Tribalism and Democracy

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This latest war between Israelis and Palestinians, growing worse by the day, has its origins in the horrific slaughter of civilians by Hamas terrorists on October 7. It’s accurate to condemn this atrocity and blame Hamas for starting the war. It’s also completely reasonable to make a value judgement. Islamofascism is the greater evil and must not prevail. It terrifies not only Israelis but also countless millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East and beyond.

What’s much harder, however, if not impossible, is visualizing a solution to the underlying problem, which is two distinct peoples claiming the right to live in the same place.

And in this case, the powerful sentiments aroused on both sides point to bigger issues affecting everyone in the world. What defines a nation? What are the prerequisites for a functioning democracy? What is a legitimate justification for a population to live in a particular place?

According to Palestinians, at least those who want Jews expelled from Palestine, Jewish Zionists are colonial oppressors who over the past century have flooded into their land by the millions and stolen it from them. According to the Israelis, especially the right-wing faction, this land is their land and it has belonged to them for thousands of years.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an extreme version of similar conflicts occurring around the world. In nations settled by Europeans, a growing number of activists are now claiming they are living on “stolen land.”

There is an obvious problem with using the stolen land argument to delegitimize the presence of an entire people living somewhere, which is that with rare exceptions, no land of any value, anywhere on earth, is not currently occupied by people who did not themselves displace previous occupants, who in most cases had in-turn also displaced previous occupants. For example, native tribes in the Americas fought each other for land long before Europeans arrived.

Even the fact that in antiquity Israelis lived in what is present day Israel cannot escape a stolen land accusation. Before the Jews entered what they referred to as the promised land, others already lived there. The first three verses of the Old Testament’s Deuteronomy Chapter 7 offers a vivid description of that moment:

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”

Conquest, like slavery, is a fact of human history, common to almost every culture and found in every century. Before Christian crusaders fought to conquer Jerusalem in 1099, it was conquered by Islamic armies in 635. What’s changed is that in modern times we have evolved to the point where the consolidating finale to conquest in earlier centuries – to destroy the vanquished totally and show them no mercy – is condemned as genocide. That’s progress. Let’s not go backwards. But is democracy up to the task of reconciling antagonistic tribes, both intact, living on the same land

Where do you draw the line when making the stolen land argument? Does the establishment of a Jewish state in 1407 BC lend it more legitimacy than the preexisting ownership of land by Palestinians in 1948? If you’re talking to a Palestinian, that’s a hard argument to make with a straight face.

In the face of such unyielding passion and baffling complexity, what can an American, trying to be true to our finest ideals, make of the latest, horrifying events unfolding in the Middle East? As a nation committed to human rights, striving for moral worth in its foreign policy choices, is there any solution that can finally find universal appeal?

The so-called “two state solution” may have had a chance at one time, but rather than look for blame at the failure of a two-state solution to have ever worked despite many serious attempts, consider where we stand today. The four maps shown on this link are reasonably accurate representations of how Palestinian ownership has shrunk over the past 75 years. The West Bank, which was part of Jordan until 1967, might have been a Palestinian state, but today, the areas still occupied by Palestinians has been cut into dozens of pieces, following decades of relentless expulsions by Jewish settlers. This is still going on.

This reality bespeaks a difficult question: Is it realistic to think Palestinians would be willing to accept a two-state solution that offers them a territory that is cut into dozens of small pieces, surrounded by Jewish settlers occupying land that was not taken 75 years ago, but in some cases only months ago? And if the answer is no, as it is likely to be, is it realistic to think Jewish settlers are going to be willing to vacate enough land on the West Bank to give back a viable, contiguous territory to the Palestinians? Also, probably not.

Which brings up an even bigger question: Why aren’t Jews in Israel willing to accept a unitary state, a democracy where everyone living in the territory “from the river to the sea” gets one vote? And here we must ask, what defines a nation? It clearly isn’t just borders, because the borders of Israel, inclusive of Gaza and the West Bank, constitute a more viable geographic and economic unit than the fragmented jigsaw puzzle proposed as a “two state solution.” But nations aren’t merely defined by logical economic geography.

Israelis, regardless of whether or not you consider their territorial claims to be valid, are concerned that in a unitary state, their identity as a Jewish nation would be imperiled. Is it valid for Israelis to reject the prospect of living in a territory where a majority Muslim population, through the democratic process, determines their destiny? Is anyone surprised that Palestinians resent being disenfranchised in land that, at least in modern times, they used to call their own?

Asking who has the ultimate right to live in Israel, or Palestine, is an impossible question to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. But the larger question remains. What defines a nation? If the right to “self-determination” doesn’t apply to tribes of people unified by their language, culture, and heritage, does it still have any meaning? Most people would agree that at some point, it is not fair to suggest nations, and the people who live in them, don’t have the right to protect their culture from being overwhelmed by a new democratic majority that cannot or will not assimilate.

If you are not in favor of a unitary state in Israel/Palestine, where there is only one nation, and only one electorate, then you must question the alleged virtues of multiculturalism everywhere. You must question the wisdom of mass migration into Europe and the United States. And you’d better pay close attention to the relative birth rates of migrants  versus people with native ancestry.

If Israel, as a nation, welcomes Jewish immigrants, but admits non-Jewish immigrants sparingly, what might Germany require, or the United States? Can the United States at least begin wielding its immigration policy in its own national interest, requiring from every one of its new residents a productive combination of skills, health, wealth, and cultural compatibility? Shall the United States be willing to define “cultural compatibility” and incorporate that as a fundamental element of its immigration policy? And if not willing to do that, at least to some degree, can the United States call itself a nation?

