The Case for Nuclear Power

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There are solutions to energy, water and infrastructure challenges that make compelling economic and environmental sense even if there was no climate crisis. But for those policymakers and influencers who believe we face an existential threat for which the only appropriate way to cope is to achieve “net zero,” these solutions ought to be even more compelling.

Mass timber is a perfect example — to make it, you can harvest smaller trees and leave older growth alone, thin overgrown forests, sequester carbon in the finished product, and replace reinforced concrete as a building material. Water projects that improve our capacity to manage runoff from “bomb cyclones” and store more water from unusually wet years to guarantee a supply during unusually dry years is another example. But greatest opportunity to meet California’s energy challenges while also achieving the goal of net zero is with nuclear power.

Consider the tradeoff between two zero emission solutions: Diablo Canyon vs. the offshore wind farms proposed off the coast of San Luis Obispo and Humboldt counties. Diablo Canyon generates 2.2 gigawatts with a 90 percent uptime, i.e., it produces 2 gigawatt-years of electricity per year, nearly 10 percent of California’s entire in-state generating capacity. To generate an equivalent amount of electricity using 10 megawatt wind turbines, each one of them longer (vertically) than a supercarrier, floating 20 miles offshore, you would need at least 500 of them. This is an astonishing fact.

The cost of nuclear power plants is often cited as a reason not to build more of them. But some of that expense is avoidable. A report published in 2020 by Ars Technica acknowledges the role that litigation and bureaucratic obstacles play in elevating the cost of nuclear power, although it claims they only account for one-third of the overruns. The other source of increased costs? To quote the author: “the largest increases were indirect costs: engineering, purchasing, planning, scheduling, supervision, and other factors not directly associated with the process of building the plant,” and “about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.”

Even at these elevated costs, however, nuclear power is economically competitive with renewables. When comparing the cost of nuclear power to wind and solar power, a peer-reviewed paper, published by Science Direct last year, analyzed the difference between the traditional Levelized Cost of Electricity analysis and the more recently introduced, and more accurate, Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity. The study identified the lowest full system cost for renewables in the U.S., the blend of wind and solar on the Texas grid. By mixing input from both of these intermittent sources of electricity, the required storage capacity is minimized since solar and wind produce power at different times of day. Even in this case, when including the cost of storage and new transmission lines, nuclear power was found to be half as expensive as these renewables. No accurate evaluation of energy costs can fail to take into account full system costs, which are inherently greater when, for example, you must install a high voltage transmission line to connect a ten megawatt wind turbine, floating in 4,000 feet of ocean, 20 miles offshore, to land based battery farms and the grid.

California was once home to six nuclear power plants, generating a total of 5.8 gigawatts. Three of them, Humboldt Bay, Vallecitos, and Santa Susana, were small-scale, generating barely 100 megawatts in total. But San Onofre, with three reactors that could have been retrofit, took its 2.6 gigawatts offline in 2012. The other big plant was Rancho Seco in the Sacramento Valley, generating 913 megawatts until it was taken offline in 1989. Now, instead of building more nuclear power plants, California’s last operating reactors at Diablo Canyon are scheduled for shutdown. In the face of hyperbolic opposition, PG&E has applied to renew its license for another 20 years.

But what about the waste! Can nuclear power ever be completely safe? This article from 2019 offers a useful summary of how France has managed nuclear power, which provides over 70 percent of that nation’s electricity. In particular, it is worth noting the success the French have had recycling spent fuel, which enables a more efficient and secure supply of fuel and reduced radioactive waste. Every form of power generation carries with it an assortment of safety risks and environmental impact. To belabor the question — because it is appallingly obvious a fraud of historic proportions is sleepwalking to fruition – why are environmentalists obsessed with eliminating oil, gas, and nuclear power, while ignoring the aquatic and avian slaughter and squandered billions that are coming to California with offshore wind?

So how can we bring more nuclear energy to California, a state that, after all, is the global epicenter of climate crisis madness? Last year, writing for Quillette, Robert Zubrin, a nuclear engineer and author of the book “The Case for Nukes,” wrote a three-part series on clean energy with a focus on the nuclear option. This third installment provides an overview and makes specific recommendations in the areas of regulatory reform, the licensing process, waste disposal, and progress and priorities in research and development. In terms of advancing the technology, he writes “Breeder reactors could multiply our nuclear fuel resources a hundredfold. Small modular reactors could open up new markets unsuited to large pressurized water reactors and potentially make reactors much cheaper by enabling mass production in factories. High-temperature gas-cooled reactors and molten salt thorium reactors both hold great promise. New types of fission reactors for space applications are needed. The promise of thermonuclear fusion needs to be explored and developed.”

If California’s state legislature and governor are not merely serious, but also smart about how to deliver abundant “net-zero” energy, they need to fast-track nuclear with the same zealotry that they’ve applied to wind and solar.

Outlaw Public Sector Unions

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

When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to purchase the presidential election outcome in 2020 for $419 million. Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Meaning of Thanksgiving Can Save America

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Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

Or maybe, fable or not, it is an inspiring message of unity for a nation of settlers and immigrants who have created a place where everyone, including descendants of the Indians, have enjoyed the more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the history of the world. That’s a debate we have to wage, and one we cannot lose. Like all nations and tribes, America has had dark moments. But the good overwhelms the bad. It’s not even close.

The attempted destruction of America’s self-confidence and unity by its own institutions, however, which must be challenged and overcome, must not distract from an even bigger problem. America’s institutions have also launched a propaganda campaign, growing in intensity every year, that claims we face an existential climate crisis, and massive sacrifices are necessary to cope. This is a lie.

It’s particularly relevant to reflect on this fraud during Thanksgiving, because our nation of settlers and immigrants would not exist if the types of rules and restrictions being imposed on Americans today were in effect 400 years ago. And it gives rise to a fundamental conflict: We continue to invite immigrants from around the world to move here, but thanks to extreme environmentalist restrictions, we are unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support them.

This violates the second essential value of Thanksgiving as defined by Britannica.com, the celebration of how America provides opportunity for newcomers. That opportunity has been hijacked and destroyed by corporate special interests, hiding behind woke ideologues and environmentalists. The woke say let them come, and they’re coming these days by the millions. Then the environmentalists say we have to lower our “footprint,” hence we can’t make room for the newcomers. Environmentalist restrictions have made it nearly impossible to expand existing cities or build new cities.

