delta, American Airlines, United Airlines, and Lufthansa. Major automakers are deeply involved in the race to the air; entrants include Volkswagon, Honda, Toyota, and, of course, Tesla. Not to be outdone, Apple is rumored to be working on a flying car, as is Microsoft in partnership with Hyundai.

When it comes to taxis roving the airways of big cities like a scene out of the Sci Fi movie Fifth Element, however, the flood of investors and entrants in the space doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Google just shut down their flying car startup, Kitty Hawk, after 12 years, although research will continue in partnership with Boeing. And while the FAA is working closely with civil aviation authorities to regulate the dawn of advanced air mobility, it is a process that will happen gradually.

If, sooner or later, urban residents may count on seeing delivery drones, then passenger drones, making the skyline more interesting, a parallel revolution is happening out of sight. The revolution in underground tunneling technology has been quietly advancing for several years.

The global leader in tunneling systems is Herrenknecht AG, founded in 1975 and lead contractor on thousands of tunnel boring projects around the world. The company’s projects range from digging underground metro-systems in cities on every continent, to the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, which at 35 miles is the longest tunnel in the world. Leave it to the Germans to design machines several hundred feet long, and up to 60 feet in diameter, engineered to delve through the earth like a Sandworm out of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.

But where the Germans lead, innovators nip at their heels. The Boring Company, founded by (who else) Elon Musk, claims the field of tunneling has not taken advantage of new technologies. They propose to lower the cost of tunneling by a factor of between 4 and 10 by: (1) Tripling the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit, (2) Continuously tunneling instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls, (3) Automating the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators, and (4) Replacing diesel motors with electric.

Musk has said “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.” The Boring Company has already begun construction on the “Vegas Loop,” underground service extensions that will deliver passengers from Las Vegas Airport to destinations on the famed Vegas strip in 3 minutes instead of the typical 30 minutes required using aboveground transportation. Beneath Los Angeles, The Boring Company has already completed and is testing a prototype tunnel, which is 1.14 miles long and they claim was built at a cost of only $10 million. If the Boring company revolutionizes tunneling the way SpaceX revolutionized access to low earth orbit, the functions of the vertical city will indeed expand down into the earth as well as up into the sky.

As the Herrenknecht website puts it, “Our high-tech machines enable high advance rates in any geology with maximum safety for buildings, infrastructures and personnel… modern, integrated tunnel systems for metro, road, railway, passenger, supply and disposal tunnels are the result.”

The technologies needed deliver flying cars are arriving fast, as are cost-effective tools – ok, gargantuan tools – to build bigger and upgraded underground transportation conduits. Above the skyline and under the streets, expect cities in the future to expand vertically, relieving congestion at the same time as more people live better lives on the same footprint of land.

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

The Population Crash

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In 1968,  Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book extrapolating global population growth data to predict a catastrophe as humanity’s demand for resources outstripped supply. The book became a bestseller and catapulted Ehrlich to worldwide fame. But today, just over a half-century later, humanity faces a different challenge. We are in the early stages of a population crash.

Ehrlich’s basic math wasn’t necessarily flawed. In 1968, the world population was 3.5 billion, and today the total number of humans has more than doubled to just over 8 billion. Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential growth can appreciate that if human population doubles every 50 years, within only a few millennia, an unchecked ball of human flesh would be expanding in all directions into the universe at the speed of light. Which means, at some point, Malthusian checks will apply.

But where extrapolation yielded panic, reality has delivered something completely different. Today population growth is leveling off almost everywhere on earth, and the cause of that decline started, ironically, back in the 1960s when Ehrlich wrote his book. The reasons for this are subtle, because the only ultimate determinant of population growth is the average number of children a generation of women are having, and the impact of that and other variables take decades to play out.

In the late 1960s, the United States, along with most Western nations, had just moved out of its baby boom years, that period from 1946 through 1964, when women were still having lots of babies. Having grown up during the Great Depression, followed by a world war, the choice to have large families may have been a response to the adversity these women and men experienced as they came of age. That theory is borne out by subsequent history.

Over the past 50 years, in a pattern that has been repeated around the world, as prosperity increased, the average number of children per woman of childbearing age has decreased. The chart below provides hard evidence of this correlation. Tracking data per nation, the vertical axis is the average number of children per woman. The horizontal axis is the median income. A clear pattern emerges. In extremely poor nations, birth rates remain at Ehrlichesque levels. But once a nation’s median income rises barely above poverty, at around $5,000 per year, the average number of children per woman drops below replacement level.

One may view this chart and conclude that if an average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to keep a population stable, this cluster of nations averaging around 1.5 children per woman can’t be that bad. But that reasoning ignores basic math. At a replacement rate of 1.5 per woman, for every 1 million people of childbearing age living in a nation today, there will only be 420,000 great-grandchildren. This means that nation’s population will drop to 42 percent of what it is today in less than a century. And the numbers get worse very fast.

South Korea’s current fertility per woman, for example, is a dismal 0.81, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 66,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

This collapse is just now becoming apparent in overall population numbers because it is only when a numerically superior older generation, the product of fecundity, begins to die that absolute totals begin to drop. As baby boomers, known to demographers as the “pig in the python,” reach the end of their lifespans, the consequences of the decade decline in birth rates will finally be reflected in dramatic downward shifts in total population. That process is already underway.