The battles between Israel and the Palestinians who believe themselves to have been displaced by Israelis very likely cannot be resolved. Two peoples are determined to live in one land. This is not unique in history. What is unique is only our hope, in this post-modern, allegedly enlightened age, that somehow eventually they can live together in peace. That may prove to be wishful thinking.

In nations where competing tribes with distinct cultures vie for political control, democracy is the engine of empowerment for the majority, and the engine of destruction for the minority. As war rages again in the Middle East, it only requires a glance at the collateral turmoil on the streets from Chicago to Berlin to see what’s at stake. We are all settlers. We are all illegitimate. And just like the Israelis, we have nowhere else to go.

Shall Israelis consent to live in a nation where they are a hated minority? Shall Americans or Europeans choose this fate? While they still can, in the nations they still call their own, it would be wise for Americans and Europeans to avoid a similar intractable reality.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Climate Data Refutes Crisis Narrative

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On September 16, with great fanfare, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced his office had filed a lawsuit against five major oil companies. Accusing them of knowingly misleading the public regarding the alleged harm that fossil fuels would inflict on the climate, Bonta’s office seeks billions in compensatory damages. But the climate change theory that Bonta’s case relies on must ultimately be validated by observational data. And the data does not support the theory.

Suing oil companies is becoming big business. Along with California, state and local government climate change lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry have been filed in Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Hawaii. Alleging these companies have directly caused global warming and extreme weather, they seek damages for consumer fraud, public nuisance, negligence, racketeering, erosion, flooding and fires.

These cases will take years to resolve, and even in victory, will cost oil companies hundreds of millions (or more) in legal fees, costs that will be passed on to consumers. The plaintiffs were handed a huge advantage in 2007 in the Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency case, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 ruling, gave the EPA authority to declare CO2 a dangerous pollutant. In 2009, the EPA did just that, paving the way for litigation.

It’s no certainty the oil industry will aggressively fight these lawsuits. If a broad settlement can be reached, that is probably their preference. Not only will a settlement avoid bad publicity, there is scant economic motive for oil companies to challenge the alleged consensus on climate change. As regulations, restrictions, and litigation disrupts oil and gas development, demand outpaces supply and prices go up much faster than production costs. A rational choice by oil and gas executives would be to collect market-driven record revenues and split the windfall profits with the government. That is a lot less messy.

That’s also a shame. By sidestepping the question of whether CO2 is indeed a dangerous pollutant, and instead leaving that decision up to a politicized EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Massachusetts v. EPA case issued a deeply flawed ruling. Without CO2, life on earth as we know it would not exist. CO2 is plant food, and without it, plants die. There is evidence that more atmospheric CO2 would have a primarily beneficial impact on planetary ecosystem health. If oil and gas companies defended themselves on this basis, they might take a case all the way to the Supreme Court and force a reversal of Massachusetts v. EPA.

An aggressive defense against Bonta’s lawsuit by Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips,, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute would attack the core premise of the plaintiffs, the alleged evidence of global warming and extreme weather. Because what is being presented as “evidence” supporting a climate “crisis” is consistently misleading and often outright fraudulent.

Earlier this month in Orange County, California, at an event attended by water industry executives, a debate between two climate experts offered a revealing look into the tactics and the mentality of the climate alarmists, as well as the beleaguered integrity of climatologists still willing to challenge the narrative.

In a session with the unsubtle name “Is it fair to blame climate change for everything?,” two very divergent points of view were on display. To represent the alarmist perspective, a professor from a world-famous university – who shall remain anonymous – presented a series of maps of the U.S., with a specific focus on the Southwest and on California. The maps depicted “before climate change” and “after climate change” scenarios, using the now familiar technique of benign blue and green overlays in areas with normal cool temperatures, and scary orange and red overlays in areas suffering alarming heat. Predictably enough, without delving into the details, the “after climate change” maps were a sea of red and orange.

The only thing about this presentation that was certain was the certainty of the presenter. We are in a climate crisis, human activity has caused this crisis, and “the evidence is overwhelming.” We only later learned that the maps being displayed weren’t based on actual temperature observations, but had been produced by a computer simulation.

After this first presenter finished, Dr. John R. Christy stepped up to offer a different conclusion. With a Ph.D in Atmospheric Science and currently serving as the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama, Christy is eminently qualified to share his views on our climate future. As a native of California, Christy assured the audience that he has been giving that state special attention his entire life. He then presented a series of slides that unequivocally contradict what we hear every day. California, to say nothing of the rest of the world, is not experiencing rapid warming, nor is it experiencing unusually violent weather.

Christy’s message might be summarized as follows: There may be some warming occurring over the past century in California, but it is not extreme, nor is it accompanied by unusually severe anything: droughts, extreme wildfires, heavy rainfall, diminished snowpacks, reduced river volumes, or drier air. Readers are encouraged to scroll through Christy’s charts, which are reposted (with permission) following this text.

The data that Dr. Christy used in his presentation did not come from hypothetical climate models, but were compiled from actual climate and weather observations gathered by weather stations and satellites and extracted from databases maintained by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other internationally recognized official sources.

If you haven’t heard of John R. Christy despite him being one of the preeminent climate scientists in the world, that’s no accident. Along with Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr. Judith Curry, and hundreds of others, his work is marginalized and his press and online coverage is either nonexistent or negative. Back in 2019, back when President Trump’s regulatory reforms had the climate industrial complex fearing for its life, Dr. Curry published an expose of what she dubbed “consensus enforcement.” In it, she described how the world’s most prestigious climate journals were yielding to pressure – mostly supported by their own editorial management – to refuse to publish anything by climate “contrarians.”

