California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit

/by

I was a dam builder
Across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
– The Highwayman, lyrics by Jimmy Webb

When the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935 it was the largest dam in the world, creating what was to become the largest reservoir in the world, Lake Mead. It took six years to fill, but at capacity Lake Mead held 28 million acre-feet (MAF) of water. Mead’s upstream counterpart, Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam and completed in 1963, delivered an additional 25 MAF of storage capacity.

These massive dams bottled up some of the last downstream extremities of the Colorado River watershed, where mountainous topography permits large reservoirs. The Colorado River, 1,400 miles in length, drains a whopping 250,000 miles of watershed. Its tributaries extend eastward through Arizona and New Mexico into headwaters in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, and north through Utah and Colorado up to headwaters in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. Access to the water stored in these giant reservoirs made possible the growth of cities and agriculture from the California coast all the way to Tucson in southeast Arizona. Las Vegas and Phoenix would not exist if it weren’t for these dams, nor would nearly 500,000 acres of rich irrigated farmland in California’s Imperial Valley along the border with Mexico.

Today the benefits of Lake Mead and Lake Powell are imperiled. For the first time since these reservoirs were built nearly a century ago, the relentlessly escalating quantity of water demanded by the cities and farms of the Southwest, combined with years of drought, have brought the levels of remaining water to dangerous and unprecedented lows. As of mid January 2023, only 7.4 MAF remains in Lake Mead, and only 5.6 MAF remains in Lake Powell. These trends are alarming.

For the last several years, far more water has been withdrawn from these reservoirs than was recharged by river flow. Measuring the flow of river water reaching the lower Colorado each year offers clarity on just how much has changed on the supply side. When these dams were built, and well into the 1980s, the average annual flow of the lower Colorado was over 20 MAF per year. An authoritative study conducted by the Department of the Interior in 2012 calculated that the average annual flow had dipped below 15 MAF per year around 2000, dropping as low as 12 MAF in 2008. A more recent analysis published by the Water Education Foundation in December 2022 reports “the river’s average flow since 2000 has been 12.3 million acre-feet.” In 2021, gripped by an ongoing drought, Colorado Basin natural flow plummeted to 6.7 MAF, only recovering to 9.9 MAF in 2022.

Average water use when Lake Mead was full back in the early 1940s was 7 MAF per year, rising to 12 MAF per year when Lake Powell was completed in the 1960s. For the last 20 years, average annual water use has plateaued at around 15 MAF per year.

It doesn’t take a hydrologist to take these numbers and project a dire scenario. With annual demand currently at 15 MAF, and annual supply dwindling to 12 MAF, and less than that in the last few years, even big reservoirs such as these are going to lose big gulps of water every year and eventually go dry. That is exactly what’s happening. Both lakes are now approaching the so-called “minimum power pool,” where the water level is too low to flow through hydroelectric turbines, or even “dead pool,” where the level has fallen so far that there are no large conduits placed low enough on the dams to allow a useful volume of water to be released.

This is the brink on which we stand today. Notwithstanding the complex balancing act whereby Lake Powell upstream can release water, so long as it has enough, to keep levels in Lake Mead from dropping to critical levels, for the last several years neither lake has been getting enough new water from natural flows. After years of supply deficits of around 3 MAF per year, any further drop in the water levels in either lake will take away their capacity to release any water beyond whatever natural flows enter the reservoirs from upstream.

Conservation Alone Is Not a Permanent Solution

To manage water scarcity, according to the prevailing wisdom among water bureaucrats and environmentalist activists, water must be used more efficiently. But for the most part this has already been done. For example, at the same time that annual water use from the lower Colorado has been relatively stable at 15 MAF per year, the population of Las Vegas has grown from 1.3 million to 2.9 million. The population of Phoenix has grown from 2.9 million to 4.7 million, and the population of Tucson has grown from 723,000 to just over 1 million. During this same period, from 2000 to 2020, irrigated farm acreage in Arizona has remained stable at just under 1 million acres, as has agricultural water use at just over 4 MAF per year. Through increased efficiency, Arizona’s farmers have achieved this while significantly increasing yields of some of their primary crops. Average alfalfa yields, for example, now accounting for over 300,000 acres of irrigated farmland in Arizona, have risen in the last 20 years from 7 tons per acre to 9 tons per acre.

As the supply of water from the Colorado River dwindles, farm acreage will inevitably shrink. But simply accepting a drastic and permanent cutback in farm acreage in places such as Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley ignores many negative consequences. Growing food in an arid environment may seem wasteful, but this ignores the quantity of still intact wildland and rainforest around the world that will give way to the plow to replace the food that will be lost if that land is taken out of production. If water can be found to keep Arizona and Southern California farmers feeding the world, how much land will be saved somewhere else? As it is, farmers in the American Southwest have become expert at surface drip, subsurface drip, micro-sprinklers, and trickle irrigation. Center-pivot sprinkler irrigation systems are timed to operate when evaporative losses are minimized. Traditional gravity-based flood irrigation is already largely reserved for acreage where the water will reduce salinity and recharge ground aquifers.

Because so many water-efficiency practices are already established, new restrictions on urban water use and major reductions in farm acreage might eliminate the supply deficit but would require punitive levels of rationing on urban residents and create undesirable ripple effects on the national and global farm economy. Even as water planners cope with the immediate crisis, a new sense of urgency should be directed toward building new water-supply infrastructure. Of all the states that could solve this regional problem, California is best positioned to make a difference.

How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit

California imports up to 5 million acre-feet per year from the Colorado River via the Colorado Aqueduct, constructed in 1933. In a crisis, even with senior water rights, California could lose some of that allocation. And California faces a similar crisis with its groundwater, heavily relied on by farmers and heavily overdrafted (for years, more water has been withdrawn than replaced), as well as with its reservoirs, depleted after years of drought. But California has options.

As we have just seen this winter, as well as in the late fall of 2021, even during multi-year droughts, tens of millions of acre-feet rain down onto California via “atmospheric rivers,” but most of the water immediately drains into the ocean. California also has an 840-mile border (not including bays or inlets) with the vast Pacific Ocean, where a limitless supply of ocean water could be desalinated to serve its coastal cities.

Despite all this potential, investments to increase California’s water supply have been incremental at best. But this can change, and if it did, not only Californians but the entire Southwest would benefit. Imagine how much easier it would be to balance the Colorado River supply deficit if Californians were no longer transporting 5 MAF per year out of the lower basin to serve Imperial Valley agriculture and Southern California cities.

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

Desalination is another option, but it is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about 1 million acre-feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other options are there?

In an era that may involve warmer and drier winters, with less rain and less snowpack, it is necessary to more efficiently harvest runoff from the storms that do hit the state. The traditional way to do this is via reservoir storage, but in-stream reservoirs — those behind a high dam directly blocking a river — cannot be allowed to fill from early storm runoff, because that would render them unable to prevent flooding if there are late spring storms. Then if late spring storms don’t materialize, there’s inadequate reservoir storage and another water shortage.

Off-stream reservoirs, by contrast, don’t block the flow of a natural river. They are typically constructed in arid valleys, and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. Using California’s proposed Sites Reservoir as an example ($4 billion for an annual yield of 500,000 acre-feet per year), off-stream reservoirs could capture and release 1 MAF per year for a construction cost of $8 billion. But absent the capacity to capture large volumes of storm runoff and move it into these reservoirs, where will the water come from?

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

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

This idea has extraordinary potential. Its preliminary construction cost estimate of $1.5 billion to harvest and recover 2 MAF per year of delta runoff is a rough order of magnitude lower than any other possible solution.

Moreover, it may well be feasible to safely harvest more than 2 MAF from the delta every year. An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called uncaptured water, which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. According to the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (emphasis added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

For this to come from some of the most respected water experts in California is very encouraging: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 MAF per year.