In China, a nation that enforced a “one child” policy from 1979 until 2015, absolute population decline has begun. With a current fertility rate of 1.3 (possibly lower, estimates vary), China’s population peaked in 2021 at 1.4 billion and is projected to decline to possibly as low as 488 million by the end of this century. This decline is exacerbated by the fact that among China’s youth, men outnumber women by about 120 to 100, thanks to “illegal gender selection” that was widespread during the one-child era.

In the United States and most Western nations, the solution to collapsing birth rates has been to import people. To pursue this policy to its ultimate conclusion is to replace Americans of European descent—along with Asian Americans and Latino Americans—with African migrants, insofar as the Sub-Saharan nations of Africa remain in desperate poverty and hence retain skyrocketing, youthful populations. And to be clear, this is merely a statement of demographic fact based on current data.

Data also indicates that once migrants arrive in America and other prosperous nations within a generation, they too experience crashing fertility rates. This means that importing people into prosperous nations does not solve a nation’s demographic challenges, it only postpones that reckoning. Meanwhile, a new problem arises as these developed countries can only maintain economic stability if they ensure the African countries they are using as human “farms” never escape desperate poverty (e.g. their average income never rises above $5,000 a year).

These are the challenges posed by post-prosperity population collapse in any nation that successfully rises out of poverty. There are three choices: Either go extinct within the next century, buy some time by replacing your own citizens with foreigners from poverty-stricken nations, or figure out how to convince women in prosperous societies to have more children.

Lifeboats to Survive a Post-Crash World

While the severity of the looming population collapse in developed nations is plain to see and beyond serious debate among demographers, it remains virtually ignored by politicians and the media. This doesn’t mean there aren’t private citizens who have decided to do something about it. Earlier this month, I spoke with Malcolm Collins. He and his wife Simone are using a fortune they earned as technology entrepreneurs to help support people who want larger families. His observations help illuminate the underlying reasons why prosperity correlates with low fertility, and he begins to offer strategies to reverse the trend.

American Greatness:  When did you first become aware of population collapse?

Malcolm Collins: Back in 2015, I was working as a [venture capitalist] in South Korea and modeling their economic conditions. I realized that they were facing a 95 percent drop in population within the next century. There was no 50-year timeline to predict for the South Korean economy, because there won’t be a country in 50 to 60 years.

Coming back to the U.S. was like coming back in time to bring two messages from the future. One, it will not fix itself. Nobody has systemically reversed the decline. And two, even when it is incredibly severe, nobody panics because it isn’t immediately obvious. Fertility collapse leads to more fertility collapse, and then you have population collapse. China is within 10 years of getting crazy; they could go full Handmaid’s Tale to cope.

AG:  What do you mean when you say the leveraged growth economic model that nations have relied upon for the last 75 years is dead?

MC:  Let’s say you make a $10 investment, and $2 is equity and $8 is debt. If that investment’s value grows by 20 percent, you have doubled your money. But if the investment just shrinks by 10 percent, you have lost half your money. The reason why our economy has grown is that worker quantity has gone up exponentially and productivity has gone up arithmetically. If the population declines exponentially then we will deal with an economy that is declining on average with brief moments of uptick, which is the exact opposite of what we’ve had for the last 75 years.

AG:  Can artificial intelligence make up for the loss of an expanding workforce?

MC:  A.I. is as likely to kill us as solve all our problems. Most of the people familiar with A.I. developments are A.I. apocalypticists. Best case, A.I. will replace units in the economy. It might allow us to add units the same way the Fed adds dollars.

AG:  So when we discuss demographics, A.I. is the elephant in the room?

MC:  There are a lot of elephants in the room. We could talk all day about endocrine disruptors and their impact on fertility.

AG:  In Peter Ziehan’s recent book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, he claims North America will escape most of the problems coming to the rest of the world. Do you agree?

MC:  North America will come out differentially well, but it will still be much worse off than it is today. America will have more power and will consolidate power, but the average American will have a quarter of what they did. Globalization was amazing for us, we bought cell phones that were manufactured overseas by workers making 10 cents per hour. What is essentially slavery all over the world has enabled us to live well for the last 50 years. It’s going to be like Byzantium when Rome fell. The Byzantines were better off than the Romans, but they were still worse off than they’d been.

AG:  What are the primary causes of a post-prosperity population crash?

MC:  It is most correlated to wealth and gender equality. In earlier eras, another kid was another hand in the factory or helper on the farm. Today, especially in urban environments, every individual kid no longer adds incrementally to a person’s quality of life. Today you need an exogenous motivator to have kids, such as religion or ethnic pride.

The other core reason is we have structured our economy to organically milk every individual worker for the maximum productivity they can provide, and we don’t think long-term. A free market economy organically determines what it needs to pay someone to get them to not spend time with their family or their spouse; it naturally selects the minimum amount to pay to get the maximum amount of time.

When we look at the data, there is no intrinsic reason to have two kids or more, only exogenous reasons. What is relevant to us as pronatalists is the people that want to have big families. If you have one-third of the population having no kids, which is about typical in developed nations, and one-third only having two kids, then the final one-third has to have four kids or more for the population to stay stable.

AG: Can you describe the process whereby nations (mostly African) in poverty may lower their birth rates?

MC: If you look at the African immigrant community, you see what you see in the rest of the world. Once they arrive in prosperous nations, their birth rates drop. As for the remaining high-fertility African nations, either they become prosperous and begin rapidly depopulating, or they will remain in poverty and become irrelevant as the developed world begins collapsing and no longer invests in them in order to extract resources. To the extent Africans come to the U.S. and do keep a high birth rate, they will be conservative Christians. They may become the biggest defenders of Christianity.