The consequences of this are a dismal diminishing of quality of life for immigrants as well as for the people already here. Migrants are arriving by the tens of thousands to New York City, where the average apartment rents for over $5,000 per month. On the opposite coast, in sprawling Los Angeles, the average rent is nearly $3,000 per month for an 800 square foot apartment.

This engineered shortage of housing, resulting in demand driven prices rising to unaffordable levels, is unprecedented. It is caused by a perfect storm of public corruption and corporate greed exploiting the primal fear of “global boiling” to silence dissent. This breeds intercultural disharmony, as aspiring low income communities including massive waves of immigrants are denied amenities enjoyed by all who purchased homes before the storm hit the shore.

The climate scam is simple, but it is a betrayal of everything that made America a great and welcoming place. Instead of using public money to build roads and enabling infrastructure to encourage more home construction, increase pay and benefits for public employees, and hire more public employees to dole out welfare to the people who can’t afford homes. Instead of competing to provide homes at affordable prices, developers collect subsidies to build “affordable housing.” It’s all to save the planet, and the scam translates into every industry, and elevates the cost for every one of life’s essentials.

Which brings us to the sanctity of home and family. It’s difficult to imagine how America’s institutions could be more committed to destroying home and family. It is financially impossible for most young couples to afford a home close to their jobs. The average home in New York City is $733,000, in Los Angeles it’s $926,000. Try to pay that monthly mortgage, while also covering property taxes and insurance, along with utilities and maintenance. And if mom works? Expect to pay $20,000 per year, per child, for childcare, at the same time as mom’s income pops you into a higher tax bracket. The cards are stacked.

Economic war against the family is only part of the problem, however, the moral assault on home and family is much worse. American women are trained to reject motherhood. Apart from traditional churches, every cultural influence in America tells women it’s not worth it. From the Atlantic, “having children is terrible for quality of life.” Fortune writes “millennials break from tradition and embrace being child-free.” Time, “Having It All Without Having Children.” And as for Christianity? “It “prevents women from being free from male oppression.”

No children. No Christianity. But if you buck the trend and have children? What does American society teach these children about home and family? These two articles from America’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, provides an indication. “Let’s Quit Fetishizing the Single-Family Home,” and “The Nuclear Family Is No Longer the Norm. Good.” No home with a yard and a garden. No mom and dad. Despite overwhelming evidence that people prefer detached homes and children of two parent households do better in life. According to America’s mainstream institutions, those things are bad.

Make a single family home unaffordable, and stigmatize it as an environmental abomination. Cordon off the cities and stack everyone together via infill and densification. And just in case the rising generation still wants to have a traditional family, marinate them in climate terror so they’ll join the The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or neuter them with transgender affirmation.

Such is the betrayal of America by what were once our trusted institutions. Everything that Thanksgiving represents – cultural harmony, opportunity, and family – is under attack. It must be stopped. Not slowed down. Stopped cold, eradicated, and replaced with the traditions and values that built this country.

For Americans who still embrace the Thanksgiving holiday for all of its historic promise, it can remind us that unity is still possible, that opportunities in this nation can still be available to everyone, and that more than anything else, our homes and our families are the cherished foundation of our health and happiness. When we fight the nihilistic Left and their opportunistic corporate enablers, we must never forget what tremendous upside our American traditions provide, or the joy and optimism and sense of possibility that has always defined our people.

This is a fight for the soul of the nation. There is no reason why the spirit of Thanksgiving cannot inform a resurgent America, and endure for another 400 years and beyond.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California Legislature Destroys Incentive to Achieve Water Resiliency

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The California State Water Board is currently drafting the regulations needed to implement Senate Bill 1157, which is possibly the most misguided, unnecessary, intrusive, expensive disaster of a law ever passed by the state legislature.

Passed and signed by Governor Newsom in 2022, SB 1147 requires California’s water agencies to limit residential indoor water use to 47 gallons per person per day starting in 2025 and 42 gallons in 2030. The theme promoted by the State Water Board as they conduct hearings and solicit public comments is “Making Water Conservation a Way of Life.” Rationing would be a more apt description of what’s coming for California’s households.

It isn’t as if conservation hasn’t been a way of life in California for decades. Despite the state’s population growing to over 39 million today, total urban water consumption in the state has been falling each year since the mid-1990s. At just over 7 million acre feet per year in 2022, urban water consumption hasn’t been this low since 1985, when the population of the state was only 26 million.

As California’s water bureaucrats move towards implementing SB 1157, the officially stated goal is to reduce total urban consumption by 400,000 acre feet per year by 2030. Put into the perspective of California’s total water withdrawals per year, this is very small potatoes. Diversions for agriculture average 30 million acre feet per year, more than four times the urban use, and diversions — captured rainfall that is released from reservoirs during the summer and fall — to maintain ecosystem health range between 20 million acre feet in dry years to over 60 million acre feet in wet years. A 400,000 acre foot reduction in urban water consumption represents barely more than one-half of one percent of the amount of water California diverts and manages even in its driest years.

For the uninitiated, SRIA stands for “Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment,” an analysis that is required for any proposed state regulation that may have an economic impact exceeding $50 million. In March 2023, the State Water Resources Control Board submitted a SRIA to the California Department of Finance. It evaluated the impact of conservation mandates on more than 400 cities and water agencies, and concluded that over the period from 2025 through 2040, the financial impact would be a net benefit of $1.2 billion.

But despite weighing in at an impressive 186 pages, this study is flawed. For example, consumers (with subsidies from water agencies) will have to purchase high-efficiency toilets and washers at an estimated total cost of $1 billion. If only 10 million of California’s 13 million households had to purchase these upgraded appliances, that would be $100 per household, not nearly enough. Yet the “benefit” to residential suppliers is estimated at $5 billion. How? Recouping capital investments and paying overhead constitute most of a municipal water bill, and water agencies under this regulation will have to help subsidize consumer purchases, install dual meters to measure indoor vs outdoor water use, hire more staff to monitor and enforce use restrictions, and meanwhile, continue to upgrade their facilities to cope with, for example, PFAS contaminants. Then they have to spread these fixed costs and additional costs over fewer units of water sold to their ratepayers. Where is this $5 billion in “savings” to consumers going to come from?