As we know, suppression of unwanted facts and analysis regardless of credibility or intent is not restricted to climate contrarians. In March 2023, Michael Shellenberger – once honored in 2008 as a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” testified before the U.S. Congress on what many have joined him in calling the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a coalition of corporate special interests, government agencies, and major online platforms that smothers honest dialog on topics of urgent national importance.

Attempting to compile information on climate that doesn’t support a crisis narrative is demonstrably challenging, as anyone attempting to use a mainstream search engine will quickly attest. For every analysis or declaration that may exist, claiming there is not a climate crisis, search engines will offer a page full of reports debunking the analysis and discrediting the source. Often it is almost impossible to even find a link to the analysis or the declaration itself. The World Climate Declaration, a petition signed (so far) by more than 1,800 experts who assert there is no climate emergency, is an example of a suppressed and unfairly stigmatized document. But with or without great numbers, the presence of scientists like Christy, Lindzen, Curry, and many others with extraordinary credentials who make this claim should put to rest the notion that the science is settled. Science is not a democracy. It is a search for truth through trial and error.

One of the saddest examples of suppression is the reluctance of conservative editors to challenge the scientific arguments used to support the climate crisis narrative. An article I recently wrote for American Spectator, “California AG Sues Big Oil for Telling the Truth About Fossil Fuels,” was refused by two conservative publications that have frequently accepted my work. Both of them have significant reach and credibility among mainstream conservatives. Rather than identify them, which is not necessary to make the point, here are verbatim excerpts from the rejection emails I received from each editor:

“We’ll pass on this, but thanks for showing it in. On the question of climate change, there’s no editorial line, but I tend to be uneasy about publishing anything directly on the science (mainly because I am not a scientist). Much more interesting to me is how climate policy is being abused (SEC, Fed) and how much of it makes no sense even by its own lights.”

And,

“Ed—we generally avoid getting too deeply into climate science, as it is very hard for me to judge. That is different than the economic trade-offs, absurd mandates, the unavoidability of fossil fuel energy to meet the needs of a growing, ever-more technology-driven society, etc. So I think we should pass on this one, as it does contain some strong climate claims…”

Got that? “Because I’m not a scientist,” and “it is very hard for me to judge.”

But that does not stop any of the crisis mongers. Is Rob Bonta a scientist? Gavin Newsom? Joe Biden? Al Gore? Greta Thunberg? How many of the in-house editors at the Los Angeles Times are scientists, much less climate scientists? But none of these people have any reluctance to hector us with their opinions, often not even derived from those climate scientists who are part of the “consensus,” but lifted from other pundits who got their material directly from press releases that featured cherry picked “impactful” nuggets taken from abstracts and summaries which in turn were exaggerations and misrepresentations of studies that even in their totality were paid for, inherently biased exercises.

If being a scientist is not a requirement for being a climate alarmist, it should not be a requirement for anyone skeptical of climate alarmism. Our capacity as intelligent non-scientists to assess competing scientific analysis may be limited, but no more so than the Bontas, Newsoms, Bidens, Gores, and Thunbergs of the world. And it isn’t hard to see an agenda at work, when every time the climate so much as hiccoughs, every mainstream news source in the world is regurgitating precisely the same terrifying soundbites and images, and repeating the same phrases and admonitions over and over and over again. Confronting such obvious and coordinated propaganda should raise skepticism in anyone with common sense and a sense of history.

If you concede the science, and only challenge the policies that a biased and politicized scientific narrative is being used to justify, you’re already playing defense in your own red zone. You’re going to lose the game. Who cares if we have to enslave humanity? Our alternative is certain death from global boiling! You can’t win that argument. You must challenge the science, and you can, because scientists like John Christy and others are still available.

The following charts were presented by Dr. Christy on October 13 at a conference in Southern California:

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This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Fight for the Future of California

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AUDIO: A wide ranging and lengthy discussion over our ongoing fight, against the odds, to secure a future of prosperity and freedom for all Californians. Topics covered include public sector union power, environmentalist extremism, the coalition of special interests that control the state, and its consequences for quality education, law and order, and the cost-of-living. Edward Ring with Paul Preston, host of Agenda 21 Radio.

To view, click here and skip to 2:03:30 for Ring’s portion of the broadcast.

Greening the Urban Food Desert

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When it comes to food, America’s cities enjoy precarious abundance. We take for granted the remarkable system that allows us close proximity to chilled and gleaming shelves, loaded with apricots from Spain, avocados from Mexico, cheese from France, wine from South Africa, chocolate from Belgium, fish that was originally farmed and frozen somewhere in China; pretty much any food we can imagine, from anywhere in the world. By the billions, trucks, trains, ships and planes traverse land, sea and air to bring us a cornucopia of plenty unprecedented in history.

While California is by massive margins a net food exporter, even within the state a gigantic distribution machine is required. Just feeding the 7 million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area requires transporting up to 3 million tons of food per day.

For all its well oiled, atomized and market driven efficiency, the machine isn’t perfect. If the geography of food availability were viewed as a biosphere, most of America’s cities would be lush forests. But in a phenomenon almost perfectly correlated with income, huge swaths of the urban landscape would be what has become characterized as a food desert. Defined as any “area with no ready access to a store with fresh and nutritious food options within one mile,” an estimated 23 million people live in food deserts, and about half of these food deserts are in the heart of America’s biggest cities.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to determine the consequences of this desertification. Low income households can’t afford fresh organic fruits and vegetables, or grass fed beef and free range antibiotic-free chicken. Often working two jobs and raising children in single parent households, these residents not only don’t have enough money to buy healthy food, they also don’t have the time to travel across town to the nearest supermarket that may be several miles away. A healthy choice is not an option.