An environmentally friendly delta diversion project has several appealing aspects. Unlike the delta pumps, these extraction channels would not harm fish, nor would their operation alter the current of the delta, which brings the risk of saltwater intrusion. Their high capacity may make building the controversial Delta Tunnel unnecessary. Storing high volumes of water in San Joaquin Valley aquifers with a known capacity in excess of that of Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined would eliminate the need for more reservoirs while also making possible almost a limitless capacity to store water from wet years to use in dry years.

The Upside of Massive Investment in Water Infrastructure

The reason the government subsidized water projects during the great waves of dam and aqueduct construction in the 1930s and again in the 1950s and ’60s is because affordable and abundant water lowers the overall cost of living and doing business. It lowers the cost of food. It lowers the cost of housing. It lowers utility bills. This is an economic ripple effect that has no rival. Affordable and abundant water is a core enabler of economic prosperity.

Conservatives ought to appreciate the case for public investment in water infrastructure: Without spending on the front end on huge capital projects that smash the price equilibrium for water and make it affordable, there will be a greater need for government spending on the back end. Billions will instead have to be spent on an enforcement bureaucracy to ration scarce water, along with the enforcement hardware — such as dual residential meters to monitor indoor vs. outdoor use — and additional billions will have to be perpetually spent to subsidize low-income families that cannot afford their water bills, food, and housing.

Investing in abundance at the level of basic economic essentials — water, energy, and transportation infrastructure — is a traditional role of government. The problem with rejecting on principle the use of government funds to subsidize infrastructure is that it implies a preference for spending government funds instead on perpetual funding for the new bureaucracies that will enforce rationing and the permanent burden of subsidies for low-income families.

Equally, opposing government participation in funding water projects is to legitimize the inevitability of high prices and scarcity. Denying funding to create water abundance is to accept the premise that a middle-class lifestyle is unsustainable.

However heretical it may sound to conservative and libertarian ears, there is a case to be made that the WPA projects that gave America Lake Mead, the Colorado Aqueduct, and a host of other assets, long since paid for and which yield dividends to this day, were worthwhile investments. Perhaps if there were sufficient regulatory reforms, private investment could pay for enough new water-supply infrastructure to create affordable abundance. Don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, start moving earth. Start pouring concrete. The water is there. Let’s go get it.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

Somalia’s Problem Isn’t Climate Change, it’s the Climate Agenda

/by

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently appeared on NPR’s “News Hour” to discuss the looming catastrophe in Somalia and call for more aid to the troubled east African nation. In her interview, she repeatedly cited climate change as the reason for Somalia’s current predicament.

Framing problems, whether they occur in Syria, Somalia, or California, as primarily the result of “climate change” is inaccurate and unhelpful. The drought in the Horn of Africa is indeed severe, so bad, in fact, that NPR reports it as “the worst drought in 40 years.”

So what about 40 years ago? If the multiyear drought gripping the Horn of Africa in the 1980s was worse than the one we’re seeing today, what changed? It wasn’t the climate.

What’s really happened in Somalia over the past 40 years is, in almost every imaginable aspect, evidence of how the international community’s foreign aid agenda has failed. Food insecurity in Somalia and elsewhere is exacerbated by aid policies that ignore the root causes and propose unsustainable solutions. Today, the trajectory of policies proposed by globalists in the name of combating “climate change” are going to make the problems facing nations like Somalia much worse.

To begin with, the primary cause of Somalia’s current difficulties is a population that has grown beyond the capacity of a primitive agricultural economy to sustain. In 1950, Somalia’s population was only 2.2 million. By 1983, 40 years ago, it had nearly tripled to 6.1 million. Without investment in infrastructure and adoption of modern agriculture, Somalia was already overpopulated. The nation already lacked the ability to withstand a drought. But the drought and famine in the early 1980s was just the beginning of Somalia’s imbalance between its internal capacity and demand for food.

Today Somalia has a population of 18.1 million, triple the number of people living there in 1983. There is no end in sight. In 1983, the total births per woman in Somalia was 7.3, unchanged from 1960. By 2020 that rate had only dropped slightly. Women of child-bearing age in Somalia on average are still having 6.4 children. Their population is increasing at a rate of more than 3 percent per year. This means their population will double to 36 million people by 2045, just 22 years from now.

If Somalia were possessed of a vibrant and growing economy, modern infrastructure, and a robust agricultural sector, one might applaud their fecundity. After all, prosperity, as we have seen throughout the world, tends to correlate almost perfectly with population decline. But nothing of the sort has happened in Somalia. It is a failed state, utterly dependent on foreign aid.

Ever since African nations gained independence in the 1960s, the policies of mostly Western nations have centered around shoveling billions of dollars in food aid and medical aid, with the utterly unsustainable result being exploding populations in societies that don’t evolve and advance internally because they don’t have to.

To put this failure into stark economic terms, Somalia’s GDP in 2020 was $6.9 billion. On that base, their exports totaled a paltry $276 million, while they imported $4.2 billion. Somalia’s trade deficit is nearly 60 percent of their GDP. They are a welfare nation, living on a welfare continent.

When Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield elaborated on the crisis in Somalia, one of her first observations was how the war in Ukraine, a world breadbasket, was reducing the flow of food aid. But while welfare in the form of food aid may be necessary and justified in the present crisis to avert mass starvation, in the long run it is the addiction that kills the patient.

Even now, Somalia could produce all the food it needs internally and withstand droughts. The nation has two rivers running out of the highlands of Ethiopia that could irrigate vast areas of fertile land in Somalia’s southwest. The Juba River, at its point of entry into Somalia, has an average annual flow of 4.5 million acre-feet per year while the Shabelle River averages another 1.9 million acre-feet per year. According to the World Bank, Somalia has an estimated 3.5 million acres of arable land. To feed 18 million people, this is plenty of water and plenty of land.

An expert on the potential of Somali agriculture is Dr. Hussein Haji, founder of the Somali Agricultural Technical Group (SATG). In a lecture posted on the SATG website, Haji identifies Somalia’s perennial water sources for irrigation, its ample farmable land, and its year-round growing season. Haji also points out that crop yields per unit of area in Somalia are one-tenth that of modern farms. Haji goes on to note the potential of Somalia’s coastal fisheries and abundant grazing land.

Solving Somalia’s Challenges Requires Rejecting Climate Change Ideology

Bringing Somalia, and the rest of Africa, into the 21st century is complicated. But what is not complicated is the fact that nothing on offer from the globalist climate change agenda is going to help. Somalia needs hydroelectric power and reservoirs to guarantee a drought-proof water supply. That will require dams, or at least off-stream reservoirs if the topography permits it.

But dams and hydroelectric power are environmentally incorrect. Hence Somalis are denied water and food security.

Somalia also has abundant oil and gas reserves. They could drill and refine oil and gas to fuel their  growing industrial and transportation sector, generate electricity, produce fertilizer, and have plenty left over to export.

Successfully transitioning Somalia into a nation that is food independent even in drought years requires a combination of conventional infrastructure investment paired with evolved thinking on sustainable agriculture. Innovative grazing techniques could help restore arid landscapes in Somalia and elsewhere in Africa. Purchasing high-yield, but open-pollinated seeds, could ensure Somalia’s farmers can improve their productivity without becoming hooked on expensive so-called terminator seeds, which cannot be saved and used for next year’s crop.

A common thread that can inform what might otherwise seem an inconsistent approach is to recognize that behind strategies to supposedly combat the “climate crisis” is a cabal of Western corporate and financial elites who want to control the world. To do this, it is necessary to leave nations dependent on foreign aid and unable to survive without incurring huge trade deficits. This is the hidden agenda behind the supposed necessity to halt all investment in practical infrastructure and conventional energy in developing nations.

If you want to control a people—whether it’s an emerging nation overseas or an aspiring inner-city community in America—control the food and control the money. In the bargain, your bureaucracies and your corporate allies will be the conduits through which power and profits will be harvested.