Independent experts agree that the SRIA was flawed. Last month, MESA Water District commissioned a review of the State Water Resources Control Board’s SRIA, and tore it apart. With respect to the overestimated benefits of these regulations, MESA stated (1) “It significantly overstates supplier variable production costs and appears to double count these costs,” (2) it bases its estimates of avoided water production cost primarily on wholesale water rates even though these rates embed a sizable portion of fixed costs which in the long run are not avoidable, and (3) “it mistakes the underlying causes for escalating wholesale water rates and consequently overstates the rate at which truly avoidable costs will escalate in the future.”

With respect to the underestimated costs of these regulations, MESA writes (1) “It uses constant unit costs for conservation measures despite assuming a rapid and massive ramp-up of these programs in the first five years of the regulation,” (2) “it underestimates customer costs by ignoring the time-value-of-money costs of shifting future expenditures closer to the present,” (3) it underestimates the costs of mixed use meter to dedicated irrigation meter conversions by only counting the initial installation and inspection costs and ignoring the annual maintenance, billing, and meter replacement costs,” and (4) it grossly underestimates the costs of program creation and reporting as well as the costs to implement the new ‘Best Management Practices’ for commercial, industrial and institutional customers.”

All told, the MESA analysis estimates a net cost of $7.4 billion. For 400,000 acre feet per year of water.

The cost of water rationing isn’t merely felt financially. Imagine having to report how many people live in your home in order to qualify for your 42 gallon per person per day water allocation. Imagine having to justify your “outdoor water budget” in order to keep your outdoor landscaping healthy. It is not necessary to put ourselves through this. Cost-effective supply-side solutions are plentiful. In the water season that just ended in California, over 25 million acre feet of water passed through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and out to the Pacific. This is more than twice what is required for the health of Delta ecosystems, and if that water had been stored it would have offered enough supplemental supply to withstand several years of drought.

There are many ways to store this water that fulfill reasonable environmentalist concerns. For example, channels cut into Delta islands can have gravity-fed French Drains that move water without harming fish. Feasibility studies indicate that a 200 acre site could move 15,000 acre feet per day during storms, and this water could be stored in vacant underground aquifers that are, just in the San Joaquin Valley, estimated to have a capacity of 75 million acre feet.

Other ways to realize massive increases in urban water supplies were described in detail last year in a study released by the prestigious Pacific Institute. They estimated that just through capturing urban runoff, up to 3 million acre feet could be stored each year, and that by recycling urban waste water, capturing another 2 million acre feet per year is possible. Even if these figures are optimistic, they accurately identify two additional paths to water abundance that are necessary investments anyway. Harvesting rainfall through daylighting streams and diversions into aquifers will prevent flooding and will help mitigate toxic runoff from urban surfaces. Recycling and reusing urban wastewater will eliminate the nitrogen pollution still present in treated outfall. Other options to increase water supply are additional reservoirs (Sites, Temperance Flat, Pacheco, Shasta enlargement, etc.), as well as desalination. There are plenty of ways to achieve water abundance in California.

Abundance and resilience are synonymous. Water rationing will not achieve the resilience that Californians are going to need in the future, whether it’s to adapt to prolonged droughts and bomb cyclones, or to cope with other potential disruptions to a precarious network of pipelines, pumping stations, and aqueducts. Precisely the opposite policy should be California’s legislative priority.

Water agencies need to be incentivized to increase their supply capacity, not reduce it to a fragile minimum that lacks any margin for error.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How California Makes New Cities Nearly Impossible

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Earlier this year the investment firm Flannery Associates announced that over the past five years it had quietly spent over $800 million to acquire over 50,000 acres of rural land in east Solano County with the intention of building a new city. Less than 60 miles from downtown San Francisco, and close to major interstates, building this proposed city makes a lot of sense. But it will probably never happen.

It isn’t as if new housing isn’t desperately needed in California. By 2020 due to a combination of population growth and a slow response by the home building industry, California had fallen to an estimated 3.5 million units short of what was needed to bring supply into balance with demand. Since that time, the gap has narrowed by half, with the state logging a net population loss of 800,000 at the same time as roughly the same number of new housing units have been built. But that still leaves the state 1.5 million units short.

According to a 2021 housing-affordability survey conducted by Demographia International, which ranked housing affordability in major metropolitan areas around the world, California had three cities in the top 10. Measuring median home price divided by median household income, San Jose’s ratio was 11.5, Los Angeles had 11.3, and San Francisco’s was 10.7. The No. 11 spot was San Diego at 9.4. Every one of California’s major cities is among the worst places in the world to try to purchase a home.

The conventional wisdom used to be that a home was affordable if it cost no more than three times the purchaser’s household income. California has managed to triple that ratio, and higher interest rates have only pushed its home prices down by a paltry 0.8 percent over the past year. According to Zillow, today the average home in California costs $747,352, compared to $348,539 in the rest of the U.S.

To cope with an ongoing and severe housing shortage, California’s state legislature has passed laws that override local zoning laws to make it easier for developers to construct high density “infill” projects within existing cities. The legislature has also made it easier for developers to build affordable housing. But dense, multifamily housing carries higher costs per square foot, and runs contrary to the prevailing sentiment of homebuyers, which is to live in a detached, single family home. And for every subsidized affordable unit of housing, purchasers of unsubsidized homes in the same project pay more, along with taxpayers.

What California’s policymakers have not done, however, is to encourage the development of new cities on raw land. The extreme environmentalist ethos that prevails in the capitol, as well as in countless courtrooms across the state, guarantees that most housing developments will be high density projects inside the footprint of existing cities. Single family homes, and developers willing to brave the gauntlet of disincentives to build them, will remain in short supply and out of reach for the average working family in California.

One such developer is the Tejon Ranch Company, which has fought for over two decades to construct homes in Southern California. Their travails against environmentalist extremists, while mostly behind them, offer a cautionary note to developers such as Flannery Associates. The Tejon Ranch is a unique property. At 270,000 acres, it is the largest privately owned parcel of land in the state, with a fascinating history. Originally consisting of four Mexican land grants, they were purchased and consolidated in the 1865 by Edward Fitzgerald Beale, an explorer and surveyor who, among other things, was the first person to bring news of the discovery of gold in California to the east coast in 1848. In 1912 Beale’s descendants sold the massive property to a group of Los Angeles businessmen and developers headed by Harry Chandler, who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times. In 1936 this ownership group incorporated as the Tejon Ranch Company which since 1999 has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

When the Tejon Ranch Company decided to develop their property, after extensive negotiations with environmentalist organizations, in 2008 the company agreed to leave 90 percent of the property undeveloped. Evidence of the agreement being consistent with the environmentalist’s initial demands is documented in a 2006 letter sent to then Governor Schwarzenegger and other prominent politicians, signed by representatives of the Sierra Club, the NRDC, and several other environmentalist organizations. In the letter, the primary conditions of a compromise are noted as follows: “conservation biologists have recommended that approximately 90 percent (245,000 acres) of the Tejon Ranch be preserved to ensure that ecosystem processes are maintained.”