Instead they walk to the corner store, where in between the racks of cheap liquor, box wine, and 40 ounce cans of Colt 45, for around $5.00 (much less in a supermarket) they can pick up a 14 ounce can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs. Get a load of some of the ingredients: Wheat Gluten, Glyceryl Monostearate, Mechanically Separated Chicken, Bleached Wheat Flour, Thiamine Mononitrate, Soy Protein Concentrate, Caramel Color, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hydrolyzed Corn Gluten, Soy Protein And Wheat Gluten, Ammonium Chloride, Enzyme Modified Cheese, Sodium Phosphate, Soybean Oil. Etc. Yum.

Or, better yet, food desert dwellers buy what we affectionately refer to as “fast food.” Some people call it “junk food.” Both terms are accurate. But boy does it taste good. And it’s cheap.

Imagine that an extraterrestrial, first time visitor to our planet, a humanoid with a physiology and culinary instincts identical to our own and no preconceived biases or preliminary briefings, upon arrival is offered two very distinct meals. The first, a wild caught Halibut, grilled and served with long grain rice and perfectly blanched baby green beans. The second, a MacDonald’s Big Mac, straight from the warming bin, accompanied by a bag of hot and salty, crispy, greasy french fries. Will anyone bet which meal would elicit the most enthusiastic response?

If someone like this, entirely unfamiliar with healthy food, or, for that matter, haute cuisine, traveled to an American city on a mission to identify the finest, tastiest food, they might well render unsettling judgments. Such is the nature of the so-called food swamp, urban spaces where food of all kinds, healthy and unhealthy, fast-food and food requiring preparation, processed food and unprocessed raw vegetables and fruit, is all widely available. But what costs more? The center cut of a wild Halibut filet, or a Big Mac Meal? Clue: If the menu item has the term “AQ” or “market price,” next to the Halibut special, it won’t be a hit with the natives. Equally germane, what tastes better?

It’s easy enough to claim a refined palette, and decry the gauche, insidious, shallow, vapid, cloying vulgarity of fast food flavors, but perhaps one doth protest too much. Who among us, when we’re being honest with ourselves, does not appreciate the slick, lubricious mouthfeel of a sizzling cheeseburger, dripping with saturated fat? In the real world, making the healthy choice is often an acquired taste, from which all but the strongest among us occasionally relapse.

Hence the emphasis on nutritional education. According to the National Institute of Health,
“government programs and community interventions have shown promise through creating supermarkets, farmers’ markets, and community gardens, but health literacy and behavior modification related to meal choices are just as essential.” Despite efforts spanning decades, not all inner-city areas have such programs in place. It’s not easy. Choosing between a pepperoni pizza and a bowl of tofu and quinoa can be a struggle even among people who are hyper-literate regarding food choices. And while the eventual afflictions of gout, stroke, reflux, diabetes, and cancer can motivate any rational person to eat wisely, it’s also very easy to convince oneself that one more slice can’t hurt. Millions of Americans will engage in that reasoning every day for forty years, or until they’re struck down, whichever comes first.

But nonetheless, even if there are enlightened consumers who live in a food swamp, fortified with sufficient willpower to consistently reject sweets, grease, and problematic chemical additives, can they afford to eat the good stuff? Maybe. Frozen food, which will keep indefinitely and can often include minimally processed ingredients, is surprisingly affordable. Target, for example, sells several relatively healthy frozen entrees. They offer “Carbon Neutral” Butternut Squash and Sage Ravioli, 310 calories, for $4.29. Pesto Tortellini “made with organic wheat and basil,” 530 calories, for $5.89, “Plant-Based” Frozen Mandarin Orange Crispy Chick’n, 520 calories, for $4.99, and Vegan Frozen Natural Foods General Tso’s Tofu, 370 calories, also for $4.99.

One may argue these are not entirely healthy choices. But how affordable is affordable? MacDonalds may no longer have items for one dollar on their “Dollar Menu,” but they still offer their McChicken Sandwich, packing 400 calories, for $1.99. On Fridays, or “Fry Days,” they’ll throw in a medium order of fries for free. Ditto for the “McDouble,” formerly known as the Double Cheeseburger, which will sluice another 400 savory calories into your gut for a mere $2.59. What are you going to eat, when time is short and money is shorter? General Tso’s Tofu, or, for half as much money, a McDouble?

And then again, what the corporation giveth, the corporation taketh away. In September 2023 Target announced the closure of nine locations in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, citing theft, and saying “its business had been hurt and the safety of employees and customers was at risk.” Government incentives can mitigate, to a point, financial risk. But if the neighborhood around a large retailer is mobbed with stupefied addicts, methamphetamine addled psychopaths, if feces and syringes litter the sidewalk, and unpredictable and traumatic events repeatedly occur where terrifying smash and grab gangs brazenly steal merchandise, customers will stay away and employees will quit. Before a food desert can be irrigated, the locusts must be brought under control. Order must be restored.