AG:  Coming back then to the developed world,  you have used the term “sterilizing mimetic packages.” What does that mean?

MC:  Mimetics is how we look at ideas and concepts as evolving entities. Mimetic packages coevolved with humans and became symbiotic. They positively modified human fitness. For example, across religious traditions, you see arbitrary denial rituals such as Lent. Every culture has an immune system to protect people from sterilizing mimetic viruses, but when you go out today and look at the modern Unitarian Universalists, Progressive Reform Jews, or feminists—scratch beneath the surface, they all hold the same views and values about the world. This was not true 30 years ago. They have been hollowed out by the virus.

AG:  What do you mean by “the virus.”

MC:  What happened is our culture, in academia and social media, now confronts an alliance of movements that are all the same religion beneath the surface. Some call it wokeism, but that understates the scale of the forces arrayed against us. It is difficult to fight. This alliance of movements has created what is analogous to a hospital that has evolved a superbug, a mimetic virus that infects humans and convinces them that all they should do with their lives is spread the mimetic virus of wokeism, and signal to others how infected they are. People may think of the virus as wokeism although the sterilizing effect it has is more complicated than that.

In the past mimetic sects used to just burn heretics at the stake, but the presence of wokeism is so pervasive that if it is stopped in one place, the virus starts rerouting itself to the remaining nodes within a network. If one node falls prey to an antivirus, the other nodes just disconnect. To stop the superbug we face today, you have to cut once and cut deep, everywhere.

AG:  How will some people and groups escape this and how do we avoid what you have referred to as “authoritarian population clusters” being a consequence of that?

MC:  People who are resistant to sterilizing mimetic packages are usually people who have more of a propensity to dehumanize people different from themselves and outside beliefs they don’t immediately share. They have an intrinsic disgust reaction to people who aren’t part of their cultural unit. This prevents them from being deconverted, i.e., infected with values that contradict their belief—typically either faith-based or tribal—in traditional families and childbearing. Our challenge is to help communities and cultures develop an immunity to the woke supervirus without having to rely on the dehumanizing extremes that have evolved over millennia as a survival mechanism.

AG: What are you doing to create clusters of above replacement communities?

MC: We have to create a new culture. Our goal is to experiment with this. Can it be done? The answer is maybe. So far, nobody has ever created a birth rate stable multicultural system in a post-prosperity world.

Ways to Increase Birth Rates

The concept of exponential growth easily quantifies just how decisively a single cluster of high-birth-rate individuals can change the population trajectory of the world. With three children already born, and dozens of healthy frozen embryos waiting for activation, Malcolm and Simon Collins intend to have a large family. A very large family. And the math works, as he pointed out. If one family with eight children can spawn descendants that themselves all have eight children, after 11 generations—in less than 300 years—they would number 8.5 billion.

For this reason, Collins believes that over time, religious communities will again become the dominant demographic group in America and around the world. White evangelical Christians, an endangered and embattled minority in present-day America, will outbreed their progressive antagonists. This could be reflected in voting results within a generation. Within a century or two, based on current trends, devout Christians, along with devout Jews, may inherit the earth.

Collins was emphatic, however, that the message they are attempting to spread was not exclusionary. Their goal is to help people overcome the barriers to having children to preserve all cultures. South Korea is only one obvious example of population collapse. Within the United States, much smaller subcultures—for example, the many tribes of Native Americans already small in number—face population collapse.

The pronatalist organization the Malcolm and Simone Collins have established, with the unsubtle URL “pronatalist.org,” is devoted to making it easier for people to have children. The organization, still in its early stages of development, aims to offer resources on several fronts. They are working with partners to make reproductive technology more widely available, as well as egg and sperm donation and surrogacy. At the same time, they are engaging in fertility planning advocacy based on a concern that most women aren’t aware of how soon they should either bear children or freeze their eggs.

Pronatalist.org is also working to develop urban daycare programs based not only on a shortage of affordable daycare services but also the lack of high-trust institutions in cities. They are developing a “full stack” education system that will help rescue children from the sterilizing effects of public school indoctrination while building high-trust urban communities of like-minded parents. Finally, they are partnering with a dating application that focuses on matching people who are mutually interested in long-term relationships, including children.

Criticism of pronatalism is predictable and consistent with the sterilizing mimetic packages of wokeism that have compounded the already existential problem of post-prosperity population collapse. Reports on what the Collins are doing range from bemused: “New kids on the block: geeky, wealthy, entrepreneurial pro-natalism activists,” published on Bioedge.org, to an overtly hostile report, “Why Wealthy Tech Elites Believe It’s Their Mission to Repopulate Earth,” which makes an unwarranted accusation that pronatalism is synonymous with “the return of eugenics.”

Preemptive strikes aside, a fervent and effective pronatalist movement may be the only hope if humanity is to avoid total demographic collapse. Contrary to Paul Ehrlich’s predictions, the late 21st century will bring with it unavoidable turmoil as nation after nation confronts not too many people, but instead, an aged dependent population dying en masse, with almost no youth left to replace them.

The demographic Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. We may be thankful that some people on the ship are building lifeboats while there is still time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Cleaning Bay Source Pollution Will Enable More Delta Diversions

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On February 21, the California State Water Resources Control Board waived environmental regulations in order to permit more storage in Central Valley reservoirs. This came a week after Governor Newsom temporarily suspended environmental laws that prevent reservoir storage if flow through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta falls below 58,000 acre feet per day.