According to a spokesperson for Tejon Ranch, the mutually agreed upon conservation and land use agreement was reached in 2008 after several years of scientific study to identify the appropriate parts of the ranch for development and which parts should be conserved as habitat. But then something happened to nearly derail the entire project. One of the environmental groups that had all agreed to the Tejon Ranch conservation and land use plan, dropped out and sued the company under the California Environmental Quality Act, otherwise known as CEQA.

More than any other single piece of state legislfdeation, CEQA is the law that has stopped countless housing project applications from ever getting approved and built, and deterred countless developers from even trying to build projects in the state. It began innocently enough.

Signed into law by then Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970 to ensure that state projects anticipated and mitigated “significant environmental impacts,” CEQA at that time was a reasonable response to rapid growth across the state, and complying with CEQA typically required a manageable amount of time and expense. But in 1972 state judges determined that “state projects” meant any construction project that required government approval – and ever since, CEQA applies to all construction in the state of California.

Over the 50 years since then, CEQA has morphed into a beast that would be unrecognizable to its original proponents. Swollen beyond comprehension by decades of “clarifying” legislation, amendments, court precedents, and agency interpretations, CEQA is now a bottleneck that chokes and kills the good more than the bad, making California the worst place on earth for anyone to ever attempt to build anything.

More to the point, anyone can use CEQA to sue a developer. Consequently, just one group, the Center for Biological Diversity, decided to sue the Tejon Ranch Company to stop their projects. While at times joined by other environmentalist groups, this organization has been a consistent opponent of development plans on the Tejon Ranch.

There are four distinct Tejon Ranch development projects. All of them have been under assault In the south San Joaquin Valley, near the junction of Interstate 5 and the southernmost extremity of Highway 99 is the project that has progressed the furthest. This commerce center, called “The Oasis on I5,” already has gas stations, EV chargers, hotels, restaurants and retail outlets. The company is breaking ground as well on a mixed use community that will be located next to the outlets.

Moving south along I5, the next project is the Grapevine Master Planned Community, planned to include 12,000 homes and 5 million square feet of commercial space. This project was approved by Kern County in 2016, then sued by the Center for Biological Diversity in 2017. In the subsequent ruling the judge required the company to go back and make supplemental additions to their environmental impact statement regarding traffic impact. That was done and and approved in 2019, wherein the Center for Biological Diversity sued again over the reapproved project. That lawsuit was dismissed by the court in 2021.

According to Tejon Ranch representatives, to date the Center for Biological Diversity has either sued directly or filed lawsuits against other entities that are part of their development process a dozen times. They sued the expansion of the Tejon Ranch Commerce Center and lost, then appealed and lost again at the appellate court. As noted, they sued the Grapevine project and lost. CEQA was the basis for most all of these lawsuits.

The third project on the Tejon Ranch is Mountain Village, located in the mountains at the top of the pass navigated by I5 to connect the San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles. The project is to include resort amenities up to 700 hotel rooms and a residential community of 3,450 homes. This project fought Center for Biological Diversity lawsuits until the last case finally made it through the appellate court. Currently litigation free, the mountain village is fully approved and a final tract map has been approved by Kern County. But amidst the legal travails described thus far, nothing compares to the company’s fourth and biggest project.

The planned community named “Centennial” could be a poster child for the difficulty in building homes in California. Located on the southernmost section of the Tejon Ranch and inside Los Angeles County, by 2019 the company had gotten their plans approved by the county, but were immediately hit with two lawsuits that relied on CEQA. In separate judgements in 2021, the court ruled against all counts brought in the Center for Biological Diversity’s case, and against all but two counts in the other case. The company agreed to mitigate the two issues where the court ruled against them, and in late 2021 the plaintiff in that case agreed to a negotiated settlement. But it wasn’t over.

The nuances involved in what happened next perfectly illustrate how CEQA lawsuits have created burdens on developers that are so expensive and time consuming that only those with very deep pockets and the ability to endure years if not decades of delays can stay in the game. Although the Center for Biological Diversity had lost their lawsuit, within their filing was a statement that they agreed with the complaints in the other lawsuit. As a result, they are arguing they have the right to also negotiate a settlement agreement with the company, insofar as they didn’t agree with the terms of the settlement that the other plaintiff had negotiated. The case remains unresolved at this time.

The Center for Biological Diversity, with reported revenue of $27 million in 2022, has been around for a long time. Back in 1999, the New Yorker had this to say about the organization, “What’s unusual about the center is not so much its agenda, which is shared by the rest of the so-called deep-ecology wing of the environmental movement, as its effectiveness.” The article quotes Robin Silver, who remains a principal officer at the center, as saying that in order to accomplish their goals, “we will have to inflict severe economic pain.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that CEQA, which grants standing to almost anyone to sue to stop a development project, has enabled organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity to tie developments like the Tejon Ranch projects up in knots. California’s state legislature, to its credit, has recognized CEQA has become a monster, and to its discredit, hasn’t done anything about it. An appropriate reform would be to limit standing for lawsuits to district attorneys for California’s counties. Critics may consider that an extreme solution, but as it is, extremists have hijacked CEQA, and the “economic pain” is felt across the state. Working families in California cannot afford homes, and CEQA is the reason why.

As long as CEQA exists in its current form, companies in California with the resources to navigate endless lawsuits will eventually build their projects, but the number of housing projects that will ever get built will be fatally limited, and the prices that homebuyers will have to pay will remain punitively high.

As the Tejon Ranch projects slowly take shape in Southern California, Flannery Associates and their billionaire investors in Northern California should take note. With endless patience and after paying stupefying legal expenses, their dream of building a new city in Solano County may come true, but maybe not in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, residents of California who want an affordable home for their families have to wait, and wonder why.

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

California Set to Squander Billions on Offshore Wind

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It’s about time Californians of all ideological persuasions wake up and stop what is possibly the most economically wasteful and environmentally destructive project in American history: the utility scale adoption of offshore wind energy. 