Americans and citizens of other Western nations are also victims of the globalist climate agenda. One must differentiate between the misanthropic actions of the plutocracy that has currently hijacked American politics, and the innate, magnanimous character of the American people: traditional values, know-how, optimism and bold dreams.

If a political balance were restored between genuine environmentalist values and the need for practical infrastructure, Americans could preserve upward mobility and the middle class in their own nation at the same time as they made investments in nations like Somalia to enable them to achieve prosperity. Moreover, if American companies went to Somalia to build dams, aqueducts, power plants, an electricity grid, and drill for gas and oil, they could do it with the utmost possible respect for the environment.

If Somalia were to become a truly independent and prosperous nation, its population would stabilize, as has happened without exception throughout the developed world. This is perhaps the finest irony and most sinister consequence of the climate change agenda. If Africa’s population stays on course, and doubles to over 2 billion people by 2050, every time there is a drought or a disruption in food aid, hundreds of millions of Africans will strip the forests bare for fuel and slaughter the wild game for protein. They will live in societies so destabilized by poverty that the very last thing on their minds will be breathing clean air, drinking clean water, or protecting wilderness and wildlife.

Environmentalism, in trying to solve the alleged climate crisis, is destroying the environment.

At its cynical roots, globalist diktats to combat the “climate crisis” are schemes to create dependency and debt in order to control the Global South. This is the real reason why Somalis are starving today. This is why, along with all their counterparts throughout Africa, they are migrating by the millions to prosperous Western nations. Western elites call them “climate refugees.” The precise opposite is true. They are refugees from nations held down and impoverished by the globalist climate agenda.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Underreported Reason for the Decline of Salmon

/by

As Californians dig out from several major storms just since December, major reservoirs in the state are already filled to within 86 and 104 percent of their historical average for this date, and the Sierra snowpack sits at 205 percent of normal. With additional precipitation likely before the end of California’s attenuated rainy season, and massive projected snowmelt poised to cascade downstream later this spring, water managers are already deciding what to do with the all this water.

To the uninitiated, such a policy decision might seem obvious: Once summer is imminent, and no more storms ought to threaten to overwhelm the spillways and cause flooding down in the valley, let the reservoirs fill to capacity. Save another five million acre feet behind the dams. But when it comes to water policy in California, complexities are layered atop complexities, and nothing is obvious.

Water management in California revolves around several distinct priorities that are often in conflict. Reservoirs provide flood control and store water for delivery via aqueducts to farms and cities, but they also have disrupted the natural flow of the rivers they span. As a result of in-stream dams, the aquatic environment is irrevocably altered. California’s water managers now have to balance the water requirements for food and people against the need to preserve a viable habitat for aquatic species.

For years, controversy has flared over just how much water should be released to preserve endangered species of fish, and how much should be reserved for farm irrigation and urban water agencies. One of the most critically endangered species of fish are the native salmon. This anadromous species of fish was once so abundant that hundreds of millions would hatch from eggs in the headwaters of California’s rivers and fight their way to the ocean, then after a few years return as adults by the millions to fight their way back to those spawning grounds.

Today, many of those spawning beds in California’s upper watersheds are blocked by dams. While some streams remain unobstructed and fish hatcheries raise millions of fingerlings for release downstream each year, California’s salmon population is a fraction of what it was. There is concern the fish could disappear altogether from California’s rivers.

Maintaining a hospitable environment for salmon doesn’t merely require adequate flow in the river during the spawning run upstream, or the subsequent migration of fingerlings downstream to the ocean. The temperature of the water in the river is also a factor. Salmon don’t tolerate water hotter than around 68 degrees, which in shallow waters during a hot summer can be easily exceeded. To cope with this, more water has to be released, preferably from deep reservoirs like the massive Lake Shasta, from which the water initially entering the river is much colder.

If you care about salmon, these gyrations make sense, but during drought years they come at a cost that many of California’s farmers would consider existential. Over the past few decades, and especially over the past few years, as withdrawals from rivers for irrigation were increasingly limited for environmental reasons, farmers were forced to pump groundwater. The resultant overdraft was compounded by the fact that using river water for flood irrigation in many cases was used to replenish those same aquifers.

What frustrates many of California’s farmers is the wisdom they have acquired over generations seems to be dismissed as folklore by the experts, hired by environmentalist activists, that inform legislators and regulators. But farmers in California never wasted water. They know when the ground is thirsty and able to percolate flood irrigation to recharge aquifers. Orchardists understand the water saving benefit of drip irrigation but also understand that each year, in most cases, there is a moment when a half-foot of flood irrigation will percolate to aquifers, flush away accumulated salts, eliminate gophers, and saturate the earth for a winter cover crop.

California’s family farmers, who have watched the rivers naturally rise and fall for countless seasons, also know that in dry years the salmon don’t run. The salmon instinctively sense if the rivers and streams are running dry, they stay in the ocean, and they wait for a wet enough year to make the final journey back to their spawning headwaters.

The Underreported Variable – Bass Eat Salmon

An almond farmer in the San Joaquin Valley who once worked as a fisheries biologist is Christine Gemperle. She shared a revealing story about salmon in California’s rivers, and what may constitute a greater threat to their survival than reservoirs and warmer waters could ever be. Gemperle participated in radiotracking studies back in 2000, where they were tagging salmon smolts (youthful salmon that have migrated from their spawning grounds into estuarine waters en-route to the ocean). As they monitored the smolts, they noticed significant numbers of their trackers moving upstream. This would be completely contrary to the natural path of smolts, since their goal is to make it to the Pacific Ocean.

As it turned out, the trackers, along with whatever remained of the smolts, were in the stomachs of striped bass.

This evidence, that striped bass eat salmon, has probably been known by anglers ever since striped bass were introduced to California’s rivers over a century ago. But marine biologists have had evidence of this for over 20 years.

A recent article written explicitly on this topic, from an expert source, provides an example of current thinking on the issue of striped bass and salmon in California’s rivers. Titled “The Delta Divide: Bass Trends In Salmon Migration Corridors,” the article opens by clearly stating the problem:

“Recent research has established that very few juvenile Chinook salmon survive the migration from their birthplace in California’s Central Valley tributaries, through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and out to the Pacific Ocean. Records from rotary screw traps on the Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers show that most young salmon do not even make it as far as the San Joaquin River, still hundreds of miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge. Numerous elements contribute to the low survival of juvenile salmonids, including habitat alteration, pesticide pollution, and predation by non-native fish.”

And predation by non-native fish. But how much of a contributing factor is this predation? How decisive is it in affecting salmon populations?

That question is not answered. This article does not suggest that bass are the primary problem with salmon survival. Here’s as close as it gets: “Striped bass, on the other hand, were not frequently recaptured during this study. This lower rate of recapture is likely due to the highly mobile nature of striped bass, but future detection of tagged individuals at PIT tag antennas, in long-term surveys, or by other predator research projects, may help uncover their seasonal movement patterns. Genetic and visual analyses of the diet samples have not yet detected any Chinook salmon, but 43% of collected gut samples contained other fish, including both native and non-native species.”

Another San Joaquin Valley farmer told me the consulting firms that conduct studies of aquatic species in California’s rivers cannot point the finger at striped bass because that would undermine the larger environmentalist agenda to continue to mandate higher river flow as well as anger the bass anglers. He claimed these experts cannot be forthright because it will offend their clients.

Gemperle, in a follow up email, corroborated this farmer’s claims, writing “It is no secret that non native bass species (large mouth, small mouth and especially striped bass) eat juvenile salmon. What most people don’t know is that it was originally documented in the year 2000 and it has taken 23 years for it to be acknowledged as a huge hurdle in the salmon population’s recovery if that is even possible.”

In a November 2022 presentation by the state’s Delta Lead Scientist Laurel Larsen to the Delta Stewardship Council, titled “The Role of Water Quality in Salmon Predation,” there wasn’t a single mention of striped bass. Larsen explored competing hypotheses regarding what habitat variables render salmon most vulnerable to predation, with the common emphasis being that California’s rivers need more flow and cooler water temperatures.