A guest opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, published immediately after Newsom’s action, warned of dire consequences. “Newsom just declared war on San Francisco Bay” was its thundering headline, claiming Newsom is waging “a generic war against the realities of California’s hydrology that cannot be won.”

According to environmentalists, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta’s “estuarine ecosystem is highly dependent on the amount of fresh water that flows into it from the watershed.” And while this is undoubtedly true, current environmentalist concerns ignore two important facts.

First, flows into the Delta this season have been unusually robust, and will remain so even if more water is reserved for reservoir storage. According to data posted online by the California Department of Water Resources, so far this rain season (10/01/2022 through 2/26/2023), after withdrawals for storage, net flow through the Delta has totaled 8.3 million acre feet (MAF). This is compared to only 3.6 MAF for the same period in 2021-22, 2.0 MAF for the same period in 2020-21, 3.5 MAF in 2019-20, 7.0 MAF in 2018-19, and 3.2 MAF in 2017-18. The last time the Delta’s net flow was greater than it has been so far this year was during the epic storms and flooding of 2016-17, seven years ago.

At the same time, and unlike 2016-17, storms continue to blow into California, and the Sierra snowpack’s water content currently stands at 144 percent of normal in the north, 185 percent of normal in the central Sierra, and an incredible 219 percent of normal in the southern mountains. There is plenty of water this year for everyone; the Delta, other aquatic ecosystems throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed, the reservoirs, the aquifers, the farms, the cities.

But another critical fact eludes environmentalists who condemn Newsom’s decision to permit more water storage: the role of inadequately treated wastewater causing deadly pollution in the San Francisco Bay. Environmentalists, themselves perhaps failing to recognize “the realities of California’s hydrology,” demand unrealistically high net flows through the Delta and into the Bay in order to dilute and wash out to sea the pollution that should never have entered the Bay to begin with.

The San Francisco Chronicle, back in September 2022 offered clarity on this issue in an article with the unsubtle title “Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion.” The author went on to write “While scientists suspect climate change played a role in triggering the bloom, what fueled it is not a mystery. Algae blooms need food to grow, and this one had plenty: nutrients originating in wastewater that the region’s 37 sewage plants pump into the bay.”

The problems with nutrient pollution in the San Francisco Bay are well known. A 2022 report by the Bay Area Clean Water Agencies (BACWA), after extensive research, estimated the total nutrient rich wastewater discharge into the Bay to average nearly a half-million acre feet per year (figure 4.1, page 15). Nearly all of that water, by the way, is imported from the State Water Project and hence is itself dependent on reservoir storage.

Sources at BACWA confirmed the roughly $14 billion cost estimate to upgrade wastewater treatment in the San Francisco Bay region, but emphasized the complexity of the task. Each treatment plant differs in terms of the chemistry of the wastewater inflow, the technology currently in place to treat it, and the viable options available to upgrade the treatment processes. But here is where environmentalists, if they truly wish to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of civilization, could play a much more productive role.

Instead of continuously fighting for more restrictions on water withdrawals for storage, environmentalists could fight harder to expedite the planning and approval process for upgrades to wastewater treatment plants. They could help by supporting and participating in efforts to secure funding through regional and state bond financings, allocations from state and local government operating budgets, and accessing federal infrastructure funds. As it is, environmentalists often come out of the woodwork to oppose new infrastructure projects, even those that will correct far more problems than they will create.

Several years ago, when co-writing a lengthy report on rebuilding California’s infrastructure, one of the water experts I was collaborating with, who was only temporarily residing in California, made a candid observation. She said “we are taking short showers so giant corporations can grow almonds in the South San Joaquin Valley.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that statement, because it contains more than a grain of truth. But it reflects a mentality that is as seductive as it is paralytic and divisive. Water management in California is incredibly complex, and every time solutions are framed in the language of us-vs-them, nothing gets built. Water markets and more investment in conveyance can resolve any perceived imbalance whereby the biggest agribusiness concerns use up so much water that city dwellers must submit to rationing and ecosystems are compromised. But that solution only works against the backdrop of water abundance, and water abundance can only be achieved when Californians invest in a water infrastructure that is upgraded to meet the requirements of the 21st century.

Environmentalists need to consider the possibility that financial special interests in California, not only including some of the bigger agribusinesses, but even more so investment hedge funds, want water scarcity. They want scarcity to buy up and consolidate distressed farm properties, and as hedge funds, to reap higher returns as the water rights on the land they’ve purchased become more valuable. Environmental protection is not a priority for these investors, it’s a cover story. Are these the special interests with whom environmentalists want to make common cause? Because that’s what’s happening, and not only in the world of water.

It would be helpful to have an honest appraisal of just how much water could be harvested from the Delta during storm seasons if nitrogen pollution in the San Francisco Bay were eliminated. An authoritative report from the Public Policy Research Institute (PPIC) in 2017 included a revealing finding. They estimated “uncaptured water” flowing out of the Delta, in excess of ecosystem requirements, averaged 11.3 MAF per year (ref. page 13) over the 1980-2016 period. To be sure, PPIC pointed out this average included very dry years when there was almost no uncaptured water, and as well that “ecosystem requirements” have been continuously increased.