The California Legislature intends to despoil our coastline and coastal waters with floating wind turbines, 20+ miles offshore, tethered to the sea floor 4,000 feet beneath the waves. Along with tethering cables, high voltage wires will descend from each of these noisy, 1,000 foot tall leviathans, but we’re to assume none of this will disrupt the migrations of our treasured Cetaceans and other marine and avian life, not the electric fields emanating from hundreds (thousands?) of 20+ mile long live power lines laid onto the ocean floor, nor from the construction, the maintenance, or the new ports, ships, and submersibles.

This article from Politico, published September 1, seems to celebrate the passage of AB 1373, which authorizes the California Dept. of Water Resources to go “shopping for offshore wind.” It includes this quote, “’Central procurement makes offshore wind possible,’ said Martin Goff, California project director for the Norwegian developer Equinor.” And massive subsidies, perhaps? 

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

With these financial failures behind them, Equinor is betting California can deliver a level of subsidies that were denied elsewhere, killing those projects. They’re probably right.

Last month Cal Matters published a reasonably balanced report describing local reaction to planned offshore wind developments in San Luis Obispo and Humboldt counties. But while the article quoted a paid proponent of the project dismissing skeptics as NIMBYs, it didn’t investigate the possibility of wind industry contributions flowing into the political campaigns of local elected officials, along with the bank accounts of supportive nonprofits, tribes, and media properties. Hundreds of billions in California taxpayer funded subsidies are at stake. 

The Cal Matters article reported the California Energy Commission’s goal to achieve 25 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. Hasn’t anyone calculated what that’s going to look like? Here is a best case scenario.

Even if these machines had a 40 percent yield, which is a realistic estimate of how frequently there will be enough wind to turn the rotors, and even if each machine had a capacity of 10 megawatts, 2,500 of them would be required to generate 10 gigawatts of baseload power.

Floating wind turbines with a capacity of 10 megawatts have barely been prototyped and have no long-term record of durability. As designed, each one is 1,000 feet from the waterline to the tip of the blade, and also require a commensurate flotation vessel and counterweight below the waterline. From tip to tip, they are longer than a U.S. Navy supercarrier.

Because these machines only generate power intermittently, generating 10 baseload gigawatts would require proportionate battery storage, along with thousands of miles of new undersea and land based high voltage lines. All this would only deliver 10 percent of the 100 gigawatt generating capacity Californians are going to need if the state legislature succeeds in forcing our residential and transportation sectors to go all-electric.

To get an idea of the environmental impact of offshore wind turbines, this article from the California Policy Center provides useful links to additional reports on the environmental destruction wrought by wind energy, both onshore and offshore. Wind turbines aren’t just Condor Cuisinarts. Along with raptors, condors, and other magnificent endangered birds, they kill bats and insects – their blades are at the altitude insect species migrate. 

Offshore, it’s worse. According to a recent study sponsored by a New England commercial fishing association, electromagnetic fields from undersea cables produce birth deformities in marine life and produce magnetic fields that disrupt the orientation abilities of some fish. Their low frequency operational noise disrupts sounds made by fish for mating, spawning, and navigating. The turbines “increase sea surface temperatures and alter upper-ocean hydrodynamics in ways scientists do not yet understand,” and “whip up sea sediment and generate highly turbid wakes that are 30-150 meters wide and several kilometers in length, having a major impact on primary production by phytoplankton which are the base of marine food chains.” 

Support for offshore wind by environmentalist organizations is inexplicable. Apparently, just say the magic words “climate crisis,” and anything goes.

In California, environmentalist safeguards, always a good idea, have been taken to extremes. On the California coast, hyper-regulation is the norm. Natural gas fueled generating plants situated on the California coast are being decommissioned. Diablo Canyon nuclear power station is one regulatory hiccough away from its demise. A desalination plant that would have made Orange County completely independent of imported water was struck down last year by the coastal commission. As for offshore rigs harvesting from some of the biggest reservoirs of oil and gas in the world? Shut them down! 

But if you want to stick thousands of floating wind turbines offshore, at stupefying cost, California’s Byzantine bureaucracy and captive taxpayers are here to help.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Demographics of Polarization

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Women around the world are having fewer than two children. But while population decline is well underway in most nations, there are a handful of nations that are still experiencing a population explosion. The implications of this challenge the foundations of cultural and national independence, most particularly in nations whose populations have stopped reproducing. The nations still experiencing rapid population growth have cultural traditions that stand in stark contrast to the nations with stable and declining populations. These profound demographic and cultural differences, when combined with a massive and ongoing transfer of people from high birth-rate nations into low birth-rate nations, introduces the potential for polarization on an almost unimaginable scale.

It isn’t as if the demographic trends haven’t been obvious for a very long time. In 1986, Ben Wattenberg published “The Birth Dearth,” where he pointed out that while America’s population was increasing in that decade, it was because the huge numbers of babies born during the post-WW2 baby boom were all grown up and having children. Population growth was not because young women were having lots of children. It was because a lot of mothers, born during the baby boom, had reached peak childbearing age. Per mother, children were not being born at replacement rates.

What Wattenberg was getting at can be visualized using what demographers refer to as population pyramids. Depicted below is a 2023 population pyramid for Europe. Women of prime childbearing years are shown in the 3rd and 4th rows from the bottom, where their percentage of the population is represented by the stacked red bars on the horizontal axis.

As can be seen, women aged 20-24 represent 2.5 percent of Europe’s population, and women aged 25-29 are 2.7 percent of the population. But men and women who are beyond the age when families are typically started represent larger percentages of the population. European men and women between the ages of 35 and 65, as counted in five year age groups, each represent around 3.5 of the population. The difference between Europeans aged 0-5 and those aged 60-64 is dramatic. There are nearly 60 percent more women aged 60-64 than girls aged 0-5. This is a population in rapid decline.

While overall, the population pyramid for the world indicates below replacement birthrates are already here, with an absolute population decline only one or two decades away, it would be a grave mistake to assume these demographic shifts are uniform across nations. The next population pyramid, depicted for the African continent, makes this dramatically clear. The population of Africa, already twice that of Europe, has quintupled since 1960, and continues to rapidly increase.

As shown on the chart below, the number of African women currently of child bearing age, about 4 percent of the population, is twice that of their mothers, who represent around 2 percent of the population, yet is only about half that of the babies, representing 7 percent of the population. Africa’s population is exploding, while in most of the rest of the world the population is imploding.