In general there seems to be consistent rejection of the theory – evident in plain sight – that salmon smolts are bait for bass. In a 2016 article published by the San Jose Mercury, UC Davis researchers are quoted as saying that even if bass populations are reduced, other predators will take their place. This seems fishy. Environmental remediation invariably prioritizes removing invasive species, often going to extreme lengths to do so. Why are striped bass exempt from the environmentalist penchant for eliminating invasive alien species?

Water for Salmon, Salmon for Bass, Bass for Anglers, and Farmers Don’t Farm

One might find a clue to this mystery in the 2012 recommendation from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to triple the catch limit and reduce the size limit for bass. Experts there had clearly determined this would help with salmon recovery. But the state Fish and Game Commission immediately rejected the plan. Why?

We may begin by recognizing that every agency in California answers to special interests. When it comes to any state agency tasked with managing California’s rivers the most influential special interest is environmental activists. But there is considerable overlap between the agenda of, for example, environmentalist groups such as the Audubon Society, and groups advocating for the sport hunting and fishing industry such as Ducks Unlimited.

One can only speculate as to the discussions that occur behind closed doors between these and many other advocacy organizations, their lobbyists, their litigators, and their campaign strategists. But this powerful alliance shares a common goal: Leave more water in the rivers. Anglers want the bass protected because fishing for trophy bass is an extremely popular sport in California. Environmentalists welcome the support from sportfishing groups because it adds political weight to their ongoing pressure on water managers to prioritize water to maximize river flow and minimize river temperature.

And so this year, just as in every year, increasing percentages of available stored water will be sent down the river in hopes that will enable more salmon to survive the gauntlet of voracious bass. The cost of this choice is measured in the tens of billions of dollars. In dry years, which hundreds of years ago were just as common as they are today, the salmon simply stayed in the ocean. Now, instead of keeping millions of acres of farmland in production, in dry years California’s rivers still flow in defiance of historical precedent – in amounts inadequate to nurture healthy salmon but enough to confuse the salmon into migrating up the rivers anyway – while millions of acres of productive farmland are fallowed.

Also measured in the tens of billions of dollars, is the costly choice facing Californians in dry years: either build new ways to capture and store water, since existing systems are now geared primarily towards maintaining river flows for salmon to escape bass, or subject 40 million Californians to water rationing and the expense of completely retrofitting their appliances and killing their landscaping in order to conserve.

Against these choices, one might think the state would reconsider extending the season, raising the limit on the catch, and reducing the size limit for bass. It would cost California’s taxpayers nothing. And if it didn’t work, bass populations – a most adaptable and resilient species – would easily rebound. It’s worth a try.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Are Cities Ready for Renewable Skyscrapers?

/by

Every so often a product comes along that presents itself as a “sustainable” innovation, yet has compelling appeal even if sustainability isn’t someone’s top priority. Of course, sustainability has become something of an overused buzzword, but it generally refers to a production process that doesn’t deplete natural resources or damage the environment.

So called “mass timber” is an example of such an innovation. Able to replace reinforced concrete as a building material, it is economically competitive and aesthetically superior. It is perhaps the most profound innovation in building materials since the invention of reinforced concrete over 150 years ago – and it has the power to transform urban development.

By every measure of sustainability, mass timber beats concrete. As a forest product, it is genuinely renewable. Since smaller trees can be used for mass timber than for conventional lumber, more comprehensive forest thinning and fire prevention operations are commercially viable and larger trees can remain untouched.

For those who prioritize these variables, it is also an excellent way to permanently sequester carbon. Manufacturing concrete, by contrast, is a far more energy intensive process, and each year utilizes millions of tons of sand which is – surprisingly – a dwindling and non-renewable resource.

Laminated veneer, commonly known as plywood, has been around for decades. Mass timber (also referred to by the more descriptive term “cross laminated timber”) is where strips of wood are pressed together into large beams and panels, with each layer of grain running perpendicular to the layer above and below it. It has only been around since the 1990s.

The products available today are amazing: structural pillars with cross sections 60 inches on a side; lateral beams; floor panels eight inches thick, 10 feet wide, and 40 feet long.

The specifications defining cross-laminated timber should silence the skeptics. They weigh about one-fifth as much as similar sized structural materials made of reinforced concrete, while offering the same strength. They are not combustible. In hot structure fires, only the outer skin of the beams are charred. They are aesthetically pleasing and, unlike concrete, do not require surface treatments to soften their appearance.

This characteristic allows, for example, the floor panel in a high-rise unit to constitute the ceiling panel for the unit underneath. They have better thermal characteristics than concrete, meaning less additional insulation is required. And they can be manufactured to precise sizes and delivered ready for assembly, a tremendous time saver.

The construction industry changes slowly, but after a slow start, the use of mass timber is taking off around the world. Last July, what is currently the tallest mass-timber tower in the world opened in Milwaukee, Wis. Technically speaking, this is a “hybrid” building, with reinforced concrete used for the first six floors, plus for the staircases and elevator shafts. But at 25 stories, most of the superstructure of this building makes exclusive use of wood.

Tim Gokhman, the managing director of New Land Enterprises, the development company behind the Milwaukee tower, explained the appeal of mass timber: “There’s a reason it’s taking off. It’s lighter and faster and more precise and takes a smaller labor force to install. It can be economically equivalent and in some areas better, and it is a way more beautiful product and it is sustainable. It is in many cases a superior technology which is why it’s going to be transformational.”

Milwaukee’s mass-timber tower will not hold the world record for long. Taking shape over the skyline in Sydney is a 40-story hybrid timber building that will become the new headquarters of the Australian software company Atlassian. The building is a designed to be a showcase of sustainable technologies, with natural ventilation, large planted terraces, a photovoltaic skin and a veritable forest of vegetation on the roof.

While expensive statements such as the development in Sydney may offer valuable visibility to the phenomenon, mass timber has experienced hockey stick growth because it offers an economic advantage to builders. The renewable nature of mass timber gives it additional appeal.

You can’t research the product without having to wade through endless computations of how much carbon mass timber will sequester, or horror stories about the amount of carbon emissions caused by the manufacture of concrete. But is mass timber renewable at scale? Could it replace reinforced concrete? The short answer is yes.

In the United States in 2020, about 370 million cubic yards of concrete were produced. About 40 percent of that went for commercial real estate construction. If we assume half of that can be replaced by mass timber, that would mean our forests would need to replace 74 million cubic yards of concrete, which equates to 24 billion board feet of timber. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the annual timber harvest in the United States, it’s not.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, there are 12 trillion board feet of timber volume in the United States and about 186 billion board feet were harvested in 2018. That is, the U.S. timber harvest each year represents about 2 percent of the U.S. timber by volume. In the United States, forest growth has outpaced harvesting for many decades. For mass timber to replace half the concrete used in commercial construction, the nation’s forest harvest would only have to increase by 13 percent.

Increasing the timber harvest would certainly make sense in California, where the timber industry has been reduced from annual harvests of up to 6 billion board feet as recently as the 1990s to only 1.5 billion board feet in recent years. The result has been overcrowding, with dense stands of unhealthy trees. In dry years, these trees drink up most of California’s precipitation before it can percolate or runoff, exacerbating the state’s water shortage.

And the main reason for catastrophic forest fires in California is the combination of fire suppression, unreasonable restrictions on controlled burns or mechanical thinning, combined with the near destruction of the timber industry. So mass timber offers a public safety advantage, too.

Despite some official resistance to increasing the harvest and manufacture of mass timber in state, these products are catching on as a building material. Last month, California building codes were updated to allow for construction of mass timber buildings up to 18 stories tall. Mid-rise buildings using mass timber are opening or under construction in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento and elsewhere across California.