Another way to deliver healthy food in America’s inner cities is to grow it on site, and in an intriguing twist, some of the urban gardens springing up are leaning into the street culture and thrive under an apparent truce. In South Central Los Angeles, a self-described rebel by the name of Ron Finley, dubbed the “Gangster Gardener,” has transformed vacant lots in his neighborhood into community gardens. Finley, and the beneficiaries of his efforts, no longer have to “drive 45 minutes just to get a fresh tomato.”

In Oakland, Miguel Altieri, an Agroecology professor at UC Berkeley, has analyzed the potential in that city to green its food desert through urban farming. He determined that “Oakland has 1,200 acres of undeveloped open space – mostly public parcels of arable land – which, if used for urban agriculture, could produce 5 to 10 percent of the city’s vegetable needs. This potential yield could be dramatically enhanced if, for example, local urban farmers were trained to use well-tested agroecological methods that are widely applied in Cuba to cultivate diverse vegetables, roots, tubers and herbs in relatively small spaces.”

Around the U.S. similar research and projects are transforming vacant urban land into farms. A 2011 study of urban farming potential in Cleveland found that if 80% of every vacant lot were converted to agricultural use, it would “generate between 22% and 48% of Cleveland’s demand for fresh produce (vegetables and fruits) depending on the vegetable production practice used (conventional gardening, intensive gardening, or hydroponics), 25% of both poultry and shell eggs.”

There’s plenty of places where this could work. Consider suburban Detroit, a city where in just a few decades the population has dropped from nearly two million to less than 700,000. A city where decaying roads now bend past groves of cottonwood, oak and silver maple, where deer and jack rabbits now forage in tall grass. Until you pass a burned out ruin of a home, not yet removed, obscured by greenery, it is difficult to imagine that these neighborhoods once were filled with homes, set 35 feet apart and carpeting the land for mile after mile. Why not farm this land?

When considering the sustainability options for inner cities that confront what has been referred to as an economic doom loop, as they are hollowed out by COVID, crime, remote work, and in some cases, overpriced and unaffordable real estate, urban agriculture is a fascinating opportunity. If urban gardens grow on vacant land in cities that are restructuring economically and decentralizing geographically, greening the food desert is an apt metaphor, but it also is a welcome aesthetic reality. Along with the warm embrace of new buildings constructed using cross-laminated timber instead of concrete, troubled urban cores and the surrounding neighborhoods can become inviting spaces. With the potential for indoor agriculture to utilize urban structures that are no longer viable as commercial office space, it is possible that urban food deserts can indeed turn green.

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

Will Americans Fight for Globalism?

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Imagining a cascade of catastrophic escalations plunging humanity into the next world war is no longer a stretch, and it could happen fast. Israel invades Gaza to destroy Hamas, and Hezbollah goes to war. America targets Hezbollah to help defend Israel, and Iran and Syria, with Russian assistance, attack Israel. Hezbollah cells strike targets within America, and Israel and America strike targets inside Iran. Russia launches a major new offensive in Ukraine with support from Belarus. China openly supports Russia and Iran with weapons. All of this is more plausible than ever.

It also shouldn’t be necessary to debate moral distinctions. Gaza, Lebanon under Hezbollah, and Iran, are all ruled by ruthless Islamic extremists. Syria and Russia are corrupt and brutal dictatorships. China is a fascist ethno-state. Whatever Israel and America’s shortcomings may be, they don’t begin to rise to the level of oppression of these rivals.

During the Cold War, when memories of the 2nd World War were still relatively fresh in the minds of Americans, that sort of moral argument was enough. We weren’t perfect, but the Soviets, who had to build a 4,000 mile long fence to keep millions of their most talented subjects from migrating to Western nations, were obviously much worse. That moral distinction got us through the Korean War, and though more fitfully, it got us through the Vietnam War. And then it was enough to justify massive defense spending during the Reagan years. Ultimately, this containment doctrine worked. In 1989 an exhausted Soviet Union dissolved and the Iron Curtain came down.

Today, though it shouldn’t be, it is necessary to revisit all these premises. To begin with, the American people have changed. When the Cold War began, 90 percent of Americans were of various European descent, and the conflicts of the early 20th century had a unifying impact on the culture, erasing much of the bitterness left over from the Civil War as well as most of the tribal animosities their families might have brought with them from Europe. That has all changed.

Starting in the 1960s, America’s demographics have been transformed at a pace never seen before in its history. Newborns in America today are less than 50 percent white, and these nonwhite students are growing up in a nation where, primarily in Democrat dominated urban areas, they are taught in public schools to resent and distrust white people. For at least the last 30 years, in a process that has worsened every decade, every unifying norm in American society has been under assault by the institutions we have traditionally relied on to protect and reinforce national unity.

One must wonder what America’s leaders are thinking when they endlessly assert that “diversity is our strength” at the same time as they’ve spent years saturating mainstream news commentary with warnings about white supremacists and “systemic racism.” If you want to convince people to go to war with a foreign enemy, you might refrain from encouraging them to go to war with one another.

This is one of the conundrums of incorporating such a flawed model of globalism into a national agenda. If you fracture a nation’s ethnic homogeneity at the same time as you anoint the new arrivals as victims of oppression by the people already living there, you’re going to divide and weaken that nation.

Globalism as it is currently expressed has other flaws, particularly if the goal is to convert a nation into a powerful and persuasive agent of a globalist agenda. Indoctrinating children that are barely old enough to talk to think they can choose their sex is guaranteed to set an unacceptable percentage of them onto a road fraught with confusion and worse, while infuriating millions of parents. Moving from tolerance to obligatory endorsement of LGBT culture across every cultural institution is divisive; shifting the abortion debate from the heartbeat threshold to no restrictions right up until the ninth month is evil. And yet these are some of the terms of mainstream conformity in America today.