Even Elon Musk, a zillionaire whose fortune, at least that portion represented by his Tesla shares, would benefit from spreading climate alarm, has said that population collapse is a bigger challenge. In August 2022 he tweeted “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Demographers who ought to know better have ridiculed Musk for his concerns over a population implosion. From the Stanford academic journal MAHB, “Elon Musk is wrong about population growth.” From Wired, a slightly more emphatic “Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse.” The general thrust of these articles is Elon Musk should stick to rockets and cars (and tunnel boring machines and AI and social media, but never mind), because there is the “joy of smaller, older populations,” and “pronatalist” policies never work.

These demographers have no credibility. For example, South Korea’s current fertility per woman is a dismal 0.78, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 51,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

The Demographics of Polarization

There are two problems where mainstream demographers are in apparent denial. The first problem – how can the economy get bigger, or even just stay healthy, when the population is getting smaller – is easier to solve, which isn’t saying much because it compounds a perennial question that has ignited countless wars. The perennial question is what constitutes a just and equitable political economy that optimizes freedom and prosperity for all individuals.

The bloody legacy of that debate is written across the centuries, but through it all, there was a reliable assumption: every new generation will be more numerous than the one that came before it, which meant there was always growing opportunities to start businesses, find more customers, and generate wealth. And there were always more young people available to care for old people. It’s almost as if economic growth required a demographic pyramid scheme. And now that’s ending.

But there is a second, bigger problem with global demographics in this era, which is the uneven pace at which populations are shifting from growth to decline. And small wonder that Elon Musk’s warnings on this topic are dismissed as uninformed rants, because the fact that Africa’s population is exploding at the same time as the rest of the world’s population is collapsing is a phenomenon that will make any cautiously inoffensive analyst squirm. Here is a link to a map of the nations of the world, color coded according to each nation’s rate of population growth:

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination, much less formal training in demographics, to understand what this map documents. Apart from a few nations in South and Central America, and Papua New Guinea, every nation on earth has a below replacement birth-rate. That is, until you examine the nations in Africa and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia.

It is disingenuous for demographers to suggest that slow population decline is manageable, and leave it at that. After all, maybe it is. Maybe we need to discover how to maintain economic health in a world with slow population decline. But to say it’s going to take a century before the population of the world begins to significantly drop ignores two Elephants in the room. First, as things currently stand, within a century, if not sooner, the majority of people on earth will be African, and that reality will be exacerbated by the fact that by then the overwhelming majority of people under 25 will be African, and the only segment of the global population pyramid where there might remain a majority of people who are not African will be among the very elderly.

Clearly, this is an extrapolation, and extrapolations aren’t always predictive. But they’re also not based on imaginary data. These trends are playing out at breathtaking speed around the world. In Germany, where the nation-extinguishing low birth rate has risen slightly in recent years, the recent waves of immigrants are the reason why. Fully 27 percent of Germany’s newborns in 2022 were from mothers who were born somewhere else – primarily Africa and the Middle East. This percentage understates the impact of immigration is already having on Germany’s ethnic and cultural demography, because millions of mothers born in Germany are themselves children of recent immigrants.

In Western nations, the solution to population decline is to import millions of young and fecund Africans, Middle Easterners, and Central Americans. People are being transferred, en masse, from nations with rapidly growing populations into nations with declining populations. That seems logical, although it only defers the ultimate question, which is what happens when even people from these nations stop having children. Asian nations have chosen to restrict immigration, and instead are learning to cope with declining populations through, among other things, robotics and AI. What they are not doing is replacing themselves via mass immigration.

Which brings us to the hundred trillion dollar question. Is it desirable to replace the population of Europe with the population of Africa? Is it desirable to replace the population of the United States with refugees from the swelling populations of failed, chaotic, destitute nations? And if so, is it prudent to abandon the melting pot ideal of assimilation which worked so well for the first two centuries of America’s existence as a nation, and replace it with a multicultural ideal that in has devolved into something extremists use to deliberately nurture mutual resentment between immigrants and the host population? Or if assimilation is reestablished as a universally shared national priority, can it still work? Can Americans, more diverse than ever, rediscover and embrace common values and national unity?

Over the past few weeks we have seen literally millions of Leftists join forces with millions of Middle Eastern immigrants to flood the streets of American and European cities in support of Palestine. Underlying the anti-Zionist passion of these mobs is a related but deeper shared understanding: The privileged whites of Western nations are oppressors. They are culpable for the travails of the world, from devastated ecosystems to desperately poor nations. Their culture, their capitalism, their colonialism, and their Christianity are all engines of oppression. All of it must be utterly destroyed.

At what point do tribal hatreds, or just an unprecedented level of differences in tradition and culture between immigrant and host populations, erase the potential for reconciliation and unity? What brand of charismatic leadership can motivate millions of bitter rivals to abandon ages of murderous feuds and choose to unify, and how rare is that? Can debates over what constitutes an optimal political and economic system, inherent in any democracy but enough by itself to periodically engulf nations in civil conflict, withstand in addition to that historic instability the added challenge of tribal conflicts?

This is the modern face of multiculturalism. Perhaps diversity should be a strength to be celebrated, but in practice it has become polarizing. Even 20 years ago, such demonstrations of anti-Western power in the heartlands of Western nations would have been unthinkable. But demographic shifts, propelled by a plummeting population of Americans and Europeans and a burgeoning population of Africans and Middle Easterners, enabled by corporate and political special interests in the West who believe their economic survival depends on mass migration, have turned the unthinkable into reality. And it has only just begun.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Explaining the Inexplicable Popularity of Donald Trump

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AUDIO: Why is Donald Trump rising in the polls? – 10 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Trump’s Popularity is not Inexplicable

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In a routine that has become familiar of late, CNN’s Jim Acosta reports the ongoing ascendancy of Donald Trump in the polls with a mixture of dismay and disbelief. With these emotions front and center on his November 5 cable show, Acosta grimly reported the latest polling on the 2024 presidential candidates, noting that Trump is now ahead of Biden in five out of six crucial swing states. In Nevada, where Trump lost by 2 percentage points in 2020, Trump is now up by 11 points over Biden.

As Acosta proceeded to interview experts in an attempt to make sense out of this, the prevailing message was Biden is too old, and that has voters worried. David Frum, a reliable uniparty stalwart, reassured Acosta that “Trump is only three years younger than Biden,” and that Trump is so weak and elderly that he “can’t even open a jar of pickles.” The men then proceeded to applaud Biden as physically hale and hearty, dismissing concerns about his age as unwarranted.