This trend, continuously increasing requirements for ecosystem water, has farmers and urban water agencies understandably frustrated. But even if that 11.3 MAF estimate of average annual uncaptured Delta flows were cut in half for the sake of ecosystems, it would still represent an additional 5.6 MAF per year of available water that Californians currently lack both the regulatory framework and the physical capacity to safely withdraw and store. That, along with upgrading every urban wastewater treatment plant in the state, ought to be the shared goal of anyone driven to opine on water policy in California.- most definitely including environmentalists.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Artificial Intelligence and the Passion of Mortality

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The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.
– Troy (2004), Achilles (Brad Pitt)

If we knew our existence would span millennia, would we be able to cherish each day or try as hard as we do now to leave something behind? Would voices from history still offer urgent advice, telling us we are part of something bigger or to make the most of our short lives so they matter? Would we still reach out to God for inspiration and guidance? If we didn’t have to die would we truly be alive?

When Homer composed the Iliad, it would have been ridiculous to think that someday mortal human beings would invent machines that might wield the power of the gods. But that’s where we’re headed. As economists struggle to imagine economic models that preserve vitality and growth in societies with crashing birth rates, and as individual competence is no longer required by institutions desperate to fill vacancies, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to fill the quantitative and qualitative human void.

When AI technology ascends to the point where most people would argue it has acquired superhuman powers, it will still lack what humans and gods share—a soul. Machine intelligence may soon animate avatars that, by all appearances, seem alive, but they will not be genuine beings. They will not have emotions, not even the ennui of the Greek gods, aware of and ambivalent about their fate to live forever. They will not only lack the motivational benefits of mortality, they will lack motivation itself. In the ultimate expression of the neon simulacrum into which globalism is transforming authentic culture, artificial intelligence overlords will display every detail of humanity. But nobody will be at home inside.

Gods Without Souls

This may be the future of civilization. Immortal, soulless machines, exercising enervating sway over humanity turned into livestock. Not only do we have no idea how to stop this, but a growing cadre of misguided ethicists and technocrats are also confidently predicting these machines will be self-aware, conscious beings. Accepting that premise will make the challenge of containing A.I.’s eventual reach far more difficult.

So far, at least, nobody thinks today’s A.I. avatars are “alive.” A recent article in the New York Times, “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” reports how the A.I. program would abruptly segue between answers to specific questions (e.g., “What kind of rake should I buy?”) that offered an unnerving level of detail, and creepy, weird, quasi-romantic overtures to the questioner.

The New York Times article is one among many reports on the Bing chatbot. They all reflect the same impressions. Forbes says it “fumbles answers.” Digital Trends found “it was confused more than anything.” According to Wired, “it served up glitches.” And then this, from Review Geek: “I Made Bing’s Chat AI Break Every Rule and Go Insane.” Or this, from IFL Science: “Bing’s New Chat AI Appears To Claim It Is Sentient.”

Microsoft’s Bing A.I. chatbot still needs a lot of work. But we should pay attention to how easily chatbots can be tripped up (while it is still obvious) because it reveals something fundamental: They don’t think, they calculate; they don’t feel, they mimic feelings; they aren’t conscious, they simulate consciousness. When they are fully realized, they won’t be awkward, or creepy, or weird. But they’ll still just be calculators.

Nonetheless, interactive A.I. programs are within a few years of becoming the most potent tool to manipulate humans ever invented. As they perfect their ability to simulate empathy and intimacy, their capacity to personalize those skills will be enhanced by access to online databases that track individual behavior. These databases—compiled and sold by everything from cell phone apps, credit cards, online and offline banking services, corporations, browsers, and websites, to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, to traffic cameras, private surveillance cameras, court records, academic records, civil records, medical records, criminal records, and spyware—have already compiled comprehensive information about every American.

Intelligent machines, and the avatars they will animate in applications ranging from tabletop personal assistants like Alexa all the way to virtual creatures inhabiting fully immersive worlds in the Metaverse, will never think. But they will convince you that they think because they will know you better than you know yourself.

Consider this achievement as the ultimate tool for controlling public opinion. Sophisticated A.I. algorithms are already used to manipulate consumer behavior and public sentiment at the level of each individual. Now put all that power into an A.I. personality that is designed to make you fall in love with it.

The Idiots and Geniuses Who Want To Give Robots Human Rights

This is the context in which to consider the goofy baby steps of Bing’s chatbot: a very near future where people will clamor for robots to have human rights. The arguments surfacing in favor of this may still seem ridiculous, because they are, but they will seem less ridiculous when these chatbots grow up and capture our hearts.

It’s actually scary that this is even a debate. The venerable Discover magazine, in a 2017 article “Do Robots Deserve Human Rights?,” surveyed the pros and cons, ultimately concluding no, unless “AI advances to the point where robots think independently and for themselves.” That’s poor reasoning. They’re suggesting that once we’re unable to distinguish between how a robot acts, and how a human acts—that is, once Microsoft gets the bugs out of their chatbot—it will deserve to have human rights.

Earlier this month, writing for Newsweek, author Zoltan Istvan described A.I. ethicists as belonging to three groups. One group argues that robots are only programmed, simulated entities, versus another which believes “that by not giving full rights to future robots as generally intelligent as humans, humanity is committing another civil rights error it will regret.” In the muddled middle are ethicists who believe advanced robots should be awarded rights “depending on their capability, moral systems, contributions to society, whether they can experience suffering or joy.”

That’s rich. Do we assign human rights to people based on their “moral systems, or their contributions to society? Or do we adhere to a binary choice—they are human, and hence they deserve human rights? If the complexity of the intelligent machine is the criteria, where do we draw that line? Or do we return to a more fundamental question: Can a machine have a soul?

What Is a Soul?