Is this what Americans are going to be asked to fight for, if the conflicts we’re heading into expand into war commitments that can’t be fulfilled by a volunteer military and a peacetime economy? Shall we be drafted, trained, and sent to die so America’s establishment institutions can continue to marginalize if not explicitly demonize white people, straight men, Christians, and concerned parents as oppressors, at the same time as they teach nonwhites, LGBTQs, atheists and people of non-Christian faiths to believe they are victims who live in a hostile nation?

Who will be left to fight, and what will they fight for? Not America’s historic traditions or values, which are now controversial if not toxic. Nor may we fight to preserve our standard of living, which is now seen as unsustainable.

The impact of the globalist green agenda has only begun to be felt, but it is already further alienating millions of Americans from their government and the utterly corrupt corporations that are complicit in the project. To allegedly save us all from a “climate crisis,” development and use of oil, natural gas, and coal is being halted. For reasons clearly unrelated to climate change, but apparently equally compelling, development and use of hydroelectric power and nuclear power is also being slowed down if not completely stopped. Instead, energy is now going to come from wind, solar and biomass energy, with massive battery backup systems to buffer their intermittency. These are horridly destructive to the environment, require more raw materials than we’ll ever manage to extract, and cannot possibly deliver the amount of energy the nation (or the world) requires to prosper.

The consequences of “Green” policies are the primary reason why most Americans can no longer afford to own homes or pay rent, buy gasoline, or pay their utility bills. And these elevated prices for essentials factor into price increases for everything else. How will doing this make America strong enough to withstand a prolonged military conflict with peer adversaries?

In a nation with a divided people, most of them alienated from their government, saying we’re not as bad as our enemies may no longer be enough to make people willing to fight and die. If all that globalist visionaries who inform our government, and the corporations that control it, and the uniparty puppets who pretend to be our representatives have to offer us is a future where we’ll own nothing – eating bugs, replacing faith with narcissism, exchanging love for AI, fearing encounters with actual living people whenever we take off the VR goggles, packed into “pods” inside megacities like cattle, wasting away, childless, aimless – and be happy, who cares?

Green. Woke. Such are the globalists who control America today. Unless that changes, this is what we’re going to be asked to fight for, and impose on any nations that resist, whether it’s tomorrow or years from now. We will be told we are going to war to save the planet from regimes that deny the climate crisis, and to liberate the world from fascism, racism, tribalism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and now, transphobia.

To be sure, if this plays out among the actors confronting us today, the nations we may be asked to fight are undeniably worse. They commit atrocities. They don’t bother with psyops to manipulate their people into compliance, they just brutalize and slaughter them. But those nations, and the regimes that control them, also reject globalism for all the repellent features that presently define it. For just that one thing, and not in any way to excuse the rest, can we honestly blame them?

Perhaps the globalists that run America should reconsider their strategy. If they want Americans to fight for them, they need to give back a future worth dying to protect. Get the monopolistic corporations under control so they have to compete with each other and make goods affordable again. Knock off all the divisive “woke” garbage. Quit pretending there’s a climate crisis when it’s obvious that the true motivation is to consolidate property ownership and control of resources. Stop flooding the nation with millions of people who are then trained to hate us, if they don’t already.

Make America overwhelmingly strong again. Make America affordable again. Modify if not entirely scrap the globalist agenda that’s being imposed on the rest of the world. Nobody wants it. Then, and only then, ask Americans to fight. At that point, if those things were done, it probably would no longer be necessary.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Can You Be Convicted of Lying if You’re Telling the Truth?

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AUDIO: A discussion about California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit accusing oil companies of intentionally deceiving the public about their alleged role in causing global warming. This podcast, which has a pretty big audience, earned some stinging criticism for my suggestion that we need renewed and vigorous debate over whether fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. Edward Ring with Will Swaim, host of National Review’s Radio Free California.

(segment begins 1:02:00, click here to listen to podcast)

Offshore Wind is an Economic and Environmental Catastrophe

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When it comes to “renewables” wreaking havoc on the environment, wind turbines have stiff competition. For example, over 500,000 square miles of biofuel plantations have already replaced farms and forests to replace a mere 4 percent of transportation fuel. To source raw materials to build “sustainable” batteries, mining operations are scaling up, with no end in sight, in nations with appalling labor conditions and nonexistent environmental regulations. But the worst offender is the wind industry.

America’s wind power industry somehow manages to attract almost no negative coverage in the press, or litigation from environmentalists, despite causing some of the most obvious and tragic environmental catastrophes so far this century. Last August I wrote about the ongoing slaughter of whales off America’s northeast coast thanks to construction of offshore wind turbines:

“When you detonate massive explosives, repeatedly drive steel piles into the ocean floor with a hydraulic hammer, and blast high decibel sonar mapping signals underwater, you’re going to harm animals that rely on sound to orient themselves in the ocean. To say it is mere coincidence that hundreds of these creatures have washed ashore, dead, all of a sudden, during precisely the same months when the blasting and pounding began, is brazen deception.”

Nonetheless, when the story can’t be buried, deception is the strategy. Not one major environmental organization, government watchdog agency, or media outlet has called for a slowdown in industrial offshore wind projects. Instead, they repeatedly claim these allegations are misinformation. And from that paragon of truth, FactCheck.org, we get this: “No Evidence Offshore Wind Development Killing Whales.”