It’s not always easy to know which technologies will gain the imprimatur of today’s green clerisy, as even advanced hybrid vehicles that provide versatility and economy are on the outs as environmentalists promote purely electric vehicles. But advancements in mass timber should tick everyone’s boxes – and it might soon transform our cities’ skylines.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

California Per Capita Spending Doubles – Where Is It Going?

/by

California’s state government is spending twice as much as it did a decade ago, and by every metric that matters to ordinary Californians, things have only gotten worse.

Even without further analysis, this is an incredible fact. California’s state government, in constant dollars, is spending nearly twice as much per resident as it did a decade ago, and what do they have to show for it? Are the schools better? Are the roads improved? Is crime and homelessness down? The answer to these and similar questions is no. 

According to reports downloaded from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), and after adjusting for inflation and for population growth, the state’s general fund budget is up 84 percent compared to just ten years ago. Put another way, the state’s per capita general fund spending in the current fiscal year is just under $6,000 per California resident, and ten years ago — in 2022 dollars — it was just over $3,000 per resident.

Digging into what drove this tremendous increase doesn’t reveal much, because the increase is across the board. As the table below indicates, the seven departments that logged the biggest dollar increases in spending were, in most cases, increasing their budget by a lower percentage than the 84 percent by which overall spending increased. Still, some of these multibillion dollar increases bear examination.

The state prison system, for example, increased spending (all figures are in 2022 dollars) by $3.4 billion over the last ten years, a 29 percent increase. But the inmate population in state prisons dropped during the same period, from 168,000 in 2009 to 96,000 in 2022. This fiscal year, California’s state prison system is now spending an estimated $159,000 per prisoner.

How is it possible that inflation-adjusted spending is up 29 percent when the inmate population is down by 45 percent? 

Similar questions arise with every element of the state budget. The basic LAO report reduces the general fund budget to 12 categories: (1) Business, Consumer Services, and Housing, (2) Corrections and Rehabilitation, (3) Environmental Protection, (4) General Government, (5) Government Operations, (6) Health and Human Services, (7) Higher Education, (8) K-12 Education, (9) Labor and Workforce Development, (10) Legislative, Judicial, and Executive, (11) Natural Resources, and (12) Transportation. But each of these categories can be expanded; viewing all subcategories will reveal 302 separate line items.

For this reason, “Government Operations” rising from $800 million ten years ago to over $5.0 billion today, only begins to become explicable if you wade through its 66 line items. The biggest line, accounting for nearly half the increase? “Health & Dental Benefits for Annuitants,” otherwise known as OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits), that costly benefit afforded to state retirees that constitutes the unseen but nearly as financially voracious cousin to pension benefits.

The next three lines are all subcategories falling within the category “Health and Human Services.” These are big numbers. The “Dept. of Social Services” nearly doubled its spending (remember, all these calculations are after adjusting for inflation). So what’s costing another $8.1 billion a year? It turns out most of this is for so-called SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), once known as food stamps. Factors influencing this rise would include $6 billion per year of recently allocated “emergency allotment benefits,” part of the state’s response to the COVID pandemic. Another reason for the rise in spending is the decision of the state to award SNAP benefits to undocumented immigrants, but there is no publicly available data on how many of California’s undocumented residents are recipients.

The eligibility of undocumented immigrants is also a factor in the biggest single line item increase in the state budget over the past ten years, that of Health Care Services. Nonetheless, most of this increase, $17.3 billion, is the result of the expansion of Medi-Cal under the Affordable Care Act. By 2015, so-called Obamacare in California had grown to cover 12.7 million people, a nearly 60 percent growth in under two years. By 2018 there were an estimated 13.5 million Californians covered by Medi-Cal. By 2022, enrollment grew to nearly 14 million. Because most of the costs to cover Med-iCal recipients qualifying under the Affordable Care Act are covered by the Federal Government, however, it remains unclear just how much of this cost increase is due to higher enrollment, and how much is attributable to higher costs per insured, the extension of benefits to the undocumented, and more bureaucracy.

When it comes to the primary recipients of general fund spending for education, there is almost no case to be made that the population served has increased. As shown on the next chart, compared to 10 years ago the total enrollment is actually down at community colleges and in K-12 public schools. In the California State University system, enrollment is up 12 percent compared to a decade ago; enrollment at the University of California is up a bit more, at 22 percent compared to a decade ago.

But these enrollment trends, at most up by 2 percent per year, do not begin to keep pace with overall spending increases in every case. Per student spending in just the last ten years increased (again, after adjusting for inflation) by 97 percent at the community colleges, 73 percent in the Cal State system, 38 percent for the UC System, and 53 percent in the K-12 public schools.

The most egregious of these examples has to be the K-12 schools. They receive approximately 38 percent of the state general fund every year, no matter how swollen the budget gets. Imagine the perverse incentive this creates. The powerful teachers unions will push for anything that increases the state budget, because no matter what the expenditure is for, they will get 38 cents out of every dollar increase. But all this money has not improved educational outcomes.

Before moving on it’s important to note that the $13,377 per pupil spending reported by the LAO is nowhere near the actual amount Californians pay for K-12 education. That is just the general fund’s share. When spending from all other sources are considered, the per pupil expenditure rises to over $20,000. That is a spectacularly high amount of money, reminiscent of the apocryphal $600 hammer once uncovered in a defense budget audit. But at least the hammer hammered. Are California’s children learning?

The big remedies are as obvious as they are anathema to the government unions that run Sacramento.

Tens of billions every year could be saved by scrapping defined benefit pensions and OPEB benefits, and instead giving public employees the same state-funded retirement package that every taxpaying citizen is entitled to, i.e., Social Security and Medicare. That would not only restore solvency to every local government in California and eliminate the looming state budget deficit, but it would reestablish a badly needed sense of shared fate between public servants and the citizens they serve.

Such reforms might also stimulate a more meaningful dialogue in the state legislature as to what realistic limits might be placed on taxpayer supported benefits to undocumented Californians. If the weight of undocumented beneficiaries threatens to sink the budgets and hence the systems that state workers also depend on along with their fellow citizens, maybe a more appropriate balance will be struck between policies that are compassionate and policies that are sustainable.

Another way to save would be by implementing school choice, where parents would have the ability to direct the public funds allocable to their child into whatever accredited school they wished. Tens of billions in education establishment bloat could be saved with better educational outcomes.

To truly restore solvency in the state government, California could also enact common sense policies that would lower the cost of living and stimulate genuine economic growth: deregulate the housing market, loosen building code restrictions, abandon the policies of urban containment to free up land for housing, end the assault on natural gas drilling and distribution, keep natural gas generating plants open, invest in water infrastructure to lower the cost of food and housing, bring back the timber industry to create jobs, and enable access to low-cost lumber, and create a business climate that is friendly instead of hostile. 

Instead of pursuing practical measures, and making tough decisions, California’s state legislators are exclusively committed to simply spending more money. A lot more money, as the past decade clearly indicates. If lawmakers would balance their penchant for spending with a commitment to eliminate inequitable and failed — and very expensive — programs, it would help everyone living here, instead of just the special interests.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Gavin Newsom’s “Freedom State”

/by

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell, 1984

With his eyes firmly set on the Democratic nomination for president, Gavin Newsom on January 6 was sworn into the California governor’s office for another four-year term. In his second inaugural speech, Newsom highlighted the theme he evidently believes will carry him into the White House, “freedom.” But his perverse definition of freedom is as extreme as the right-wing caricatures he claims he’s protecting us from—and far more likely to be realized.

One of the centerpieces of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda is the right to an abortion. But Newsom isn’t merely defending the principles of Roe v. Wade, which tied the legality of abortion to the viability of the fetus. Nor is Newsom advocating the abortion policies enforced in almost every European nation, where abortion is illegal after 12 weeks.

When it comes to abortion rights, Newsom is pandering to extremists—some would call them murderers—who won’t rest until abortion is legal right up until the moment of birth. As it is, California’s “pregnant people” have the freedom to abort up to 24 weeks. “Viable” or not, here’s a photo of a 24-week-old fetus. Killing this beautiful, obviously sentient human being is “freedom,” according to Gavin Newsom.