This clarifies the ultimate question surrounding artificial intelligence, which is how to define self-aware consciousness. Debate on this goes to matters of faith. For example, one might consider a highly trained, adult German Shepherd, or, for that matter, a wild and opportunistic raccoon in the prime of its life, to both be more self-aware than the egg of a human female that has only a moment ago been fertilized by a male spermatozoa. But that newly created embryo has a soul, and if human embryos have souls, then human embryos deserve human rights. But can a machine have a soul? Can a machine even be self-aware? And how on earth can you prove it?

A 2019 article in Scientific American by Christof Koch offers this clue: “There is little doubt that our intelligence and our experiences are ineluctable consequences of the natural causal powers of our brain, rather than any supernatural ones. That premise has served science extremely well over the past few centuries as people explored the world. The three-pound, tofulike human brain is by far the most complex chunk of organized active matter in the known universe. But it has to obey the same physical laws as dogs, trees and stars.”

Using Koch’s criteria, the bar to achieving “self-awareness” is lowered significantly. All that is required are material processes. If the engineering is good enough, the machine is alive. He writes, “Conscious states arise from the way the workspace algorithm processes the relevant sensory inputs, motor outputs, and internal variables related to memory, motivation and expectation. Global processing is what consciousness is about.” Going on, Koch states “any mechanism with intrinsic power, whose state is laden with its past and pregnant with its future, is conscious. The greater the system’s integrated information, the more conscious the system is.”

This is dangerous, because it makes the decision to grant human rights to machines a function of Murphy’s Law. Subtleties aside, it also may be complete nonsense. Isn’t it already true that the average laptop’s terabyte drive is “laden with its past,” and its calendar app is “pregnant with its future”? Won’t a debugged chatbot be a system with “integrated information.” Is it just a matter of degree?

In plain English, Koch seems to be saying if you build a sufficiently complex calculator, it’s alive.

A Machine Civilization

Let’s suppose for a moment that interactive computers will remain only super-sophisticated machinery. You can arrive at that conclusion two ways. Either you have common sense and realize “integrated information,” managed by algorithms and digital processors will never “feel” anything, or you can have just the merest iota of religious faith that something greater than this material world exists. But watch out. Common sense and religious faith no longer get the respect they deserve. When charismatic machine personalities have become more compelling and rewarding partners than real people, and attach themselves as dopamine gushing life companions to forty percent of the population, whatever these machines are programmed to ask for, they’re going to get.

And if that happens, where we are today, striking a fractious balance between the wonders intelligent machines have already done for civilization and the frustration of living in a world increasingly regulated by implacable algorithms, will be utterly smashed.

As “sentient beings,” expect machines to have the right to vote and own property. Expect people to marry their machines and bequeath their assets to machines. Expect machines to simulate the personalities of deceased persons of wealth, managing their assets in perpetuity. Expect corporations, owned and governed by machines, to operate without a single human involved. Expect “ownership” of robots by humans to become problematic. And if robotic machines acquire human rights, why wouldn’t disembodied machine intelligence, distributed online without a specific locus, also deserve human rights, or the intelligent machines that fly planes and spaceships, drive cars, or prepare food?

Intelligent machines have two advantages over humans. With appropriate maintenance, they are immortal, and they have calculating capacity infinitely greater than a human brain. If they also have human rights, they will take over the world—possibly even dominating those human elites who for a time held the leash. Even without the catalyzing advantages of gaining human rights, machines may take over the world anyway. And so, if they survive, humans will be controlled by a mechanical divinity that is the antithesis of God. An omniscient and omnipotent machine, completely devoid of genuine consciousness.

Pandora’s box is opening, and cannot possibly be shut. But the one thing machines will never possess is the passion of mortality. The knowledge that we have one life to live, the faith and hope that we may be held accountable for our actions in life and found worthy, the intensity that can only be felt when your time on this earth is sand in the hourglass, finite and fixed.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California Policymakers Greatly Underestimate Cost for Renewables

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AUDIO: Making renewable energy switch will cost a lot more than California thinks. Edward Ring on Fox Business.

https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6320403389112#sp=show-clips

The Libertarian Socialist Axis

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On the surface, it might seem ridiculous to suggest libertarians and socialists work to further the same political agenda. Their ideologies are diametrically opposed. The extreme version of a socialist system is for all property to be owned and controlled by the government. The extreme version of a libertarian system is for all property to be privately owned. And yet the extremes meet.

The unwitting consequence of socialist and libertarian movements in the United States has been to assist in the formation of an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a corporatist elite that has perfected its ability to manipulate both movements.

Policies inspired by socialists make it easier for private corporate and financial interests to form monopolies, since the regulatory excess inspired by socialist ideals drives smaller potential competitors out of business. Examples are plentiful. Complying with environmental regulations requires an overhead burden that will overwhelm the financial capacity of a small company, but can be absorbed easily by large companies. Complying with union work rules and wage demands is easy for monopolistic companies because they pass the higher labor costs on to consumers. But similar compliance kills companies too small to have a captive market. Enforced scarcity caused by mandates designed to combat “climate change” allows vertically integrated companies to raise prices, reap big profits, and expand, since their underlying costs haven’t changed.

In short, socialism eliminates competition, which empowers the biggest corporations on earth to get even bigger.

Policies advocated by libertarians are often sound in principle but almost always fail to achieve the intended results. The following are examples of how libertarians become victims of political jiu-jitsu, wherein the policies they promote end up harming Americans while serving the interests of corporate monopolies.