Let’s set aside the obvious negative impact on whale populations of tens of thousands of marine surveying and construction sorties into offshore areas where shipping traffic has never before been concentrated, or the impact of noise and explosions on not one site, such as would be the case with a lone oil rig, but on thousands of sites, each one being prepared for an offshore wind turbine. The destruction wrought by wind turbines extends well beyond what it’s doing to whales.

A report just released by a New England fishermen association summarizes research they completed on offshore wind projects. Their findings are stunning. Just the geographic extent of these proposed offshore wind projects is unprecedented. According to the report, “Federal regulators at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) have designated almost 10 million acres for wind farm surveys and development.” That is over 15,000 square miles.

Not included in that allocation are the corridors where high voltage lines will have to cross the ocean floor to transfer electricity from the turbines to land-based power grids. The report found that “electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emanating from subsea cables appear to produce birth deformities in juvenile lobster.” That’s just the beginning.

The report also found that wind farms “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.” And there’s more.

Wind turbines “generate operational noise in a low frequency range (less than 700 Hz) with most energy concentrated between 2 and 200 Hz. This frequency range overlaps with that used by fish for communication, mating, spawning, and spatial movement,” and “high voltage direct current undersea cables produce magnetic fields that negatively affect the drifting trajectory of haddock larvae by interfering with their magnetic orientation abilities.” Haddock are “a significant portion of U.S. commercial fish landings and are an important component of the marine food chain.”

Nothing to see here, right?

What’s going on off the coast of New England is being allowed to happen because of disgraceful negligence on the part of America’s environmentalist community. What’s about to happen in California is just as bad, and is proceeding without any organized opposition or serious criticism.

Earlier this year, the federal government leased 583 square miles of deep ocean waters off the coast of California for offshore wind farms. When the first phase of these offshore wind developments are completed, these wind farms will deliver 4.5 gigawatts of “clean” electricity to the California grid. That may sound like a lot of electricity. It’s not.

To begin with, even offshore wind only blows intermittently. The most optimistic projections for the actual yield of these turbines are never more than 50 percent. This means that in terms of baseload power, only 2.25 gigawatts will come from these new offshore wind farms. California’s average electricity consumption is 32 gigawatts (of which only 22 gigawatts are produced in-state), which means if these offshore wind farms are ever completed, they’ll supply a mere 6 percent of California’s current electricity demand – the same amount currently coming from Diablo Canyon, California’s last operating nuclear power plant. But how many turbines will this take, and what will they look like?

The biggest wind turbines in the world can now produce 10 megawatts at full output. To generate this much electricity, these machines are 1,000 feet tall, which is more than three times higher than the Statue of Liberty from the water line to the tip of the torch. To achieve a collective capacity at full output of 4.5 gigawatts, 450 of these would have to be built, floated 20 miles offshore, anchored to the seabed with cables nearly a mile long, then from each one a high voltage line would also have to descend 4,000 feet to reach the ocean floor, where it would then lie on the sea bed – some proposals actually call for them to be buried – to transmit electricity to the onshore power grid. Four hundred and fifty floating wind turbines, each one of them with vertical dimensions that are longer than a modern aircraft supercarrier. There are huge and unresolved engineering hurdles involved in developing large floating wind turbines.

Bear in mind, if California’s state legislature gets its way, and the state goes fully electric – think all space heaters, water heaters, dryers, along with all trucks, buses and cars going fully electric – electricity demand will more than triple. While it’s hypothetical, the math is simple and revealing: to get 100 gigawatts of baseload power from offshore wind, you would need 20,000 turbines. And imagine all the high voltage distribution lines, and all the batteries to buffer the massive surges of intermittent power.

To somewhat return to reality, we must acknowledge that none of California’s enlightened planners intend to use offshore wind to generate 100 percent of California’s renewable electricity. But in one of the most reputable mainstream studies produced to date, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson, completed a series of simulations, culminating in a report released in December 2021 that called for 20 percent of California’s electricity to derive from offshore wind. Making more conservative assumptions regarding the size of each offshore turbine and the yield, he predicted more than 12,000 offshore wind turbines would be required.

Imagine the logistics.

How many ships will this take? How many submarines and divers? How many port facilities? How many new homes for the construction workers? What about the undersea power cables? What about the storage batteries needed to buffer nearly 20 gigawatts of on again, off again electricity? What about the ongoing maintenance? What about the raw materials needed to build all these leviathans? What about the billions and billions of dollars that will flow into the pockets of the special interests behind this disaster of a project, paid by taxpayers and ratepayers?

Overall, Jacobson’s study projected about one-third of California’s electricity to come from a combination of onshore and offshore wind turbines. Shall we reiterate what else we already know about wind turbines? Their slaughter of raptors, bats, and insects? Their incessant, low frequency sound that is audible for miles and, despite “debunking” articles that defy basic common sense, drives people and animals nuts? The visual blight? The staggering quantity of materials required for their manufacture, and the difficult if not impossible task of recycling the materials after they’ve reached the end of their service life?

Where are the environmentalists?

Where, for that matter, are the economists? Is the mantra “climate crisis” so powerful that literally anything goes, including a scheme that delivers not only environmental but economic catastrophe? In 2020, an in-depth financial analysis by the Manhattan Institute documented how “offshore wind’s costs will far exceed its benefits.” And that was before the supply chain problems, inflation, and interest rate hikes that have forced offshore wind developers from New England to California to greatly increase required rates, or pull out of projects altogether.