Is that the best they can do? On November 5, during Acosta’s predictable series of questions with a predictably anti-Trump assortment of guests, nobody cared to acknowledge that people age at different rates. Once the conversation pivoted to rote condemnation of Trump for his many legal challenges, nor was there any acknowledgement that whatever wrongs Trump may have committed, they are easily matched by the Clintons and the Bidens.

Every voter in America who isn’t perpetually marinated in online and offline uniparty newspeak will consider these things to be objective fact: Trump is physically robust, Biden is not. Trump is a victim of politicized lawfare, Biden is not. But denying these facts is not only the compulsory position of America’s housebroken, government-approved influencers like Acosta and Frum, they are the entire basis of their case for Biden.

What one almost never sees from these purportedly balanced sources of news and information is the case for Trump. But on November 4, in an article published by BBC, there appeared a surprisingly fair summary of many of Trump’s goals if he is reelected. Entitled “What a Donald Trump second term would look like,” and contrary to what was probably the author’s intent (another example of how the establishment really doesn’t get just how out of touch it is), every one of the policies described came across as perfectly reasonable and badly needed.

To Trump’s supporters, the policies he’ll implement are well known. Secure the border. End birthright citizenship. Restore, as Trump has himself said over and over, a requirement that people migrating to America bring skills and sentiments that will enable them to easily assimilate and immediately become productive citizens.

The principle at work with these immigration policy reforms ought never to have slipped away. Americans have realized the disaster of the past three years violates every aspect of a sane immigration policy. There is no border security, and no criteria for legal entry that respects the interests of Americans already living here. And yet America’s government-approved media is in blithe denial of the harm caused by 10 million people who in just three years have swarmed across the border to overwhelm social services, break big city budgets, catalyze the spread of fentanyl, enable the infiltration of terrorist cells and cartel gangs, while driving prices up and wages down.

America’s broken immigration system, for whom the only beneficiaries are government bureaucrats and corporate financiers who simply want a bigger population in order for them to grow, respectively, their fiefdoms and their profits, has infuriated ordinary Americans. They’re done. And the only politician in the United States who unequivocally intends to fix it is Donald Trump.

Other policies the BBC report characterizes as “controversial” are, to the less tone deaf majority of Americans, nothing of the sort. “Opening the spigots” to permanently lower energy prices is a perfect example. If mass immigration of unskilled people creates opportunities to grow government while assaulting the middle class with new taxes to pay for it, lowering energy prices creates opportunities for the private sector to grow and create new jobs and enables working families to afford upward mobility and expand the middle class.

Trump’s common sense policies on energy extend to environmentalist issues in general. Instead of issuing executive orders that mandate extreme, bleeding edge “green” appliances and automobiles, or regulate new single family homes out of existence, Trump will restore sanity to America’s environmentalist policies and keep a middle class lifestyle affordable. Here too, Americans have realized the environmentalist movement, and the oligarchs who profit from it, have declared war on their way of life. They’ve had enough, and Trump is the only politician who thoroughly understands what’s happened and intends to fix it.

With respect to law and order, Trump also offends the status quo. He proposes to “round up the homeless and move them to tent camps outside US cities,” and of course, to the politically connected, heavily subsidized developers who are getting filthy rich building “supportive housing” at $500,000 per unit, or the social workers giving away food and free syringes, that’s an outrageous idea. But it’s the only idea that’s going to work. As it is, America’s homeless population is only incentivized to grow, spreading crime, addiction, chaos, disease and danger.

Control immigration in a manner that strengthens America instead of weakening and dividing it. Lower the cost of living by adopting a realistic all-of-the-above energy policy and rolling back extreme environmentalist regulations. Take away the incentives for people to give up and join America’s burgeoning homeless population. Enforce property and drug crimes not only to administer justice, but to deter would-be offenders. Require state school teachers to “embrace patriotic values.”

What heresy.

Biden’s message, and by extension the message of every institutional power that supports Biden and opposes Trump is easy to understand: You don’t matter. Hard work doesn’t matter. American traditions and values don’t matter. Nothing matters, actually, except to what extent you can present yourself as a victim of the people who built America because they worked hard, embracing American traditions and values.

The Trump alternative, proven during his first term, has terrified the opposition. They called Trump a warmonger and accused him of trying to “break up NATO.” Yet he negotiated peace agreements in the Balkans and the Middle East, and pressured NATO members to honor their funding commitments. They accuse Trump of trying to “destroy democracy,” at the same time as they wage unrelenting political persecution against Trump, dozens of his associates, and thousands of his followers.

According to the BBC and other terrified organs of the establishment, Trump’s team is working with conservative organizations to minimize the opportunity, if he is elected again, for a hostile federal bureaucracy to thwart his policy initiatives and executive orders. This is characterized by establishment apparatchiks as a threat to democracy. It is not. It is a long overdue repudiation of a politicized and biased bureaucracy that has usurped the authority that is constitutionally vested in a U.S. President.

What is a threat to democracy, however, are the plans to deny Trump victory in 2024, using tactics that worked in 2020. Regardless of whatever else may have been done against him in 2020 that constitutes voter fraud, the plain fact remains that there was an organized “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” for Biden, obscenely well funded. And as John Eastman testified in his disbarment trial – excellent, honest coverage by Rachel Alexander – there is ample evidence that laws were broken in order to affect the election outcome in crucial swing states.

If that’s not enough, as described by Dr. Robert Epstein in a series of recent Tim Pool video interviews, just manipulation of search results and targeted messages by social media platforms to encourage Democrats – and only Democrats – to go vote, has a dramatic impact on actual results, turning landslides into cliffhangers, and close races into easy Democratic wins.

Anyone who bothers to view alternative media, which is hard but not impossible to find, already knows all of this. Knowing the game is rigged, and it is, further explains Trump’s rise in the polls. He is the underdog, unfairly maligned, with policies that would help the American people. Standing in opposition to Trump is Joe Biden, who offers America and the world a future of war and poverty.

It isn’t the growing support for Trump that is inexplicable. It’s his apoplectic opposition.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California Bureaucrats Embrace Water Rationing

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On October 4 the California State Water Board held a hearing to discuss how it will implement Senate Bill 1157, passed by the state legislature in 2022, which lowers indoor water-use standards to 47 gallons per person starting in 2025 and 42 gallons in 2030. The title of the hearing was “Making Water Conservation a Way of Life.”  Rationing would be a more apt term for what’s coming for California’s households.