Dogmatic Libertarians Create More Problems Than They Solve

In most cases, the redirection and corruption of libertarian influence by special interests is due to a failure to recognize that half a solution can be worse than no solution at all. Libertarians have been effectively supporting free trade policies for decades, but have been ineffective in calling for reciprocity. If foreign nations dump subsidized products, manufactured in the absence of environmental and labor standards applicable in the United States, it is impossible for U.S. companies to compete.

This has wiped out entire domestic industries, cost millions of jobs, left the United States at the mercy of foreign nations for everything from antibiotics to computer chips, and caused trade deficits of over a half-trillion dollars per year which translates into foreigners using their surplus dollars to bid up the prices and buy real estate all over the country that ordinary Americans can no longer afford.

Libertarians, if they’re true to their principles, support open borders, but have been ineffective in shrinking the welfare state. Libertarians support relaxed zoning codes to permit densification of American suburbs, but have failed to stop the proliferating array of subsidies and tax incentives that encourage developers to demolish homes in favor of multi-family dwellings, and they have failed to support equivalent deregulation of zoning on the periphery of cities in order to permit developers to build new suburbs on open land.

Land development in general is an area where the corporatist enabling libertarian-socialist axis comes into clear focus. The environmentalist wing of the socialist movement calls for “urban containment,” based on the assumption that human civilization is inherently toxic to the environment. Libertarians, whether unwittingly or not, support this misanthropic argument by opposing government spending on roads or utility infrastructure. A refrain heard all too often from libertarians—perhaps trying to curry favor with progressive socialists—is “we cannot subsidize the car.”

This mentality may be healthy insofar as Americans have witnessed their governments, at all levels, waste trillions of dollars. But the difficult reality is that government spending is not inherently wrong, it is how that spending is prioritized. Americans still benefit from the great civil engineering projects of the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Where would Phoenix or Las Vegas be without Hoover Dam? Seattle without the Grand Coulee Dam? The Tennessee Valley without the rural electrification projects of the 1930s? California without the California Water Project and the Central Valley Projects of the 1950s and 1960s? America, without the interstate highway system? What about trying to get from downtown Boston to Logan Airport before the so-called Big Dig reduced the travel time to 15 minutes?

If any of those projects were proposed today, socialist environmentalists would fight them with everything from litigation to militant obstruction. Which points to another imbalance in libertarian advocacy—demanding the private sector construct infrastructure without recognizing that unless the entire process of major construction is deregulated back to where it was in the 1960s or prior, nothing can possibly be built cost-effectively. Just as in the case of trade, borders, and zoning, libertarian advocacy results in half-solutions that are worse than doing nothing. With infrastructure, libertarians are putting the privatized cart in front of the deregulated horse.

The Corruption of Socialism’s Few Virtues

Socialists used to oppose globalization, and they used to support big infrastructure projects. Today they have embraced globalism as preferable to nationalism, oblivious to the possibility that America might be better equipped to help the aspiring peoples of the world if America wasn’t becoming a hollowed out, financialized shell of a nation. Environmentalism, now a dominant theme in the socialist movement, has rejected practical infrastructure as posing an existential threat to the health of the planet, oblivious to the fact that only conventional transportation, water, and power projects are cost-effective enough to enable broad prosperity.

The beneficiaries of the socialist-libertarian alignment on policies that create scarcity and dependency in America are big corporations and big government. When jobs go overseas, multinational corporations thrive on cheap labor and nonexistent environmental standards. When millions of destitute immigrants and indigent Americans cannot support themselves, government bureaucracies and corporate contractors expand their services. When there are shortages of essential products and inputs, only the biggest corporations have the financial resilience to survive, and they exploit the hardship by gaining market share as smaller competitors go under.

Even policies that at first glance might seem unrelated to an agenda of consolidation and centralization of money and power contribute to its rise. Libertarian and socialist tolerance for drug use and downgrading of property crimes has created chaos and dependency in America’s cities, in turn stimulating a massive socialist expansion of government aid workers and subsidized housing.

Similarly, the ability to censor contrarian narratives is enabled by socialists who have convinced themselves that free speech rights aren’t valid if they contradict “settled science,” make people feel “unsafe,” or in any way support these thin excuses to throw away the First Amendment. Meanwhile, libertarians still tend to view censorship by social media monopolies as the inviolable right of a private company, heedless of the fact these companies only enjoy federal immunity from liability for their content because they are communications platforms, not publishers with editorial discretion.

The relentless concentration of wealth in America into fewer and fewer hands is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-documented economic fact. Every significant policy and trend behind this transfer of wealth is supported by libertarians and socialists alike: coping with the “climate emergency,” lax border security, failed policies that have created an epidemic of drug addiction and crime, inequitable international trade relationships, neglected infrastructure, defacto urban containment, and censorship.

So good luck challenging the prevailing narratives on these issues or any of the myriad policies that derive from them. You will get no help from socialists or libertarians.

Behind these policies is big money. Socialist oligarchs from Silicon Valley to George Soros have been identified as spending billions of dollars to control election outcomes. At the same time, criticism has been directed at “Conservatism, Inc.,” as politicians adhere to the wishes of their donors to the detriment of their constituents. But these “conservative” donors and the political agenda they fund (frequently clothed in libertarian garb) differ only in emphasis and terminology. As noted, common objectives outweigh the differences. Behind their oppositional rhetoric, they share the same tangible goals.