Also central to Newsom’s freedom agenda is making California a sanctuary for “transgender youth seeking medical care.” Newsom, again pandering to extremists, is willing to allow confused teens and preteens the “freedom” to permanently alter their bodies. Never mind that we’re talking about minors. Never mind if much of this horrific fad, these surging rates of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” can be shown to be the result of social contagion and nurturing pressures from biased psychotherapists. Bring out the surgeon’s scalpel. Sign up children for a lifetime of unhealthy and expensive “maintenance” pharmaceuticals. And if someone who has surgically “confirmed” their gender has crushing regrets once they’re grown up, too bad, and shut up.

Newsom’s “freedoms” also extend to state-sanctioned, public use of addictive drugs. Never mind that pretty much every person with experience working with addicts and the homeless acknowledges treatment must be imposed on addicts if they are ever to recover, that approach would not permit what writer Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the “addiction maintenance industry” to continue to prosper. And make no mistake, that’s what’s going on here. The only winners in this deadly charade are drug cartels and aid workers employed by nonprofits or by the government. This is how, as our cities turn into shitholes, and depraved addicts die by the thousands, Gavin Newsom claims to be standing up for “freedom.”

The story of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda, which he’s aggressively selling in every blue state in America, doesn’t end with late-term abortions, “gender affirming” surgery for minors, or the right to mainline heroin on a city sidewalk. These are just some of the ways in which Newsom pacifies extremists and rewards opportunists, despite being hideously offensive to anyone possessing a shred of common sense and decency.

Newsom’s Freedom Agenda Is a Distraction

More to the point, these “freedoms” Newsom peddles are distractions. In some respects, Newsom and others like him on the Left are merely trolling Red America with these endorsements of depravity. This is what they do to allow their economic agenda to advance quietly. As Newsom crows about protecting the “freedom of speech” for educators—translation: the right to teach five-year-old children that they can choose their “gender” and 10-year-old children how to have anal sex—critics of this filth can be forgiven for missing how Newsom and his ilk are presiding over the slow creep of economic enslavement.

This is where the inverted logic of Newsom’s rhetorical agenda of freedom is fully exposed. Californians are being herded into regimented lives, controlled by very large corporations, public-employee unions, and environmentalists, whose alliance and shared agenda is only inexplicable at first glance. A deeper examination shows how their interests align and blows away traditional stereotypes of Right and Left.

A troubling article published in December at National Review titled “California Destroys Its Independent Truckers,” describes what Newsom is enabling, and by extension, what Democrats have in store for the entire country.

The article begins by describing how Assembly Bill 5, a state law signed by Newsom in 2019, “compels independent drivers to surrender the companies they’ve built and seek employment in large firms that can hire them.” Having recently lost court appeals, 2023 will see the loss of California’s more than 70,000 owner-operators. They are either retiring or moving to other states. Very few will be willing to join major trucking companies, and even fewer will be able to comply with the conditions set forth by AB 5 that might allow them to continue to operate independently.

But if AB 5 doesn’t wipe out every independent trucker, California’s all-powerful regional air-quality boards have declared the state’s ports off-limits to trucks with engines over three years old. As Swaim notes, “It will likely further concentrate market share in large corporations that can afford newer trucks—a remarkable but predictable outcome in a state that protests corporate control of the economy.”

At the state level, California’s Air Resources Board has declared a ban on the sale of all trucks running on gasoline or diesel fuel after 2040. Imagine how this will impact not just any independent truckers that may be left standing but any company operating a small fleet of trucks. These regulations, designed by unions and environmentalists, will force the consolidation of California shipping into a handful of very large corporations.

Anyone who thinks what happens in California stays in California is making a dangerous assumption. The wealth and influence of California’s high-tech and entertainment industry, combined with its oversized weight in the U.S. Congress, means that if Democrats win nationally, the political and economic model being imposed on Californians is going to be imposed across America.

Newsom’s “Freedom” Is Economic Slavery

The economic destruction of California’s middle class is a product of legislation and court rulings that have made it practically impossible for private developers to build affordable homes while still making a profit. They have been driven out of a hostile state, thanks to a protracted approval process, inevitable and endless environmentalist litigation, exorbitant municipal permit fees, ridiculously overwritten building codes, zoning restrictions that drive up the price of whatever raw land remains available for building, the lack of available water, overpriced and scarce building materials, a labor shortage, and the unwillingness of cities and counties—unlike throughout previous decades—to share the burden of enabling streets and utility infrastructure.

As a result, the average home in California, even in this downturn, stands north of $760,000. To make up for the shortage of private developers who can turn a profit and are therefore willing to develop housing without subsidies, an entire new class of developers and renters have emerged. The developer constructs low-income housing, taking advantage of tax incentives and government matching funds, which is then occupied by residents who have some or all of the rent paid for by the government.

This concept—creating scarcity by driving small private firms out of business through overregulation, and thereby enabling unionized and heavily subsidized large corporations to take control of a market where prices have been deliberately driven higher—is not restricted to housing. Does anyone think large energy companies don’t welcome regulations and restrictions that drive smaller competitors out of business at the same time it increases the prices they can charge and the profits they can earn? Is it far fetched to recognize that hedge funds buying up farmland for the water rights will prefer a state of perpetually worsening water scarcity, or that big agribusiness concerns with the financial resilience to withstand shortages don’t take every opportunity to buy up smaller farm operations that are driven out of business when every input, from water to fertilizer to tractor fuel, has been priced out of reach?

This is the economic slavery for which Newsom, and the state of California, is merely an instructive example. It’s happening all over the world.

These are the Lords of Scarcity, systematically imposing escalating economic hardship on every ordinary working household in America and beyond. They are imposing water shortages and calling for rationing; suppressing conventional energy and rationing during “peak” demand. At the same time they are decommissioning cheap sources of electricity and transportation fuel—from natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power—and similarly decommissioning the infrastructure to distribute them. This comes along with the imposition of all-electric cars (even though advanced hybrids are far more practical and sustainable) along with mileage taxes and “congestion” pricing that limits access by independently owned vehicles into urban cores. Add to these the suppression of new housing and the destruction of agriculture.

The collusion of big business, big government, and big labor to orchestrate this conquest throws every conventional ideological stereotype into the trash. The closest political economy that would define what is happening in California today—and by extension throughout the world – is fascism. It is economic fascism by virtue of governments and corporations working together while co-opting the labor movement. It is political and psychological fascism by virtue of the way it identifies convenient scapegoats, reminiscent of the scenes in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where citizens would perform a daily “two minutes of hatred for enemies of the party.” But the 2023 version of such a ritual is to scapegoat the racists, the sexists, the transphobes and homophobes, the climate deniers, the election deniers; all those bigots who would take away our “freedom” to murder the unborn, mutilate children, mainline heroin, or, to just preserve the freedom to earn a modest middle-class lifestyle in exchange for honest hard work.

This is how the social radicalism of the Left has been co-opted to become a useful distraction for our oppressors.  It gives everyone something to hate, with the full endorsement of every corporation and government agency in the nation.

Such is the freedom Gavin Newsom is selling. Don’t be surprised, two years from now, if it carries him all the way to the Oval Office. On the other hand, every American who values genuine freedom should be encouraged by how precarious Newsom’s strategy is when exposed to the light of day.

Newsom, and the entire corporatist establishment for which he is merely a rising figurehead, are presuming that hundreds of millions of Americans being driven into poverty will never realize that divisive rhetoric on social issues is nothing but a diversion. Don’t bet on that. Be hopeful. Times will change.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Voters Approve Over $3.0 Billion Per Year in New Local Taxes

/by

When state ballot initiatives propose new taxes, it’s big news. This past November, voters rejected Proposition 30, which would have added another 1.75 percent tax on personal income above $2.0 million. The arguments for and against Prop. 30 were litigated in saturation level television campaigns waged by both sides; total expenditures were nearly $70 million.