It isn’t as if conservation hasn’t been a way of life in California for decades. Despite the growth of the state’s population to over 39 million today, total urban water consumption in the state has been falling each year since the mid 1990s. At just over 7 million acre-feet (MAF) per year in 2022, urban water consumption hasn’t been this low since 1985, when the population of the state was only 26 million.

That’s not enough, however, for California’s water bureaucrats, and the environmentalist organizations they answer to. As they move toward implementing S.B. 1157, their officially stated goal is to reduce total urban consumption by 400,000 acre-feet per year by 2030. Put into the perspective of California’s total water withdrawals per year, this is small potatoes. Diversions for agriculture average 30 MAF per year, more than four times the urban use, and diversions — captured rainfall that is released from reservoirs during the summer and fall — to maintain ecosystem health range between 20 MAF in dry years to over 60 MAF in wet years. A reduction of 400,000 acre-feet in urban water consumption represents barely more than one-half of 1 percent of the amount of water California diverts and manages even in its driest years.

To implement such a massively intrusive regime of rationing for such a meager result is perhaps a textbook example of diminishing returns. Anyone living in California, or visiting from out of state, has seen evidence of what has already been done. Faucets in commercial buildings and airports that squirt out barely enough water to get your hands wet and automatically turn off before you’ve rinsed away the soap. Washing machines that use almost no water, violently tossing and damaging delicate clothing, taking hours to complete a cycle, and requiring multiple cycles to get clothes clean. Dishwashers so ineffective that dishes have to be hand washed prior to being loaded into the dishwasher. Flow restrictors on shower heads that make it impossible to rinse shampoo out of long hair. Yet according to the state legislature, these measures don’t go far enough.

Next on the list are lawns, and by extension, trees. It is a fact, perhaps willfully ignored by environmental activists masquerading as responsible investigative journalists, that when lawns are allowed to die, the mature trees growing on those lawns also die, because the root system is adapted to surface watering. And what’s the matter with lawns, anyway? According to the U.S. Department of Energy, turf lawns are on average 30 degrees cooler than asphalt and can be as much as 40 degrees cooler than artificial turf. Lawns not only lower the urban heat-island effect, they absorb runoff during storms to reduce flooding and recharge aquifers. As for toxic fertilizers, widely applied to lawns, these can be regulated or restricted. But instead, California’s legislature is banning lawns on commercial properties. Expect water agencies, faced with draconian mandates to reduce their supply, to impose similar bans on homeowners.

None of this is necessary. California’s original water plan, written in 1957, called for an eventual statewide system capable of delivering 40 MAF to farms each year, and 10 million acre feet to cities. As it has turned out, what they envisioned was never completed, but it is nonetheless the most remarkable system of interbasin water transfers in the world, delivering around 30 MAF per year to California’s farmers and around 7 million acre feet to the cities. Compared to the magnificent projects completed in the 1950s and 1960s, it would not take much additional investment to bring the total for cities back up to 9 million acre feet, which is where it was in the 1990s.

Skeptics will point out that California may be experiencing more severe droughts, but they will also acknowledge that there will in some years be winters such as the one we just lived through, where the entire state is inundated with prolonged and heavy rains. In the water season just ended in California, over 25 MAF of water passed through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and out to the Pacific. This is easily more than twice what is required for the health of delta ecosystems, and if that water had been stored it would have offered enough supplemental supply to easily withstand several years of drought. There are many ways to store this water that fulfill reasonable environmentalist sensibilities.

For example, channels cut into delta islands can have gravity-fed French drains that move water without harming fish. Engineering studies indicate that a 200-acre site could move 15,000 acre-feet per day during storms, and this water could be stored in vacant underground aquifers that are, just in the San Joaquin Valley alone, conservatively estimated to have a capacity of 75 MAF.

Other proposals also offer large-scale solutions to achieve water abundance. In a 2022 study, the Pacific Institute estimated that just through capturing urban runoff, up to 3 MAF could be stored each year, and that by recycling urban wastewater, capturing another 2 MAF per year is possible. And despite environmentalist objections, desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean has the potential to augment other local sources and render California’s massive southern coastal cities completely independent of imported water.

One of the trump cards wielded by environmentalists who want to ration California’s water is the connection between water and energy. They’re not wrong about the connection, but they overstate the problem. While energy is required to heat, treat, recycle, desalinate, and pump water, most of that energy is used for water heating. Overall, about 20 percent of California’s total energy consumption is allocated to water operations, but 80 percent of that is for heating. To put this in perspective, consider desalination, which is the next most energy-intensive water operation. Desalinating 1 million acre-feet of water per year would require a 400-megawatt input. That represents a 1.25 percent increase in California’s total electricity consumption, which in 2022 averaged 32 gigawatts. If California goes electric, something the state legislature is also determined to accomplish, they’ll have to find around 100 gigawatts, and allocating enough to desalinate a whopping million acre-feet of ocean water per year would require less than one-half of 1 percent of that.

Californians who are serious about climate change, unless they’re completely dominated by special interests and environmentalist extremists, need to take away the state’s many regulatory barriers to nuclear power and lobby the federal government to do likewise. They need to consider a more reasonable all-of-the-above approach to energy development, utilizing their abundant reserves of natural gas and oil, and commit to achieving energy abundance, which is a prerequisite to water abundance. As it is, the California legislature is doing the opposite.

What is being put in place today in California is a misguided set of laws that are removing the incentive for water agencies to invest in more water supplies. These laws will actually fine water agencies if they deliver too much water to their urban customers. To achieve the resilience that Californians are going to need in the future, whether it’s to adapt to prolonged droughts or to cope with other potential disruptions to a precarious network of pipelines, pumping stations, and aqueducts, precisely the opposite policy should be California’s legislative priority. Water agencies need to be incentivized to increase their supply capacity, not reduce it to a fragile minimum that lacks any margin for error.

An entirely new mentality must inform California’s voters and policy-makers, one that rejects rationing and embraces abundance. It is out of character for Californians, blessed with an innovative culture that inspires the world, to impose extreme restrictions on their residents. Water is life. Having as much as we need, affordable and abundant, is a goal that is achievable and sustainable. It’s time for Californians to reject extremist mandates and restore the quality of life that is in keeping with their heritage.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.