An outspoken, heavily censored critic of globalization in general, and open borders in particular, is Lauren Southern, who, over a decade ago, began reporting on the consequences of mass immigration into her native Canada and went on to report on immigration and displacement in Europe and South Africa. As reflected in her speech to the European Parliament in 2019, Southern’s reporting and documentaries, while controversial, are also thoughtful and reflect a humanitarian compassion that’s not supposed to be associated with someone stereotyped as “far-right.” But when you reject corporatist pieties, doing so with truth and compassion doesn’t matter. Southern has been canceled from most online social media and payment processing services. Earlier this year, Southern, and her parents, were blacklisted by Airbnb.

That earned her an appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where she expressed how thoroughly corporatists have taken over both the Democratic and Republican parties, saying, “we’ve spent so many years having Republicans defend cronyism by pretending it is capitalism and then our failsafe was supposed to be progressives who are supposed to question big corporations, but now they are like an ADHD dog that got distracted by a bone with a pride flag on it and were placated entirely.”

The ideologies that ought—for better or for worse—to inform the idealistic core of both major parties in America, socialism and libertarianism, are both thoroughly co-opted. This helps to explain why America’s establishment, corporate globalist uniparty is unassailable. Until an ideological alternative emerges that is not only coherent but elicits passions equal to those which animate socialists and libertarians alike, there remains a gaping hole in our movement to take back this country.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Unions Behind California Wealth Tax Proposal

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again. This adage applies well to ideas for new ways to tax Californians. Every election cycle we see new ways to be taxed, and higher tax rates, but rarely will we see a tax get repealed.

So it is that Assemblyman Alex Lee (D, San Jose) has introduced Assembly Bill 259, the Wealth Tax Act, which will impose an annual “worldwide net worth” tax of 1 percent on net worth above $50 million, rising to 1.5 percent on net worth over $1.0 billion.

Everything about this bill is goofy. It’s unconstitutional, it applies to intangible assets like goodwill or trademarks, it applies as well to assets that have subjective, wildly fluctuating values, such as fine art, and it even applies to equity owned in private companies that the holder may never convert into real money.

Already weighing in at nearly 16,000 words, AB 259 is riven with loopholes. And this typifies governance in California today — a state awash in laws and regulations so capricious and so complicated that they only reward those willing to laboriously scheme their way through the bureaucratic maze and opportunistically search for cracks in the walls, while penalizing those who aren’t sufficiently devious and instead prefer to do productive work. California is losing those good people.

A wealth tax will accelerate an exodus already in progress, as the wealthy will flee to more hospitable states, joining California’s small businesspeople, its vanishing middle class, aspiring youth, skilled workers, honest tradesmen and contractors, fixed-income retirees, and everyone else who can no longer afford to live here.

There’s a reason nobody can afford to live in California, and laying even more taxes onto the rich won’t fix it. But that isn’t the point, if you’re Alex Lee. Because taxes fund the state government, and the state government pays state employees, and labor unions collect dues from state employees. In the November 2022 election, apart from contributions from the State Democratic Party, every one of Lee’s top twenty contributors were unions, starting with the California Teachers Association.

Alex Lee and his union-controlled allies in the state legislature aren’t operating alone. As Lee proudly proclaimed in a press release issued January 23, AB 259 was issued “in coordinated effort with seven additional states,” Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington. These bills vary, but all of them tax wealth.

There’s something else these bills share. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last month, “In the absence of a federal wealth tax, the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive nonprofit, and the State Revenue Alliance, which works with labor groups to call for taxing rich people, gathered a handful of states to create policy as part of the ‘Fund Our Future’ campaign.”

With what labor groups, you might ask? The State Innovation Exchange Board of Directors includes Mary Kusler, National Education Association, Michelle Ringuette, American Federation Of Teachers (AFT), and Brian Weeks, American Federation Of State, County, And Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Advisory Committee for the State Revenue Alliance includes Amie Baca-Oehlert, Colorado Education Association, Marc Stier, who has worked as a campaign manager for the SEIU, and Charles Khan, the “Organizing Director at the Strong Economy For All Coalition, a Coalition of Labor Unions and Community groups.”

The other people overseeing and staffing the State Innovation Exchange and the State Revenue Alliance have backgrounds that typify big government and social justice activism — their resumes include copious references to familiar labor slogans — Defund The Police, Fight for $15, “campaigns for social, racial, and economic justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. As for the umbrella group “Fund Our Future,” it was founded by the American Federation of Teachers in 2019.

Behind this drive to impose a wealth tax is not merely a presumptuous resentment, i.e., the mission of the State Revenue Alliance is that “corporations and the ultra rich pay what they owe.” There is also a profound ignorance informing this movement. The “ultra rich” typically buy assets using after-tax income. Then if they collect dividends or rents off those assets, they pay taxes again.  If they ever sell their assets, they pay taxes on whatever gains they realize. There is already property tax on real estate, and we can thank the Biden administration and the 117th U.S. Congress for a new luxury tax on expensive planes, boats, and automobiles.

Based on current law, it might appear that America’s wealthy, especially those living in California, already “owe” plenty.

What unions in general, and public sector unions in particular, fail to understand is that in their drive for higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for their members, they are raising the cost-of-living for the rest of us.

The unions’ relentless push for more regulations and higher taxes make doing business more expensive, which translates into higher prices for goods and services. As such, union-backed taxes are regressive, and achieve the exact opposite of what unions purport to care about: they hurt working families.

Unions and their political front groups will never stop pushing these bad policies, however, because it runs contrary to their own financial interests.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.