But while every election features a handful of state tax and bond proposals that get statewide attention, additional hundreds of local state and bond proposals fly under the radar. Fortunately, after each election cycle and once all the votes are certified – something that in California doesn’t occur until 30 days after election day – the California Taxpayers Association puts out a report that shows the outcome of every local tax and bond proposal.

The impact of these hundreds of bids to raise taxes and increase borrowing, as documented by CalTax, in sum can exceed the amounts of the statewide initiatives.

We saw this demonstrated yet again this past November, when 131 bond proposals were placed on local ballots up and down the state, along with 234 local tax proposals. Of the proposed local bonds, 86 percent of them were approved by voters, dumping another $23.2 billion in debt onto Californians. In terms of budget impact, based on a 5 percent interest rate and a 30 year term, this new borrowing is going to cost taxpayers another $1.5 billion per year in principal and interest payments.

The fate of local tax proposals tells a similar story. 65 percent of them were approved by voters, adding another $1.6 billion annual burden onto California’s taxpayers.

These local increases in taxes and borrowing, which are almost exclusively regressive and will cost taxpayers at least another $3.1 billion per year, are comparable to the impact of Prop. 30, had it passed. Prop. 30, which would have affected California’s already overtaxed wealthy households, was estimated to bring in between $3.0 and $5.0 billion per year.

It’s interesting to see the categories of new local taxes. Note the projected big earner categories: “Documentary Transfer Tax,” “Gross Receipts Tax,” and “Transactions and Use Tax” (sales tax). The first two of these three are relatively recent innovations in a system that for decades relied primarily on sales tax. Expect more innovative tax schemes, such as “Vacancy Tax,” presumably designed to discourage people from owning real estate unless they plan for it to be occupied.

The propensity for voters to approve local taxes is well documented, as the next chart proves. The only category that has not performed extraordinarily well over the past ten years are General Obligation Bonds, which, still while more likely than not to pass, rarely deliver supermajority rate of approval. This is because School Bonds only require a 55 percent majority in order to pass, whereas General Obligation Bonds require a two-thirds majority.

When proponents only have to get 55 percent of voters to approve a bond, it does pretty well. Measured by the amount of proposed borrowing, school bonds consistently log over 90 percent approval by California’s local voters. The payments to service these bonds typically appear on the property tax bills of homeowners, and the amounts are not trivial. Most Californians can expect to pay considerably more than the legislated maximum of 1 percent of their home’s value, mostly thanks to local school bonds that are exempt from these limits.

As for local taxes, 2022 was a below average year for proponents, passing “only” 65 percent of them by number, and 59 percent by amount. While highly favoring proponents, this rate of approval is considerably lower than in previous elections, and may indicate voter fatigue with new taxes.

Compared to other elections in the past decade, 2022 was not bad. While California taxpayers added over $3.0 billion to their annual tax burden, voters did not approve a single statewide tax or bond proposal.

It’s a little early to look ahead to 2024, but three initiatives have already qualified for the November 2024 ballot. One of them aims to “increase personal income taxes to fund pandemic detection and prevention.” Expect additional statewide proposals to increase taxes, since California’s much vaunted budget surplus has evaporated. Voters may also count on hundreds of local tax and bond proposals, and if history is any guide, shall approve the vast majority of them.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Environmentalist Assault on Civilization

/by

No reasonable person should deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable; cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, more efficient use of resources; the list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.

Environmentalism, which once challenged corporate power, is now its useful puppet. And “climate change,” once a peripheral concern, is now a “climate crisis;” the self-proclaimed unassailable foundation of all environmentalism. Put another way, sixty years ago environmentalism once was a mostly good and courageous movement, but slowly transitioned until now it is wholly a front for plutocrats, relying on a big lie to sustain its momentum.

In an illuminating video posted earlier this month, Jordan Peterson interviewed Dr. Richard Lindzen on the topic of climate science. Lindzen, whose credentials on the topic of climate science are almost ridiculously germane and comprehensive, offered a withering perspective on contemporary environmentalism. He explained that in the 1960s there was a lot of hunting around for an issue that would give environmentalists power over the energy industry. In the 1960s environmentalists started tracking atmospheric CO2 and determined it was increasing.

These CO2 measurements, initially begun out of mere scientific curiosity, gave environmentalists the issue they’d been looking for. As Lindzen put it, “If you wanted to control the energy sector, CO2 was the one pollutant that no matter how clean you make it, there will still be CO2. You can’t get rid of that if you burn fossil fuel.”

This is the essence of environmentalism today. To control and ration the energy supply on which human civilization depends. Since every amenity of civilization uses energy, this control and rationing extends to every human activity. It is a recipe for total control over every individual, every business, and every nation in the world.

It’s easy enough to speculate as to who the ultimate puppeteers are who have unleashed this grandiose plot on the world. We were just treated to a host of them flocking to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum. It’s even easier to identify the hidden agenda; power and profit. Micromanage the world, and only the biggest or the most anointed players survive. It’s a gigantic trickle up economic scheme, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich.

Regardless of who pulls the strings behind the scenes, however, the marionettes are in plain sight. The entire state legislature in California, where nearly every “representative” is wholly owned by an alliance of public sector unions and tech billionaires, offers a perfect example. With every regulation, another unionized public bureaucracy is created and another tech company finds new captive consumers.

The result is a soft fascism, a soul-destroying tyranny masquerading as an enlightened green utopia. California, sprawling across 164,000 square miles, has vast resources of farmland, timber, oil and gas, direct access to ocean fisheries, and valuable mineral resources. With barely 40 million people, the state is sparsely populated compared with most developed nations, and ought to be delivering the most affordable cost-of-living in the world to its residents. The opposite is true.

In the name of protecting the environment and fighting climate change, California has declared war on its own people. The state’s policymakers have neglected a once remarkable water infrastructure and as a result, millions of acres of the most productive farmland on earth are being turned into a dust bowl, driving thousands of farm operations out of business and destroying the livelihoods that sustained millions of people. They have reduced the timber industry to a less than one-quarter of the size it was as recently as the 1990s. They have declared war on oil and gas, banning most new drilling and tightening restrictions on existing wells.

Critics of California’s authoritarian progressives too often focus on the so-called woke agenda while safely refraining from challenging policies that derive from the alleged “climate emergency.” This is understandable, and woke ideology and the policies it spawns are ridiculous, destructive folly that must be crushed. But the highly visible depredations of woke activists become even more dangerous if they distract us from the encroachment of green policies into every detail of individual private lives. The harmful impact of green are in many ways far more substantial and comprehensive.

The Upside of Green Policies for Big Business

When California, and then the entire nation, bans the production of incandescent light bulbs, that is an obvious intrusion into the market and into the quality of life for everyday Californians. But less obvious is the inversion of incentives that drive the push for energy efficiency at the expense of health or affordability. As Californians pay exorbitant prices to bathe themselves in high wavelength light, disrupting their circadian rhythms, and as Californians endure the unhealthy micro-flickers of LEDs hooked to inadequate transformers, manufacturers gain new customers and sell higher priced goods.

A more subtle green inversion of economic incentives, but just as contrary to the public interest, is when electric utilities convert to “renewables,” i.e., wind farms, solar farms, and battery farms, at staggering cost, while decommissioning fully paid for nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and natural gas power plants. As the electricity price to the consumer soars, the regulated public utilities earn more profit, since their pricing and hence their profits are based on a percentage markup over their costs. If your profit is limited to 9 percent, you’ll make a lot more money if you’re billing $.30 per kilowatt-hour than if you’re billing $.10 per kilowatt-hour. That’s an easy business decision.

It is obvious when dams are removed instead of new ones being built, that farmers get less water. But less obvious are the ripple effects. Without a guaranteed water supply, new housing construction can’t get approved, limiting the supply of new homes and driving up the price for all housing. Then again, housing in California is too expensive anyway, thanks to green policies that limit where new homes can get built, absurdly overwritten building codes requiring “energy neutrality,” obscenely expensive costs for building permits, a capricious approval process that can literally take decades to navigate, and the constant threat of litigation by environmentalists to stop any new construction.

For every fundamental necessity, gasoline, natural gas, water, electricity, and housing, California’s green policies have created artificial scarcity. Everything costs more. The poor have lost all hope of achieving private financial independence, the middle class shrinks, and the rich get richer. A frustrated lobbyist in Sacramento recently summed it up as follows: “Most environmentalists don’t care about people,” he said, “the old democratic party wanted to use government to make people’s lives better, but today their solution is to use government to make life harder then hook them to make them dependent on government. They want to use government to destroy the incentive to be productive. But if you kill off all the productive people, eventually society collapses.”

What’s Happening in California is Happening Everywhere

It’s one thing to impose green scarcity on California, a state that can still coast a while longer on the infrastructure investments made 50 years ago, and rely on tapping the stupefying accumulation of wealth concentrated in its high tech industry. But the marionettes that are implementing the green assault on civilization are everywhere. One of the most recent fronts in their widening war on prosperity is the farming sector, from Canada to Spain to the Netherlands to Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Based on the contention that farm fertilizer is a factor in causing climate change, policymakers have decided to shut down huge sectors of commercial agriculture. The new regulations that will permit continued operations, of course, will be far too expensive for all but the largest global agribusiness concerns.

It’s not hard to see what’s happening here. There is no economic activity, anywhere, that doesn’t create greenhouse gas. Make it impossible for all but the wealthiest corporations to comply with the new edicts, and you roll up the world.

Unfortunately, when a rare thunderstorm delivers atomic sounding sonic blasts to uninitiated Californians whose only previous experiences with sound that kinetic were the occasional punk driving by with his subwoofer turned up, they’re ready to believe the storm porn that pours out of every establishment news source. “Bomb cyclone.” “Polar vortex.” “Atmospheric River.” “Supercell,” “Snowpocalypse.” It’s all part of the “new normal,” as we allegedly encounter more and more “extreme weather events.” Except we aren’t.

Old timers can remember the 1960s, when storms pulverized California, causing floods and freezes, but back then we didn’t listen to climate agenda driven news. Storms were “storms.” And there weren’t ubiquitous high-resolution satellite images and video editing tools to allow every local weatherman to splash on to our screens terrifying images of cloud formations that covered half the Pacific Ocean. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t.

Around the world, the same game is played. Pakistan’s recent floods, despite the doomsday spin from PBS, were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.

The disaster story repeats everywhere. And contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastal aquifers were overdrafted which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.

The Biggest Big Lie in the World

And behind it all is a big lie: The “Climate Emergency.” It’s not true. It’s a lie. Dr. Lindzen, who is only one preeminent member among thousands of highly qualified scientists who have spent the last 20-30 years patiently attempting to explain the myriad holes in what is far from “settled science,” offered this cautionary reminder in his interview. He quoted Joseph Goebbels, a repugnant master of propaganda, who is often credited with saying “if you tell a big lie often enough it will become truth.”

Anyone hoping to stop the environmentalist assault on civilization must realize that it isn’t enough to challenge the individual policies that are supposedly designed to save the climate. It isn’t even enough to expose the preposterous absurdity of them – as if it is possible to transition to nothing but biofuel, wind, and solar energy and still deliver prosperity to 8 billion people within a decade or two.

What could work, however, would be to challenge the core premise of the climate alarmist movement. Learn the facts, evaluate the arguments of contrarian experts, and make up your own mind. If you no longer believe we actually face a climate emergency, say so, without reservations, in every venue and to every person and institution you possibly can.

Doing this may be deemed antisocial, and it may be suppressed, but it is a healthy expression of sanity. It used to be that when someone ran about claiming the world is about to end, they were considered the lunatics. Let’s go back to those days. Human civilization could be entering a golden age of progress and prosperity, but it cannot get there without producing CO2.

With prosperity we can adapt, as we always have. With tyranny, we can do nothing. Climate alarmism is tyranny, with green wrapping, delivered with terror.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Voters Approve Over $3.0 Billion Per Year in New Local Taxes

/by

When state ballot initiatives propose new taxes, it’s big news. This past November, voters rejected Proposition 30, which would have added another 1.75 percent tax on personal income above $2.0 million. The arguments for and against Prop. 30 were litigated in saturation level television campaigns waged by both sides; total expenditures were nearly $70 million.

But while every election features a handful of state tax and bond proposals that get statewide attention, additional hundreds of local state and bond proposals fly under the radar. Fortunately, after each election cycle and once all the votes are certified – something that in California doesn’t occur until 30 days after election day – the California Taxpayers Association puts out a report that shows the outcome of every local tax and bond proposal.

The impact of these hundreds of bids to raise taxes and increase borrowing, as documented by CalTax, in sum can exceed the amounts of the statewide initiatives.

We saw this demonstrated yet again this past November, when 131 bond proposals were placed on local ballots up and down the state, along with 234 local tax proposals. Of the proposed local bonds, 86 percent of them were approved by voters, dumping another $23.2 billion in debt onto Californians. In terms of budget impact, based on a 5 percent interest rate and a 30 year term, this new borrowing is going to cost taxpayers another $1.5 billion per year in principal and interest payments.

The fate of local tax proposals tells a similar story. 65 percent of them were approved by voters, adding another $1.6 billion annual burden onto California’s taxpayers.

These local increases in taxes and borrowing, which are almost exclusively regressive and will cost taxpayers at least another $3.1 billion per year, are comparable to the impact of Prop. 30, had it passed. Prop. 30, which would have affected California’s already overtaxed wealthy households, was estimated to bring in between $3.0 and $5.0 billion per year.

It’s interesting to see the categories of new local taxes. Note the projected big earner categories: “Documentary Transfer Tax,” “Gross Receipts Tax,” and “Transactions and Use Tax” (sales tax). The first two of these three are relatively recent innovations in a system that for decades relied primarily on sales tax. Expect more innovative tax schemes, such as “Vacancy Tax,” presumably designed to discourage people from owning real estate unless they plan for it to be occupied.

The propensity for voters to approve local taxes is well documented, as the next chart proves. The only category that has not performed extraordinarily well over the past ten years are General Obligation Bonds, which, still while more likely than not to pass, rarely deliver supermajority rate of approval. This is because School Bonds only require a 55 percent majority in order to pass, whereas General Obligation Bonds require a two-thirds majority.

When proponents only have to get 55 percent of voters to approve a bond, it does pretty well. Measured by the amount of proposed borrowing, school bonds consistently log over 90 percent approval by California’s local voters. The payments to service these bonds typically appear on the property tax bills of homeowners, and the amounts are not trivial. Most Californians can expect to pay considerably more than the legislated maximum of 1 percent of their home’s value, mostly thanks to local school bonds that are exempt from these limits.

As for local taxes, 2022 was a below average year for proponents, passing “only” 65 percent of them by number, and 59 percent by amount. While highly favoring proponents, this rate of approval is considerably lower than in previous elections, and may indicate voter fatigue with new taxes.

Compared to other elections in the past decade, 2022 was not bad. While California taxpayers added over $3.0 billion to their annual tax burden, voters did not approve a single statewide tax or bond proposal.

It’s a little early to look ahead to 2024, but three initiatives have already qualified for the November 2024 ballot. One of them aims to “increase personal income taxes to fund pandemic detection and prevention.” Expect additional statewide proposals to increase taxes, since California’s much vaunted budget surplus has evaporated. Voters may also count on hundreds of local tax and bond proposals, and if history is any guide, shall approve the vast majority of them.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

California Flooding Continues, But We’re Still in a Drought

/by

AUDIO: As one storm after another pounds California, and millions of acre feet of floodwater run out to sea, officials still proclaim the state to be in a drought. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.

California’s Mega Water Wasters