Imagine if this was an oil rig, a desalination plant, or a nuclear power plant. The opposition would be apoplectic, and that is not hypothetical conjecture. California had a chance to build another major desalination plant which would have supplied 55,000 acre feet per year of drought proof fresh water to the residents of Orange County, population 3 million. Along with other projects in the works, this desalination plant could have made that relatively arid coastal county completely independent of imported water. But environmentalists fought the project at every turn, and in May 2022, in a unanimous vote, the California Coastal Commission denied the construction permit.

As for oil and gas, California’s state legislators are doing everything they can to destroy production in the state. Despite having massive reserves of oil and gas, Californians have to import more than 75 percent of their oil and more than 90 percent of their natural gas. And when it comes to nuclear power, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California’s last one, narrowly escapes regulatory shutdown every few years, despite being designed to operate well past the middle of this century.

The scandalous double standard at work here can only be attributed to a combination of powerful special interests representing the wind power industry, interacting with a state legislature and environmentalist movement that is either bought off or alarmingly stupid. As it is, hundreds of billions of taxpayer subsidies are on track to pay for offshore wind. If it is not stopped, it will be one of the most egregious cases of economic waste and environmental destruction in human history.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Who Rules the World?

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Many years ago a friend of mine insisted we go to a bookstore so I could purchase a copy of a book that had her howling with laughter. The title of the book itself suggests the source of her amusement, “Nothing in this book is true, but it’s exactly how things are.” Published in 1994, the book is an audacious farrago into everything from massive alien intervention to pop metaphysics. One of the book’s premises, if one is to assign that much coherence to it, is that not one, but dozens of extraterrestrial races currently intervene in the affairs of humanity. It is now a cult classic.

Today, of course, the internet collects tales of alien encounters by the millions and puts them at the fingertips of billions of people. If you want to know about the alien star base inside Mt. Shasta, or lurking at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or pretty much anywhere else on the earth or beneath the sea, a few keystrokes will deliver links to endless reports, most of them bizarre and unsubstantiated. And if you want to examine more serious speculation regarding alien intervention in human affairs, now more than ever, you’ll find it.

Overall, the whole notion of extraterrestrials among us remains a fringe topic, content fodder and clickbait, but not generally accepted as probable. In a twist that would amuse H.L. Menken, some of the people who establishment media stigmatize as conspiracy theorists themselves consider any mainstream focus on aliens to be a carefully orchestrated hoax, perpetrated to distract us from much more sinister earthbound conspiracies.

All of this begs the question: who is running the world, and the related questions, who or what is motivating them, and what is their goal? Bringing up the possibility of alien involvement helps clarify this issue. If extraterrestrials are here, and are influencing the future of humanity without interfering through overt conquest, who would they approach?

Asking the question “who runs the world” in this hypothetical manner doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. It’s a simple question, worth asking. Where is the power to alter human destiny most concentrated? Attempting to answer this inevitably takes us down a rabbit hole. But to refrain from asking is to act as if this doesn’t matter when it’s arguably the only thing that matters. Is it safe to assume the world is just a chaotic miasma of factions, hurtling into the future, or that if it isn’t, that the people in charge are acting in our best interests?

In an attempt to understand who sits at the pinnacle of global power, an obscure article published in 2018 on the West African website TheInfoNG offers useful clues. The provenance of the article is dubious, and the theory put forth is widespread, but the title “Revealed: The 13 families who secretly rule the world,” suggests this is as good a place as any to have a look. They write:

“The forces that underlie the new world order follow a slow program to gain complete control of humanity and the resources of our planet. The masses are absolutely unaware that their freedom is being progressively removed. It is believed that at the top of the pyramid, all movements are orchestrated from an organization called the Thirteen Families, a council that consists of 13 of the most influential families on earth. In their opinion, they have the right to rule humanity because they are the direct descendants of the ancient gods and consider themselves royalty. These families are: 1 – Rothschild, 2 – Bruce, 3 – Cavendish (Kennedy), 4 – Medici, 5 – Hanover, 6 – Apsburg, 7 – Rupp, 8 – Plantagenet, 9 – Rockefeller, 10 – Romanov, 11 – Sinclair, 12 – Warburg, 13 – Windsor.”

The article goes on to claim the Rothschild family is by far the most powerful dynasty, controlling over $500 trillion dollars including ownership of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. Also in the article is an image that provides an interesting framework for this alleged control by 13 powerful families. The image, reproduced below, did not originate from TheInfoNG, insofar as a basic Google image search reveals it to currently exist on at least 46 different websites going back at least to 2013.

Immediately obvious in this pyramid chart is that people are at the bottom, outside the triangle of control, and within the triangle at the lowest level, wielding the least power, are national governments. Working up the pyramid, the next level are the major corporations, which are beneath the big commercial banks. Above them are national central banks, which in turn are subordinate to international central backs such as the IMF and the World Bank, which themselves answer to what is referred to on the chart as the “Central Bank of Central Banks,” otherwise known as the Bank for International Settlements. And at the tip of the pyramid? The 13 families.

It’s obligatory to question this paradigm, but rejecting the idea of 13 families running the planetary show doesn’t nullify the possibility that a global hierarchy of institutions exist that are more powerful than national governments. Anyone familiar with the ESG movement recognizes that it is being rolled out and enforced by banks and financial institutions who make access to cash, loans and investments contingent on compliance.

Similarly, anyone watching the contemporary obsessions with gender ideology and climate alarm has to acknowledge that corporations have incorporated them into their products and marketing. And do corporations control governments? Up until a few years ago when gender ideology and climate alarm coopted and silenced them, that is what the American Left had made a premise of their existence. Now, apparently, accusing the government of being beholden to corporations and banks is a “right wing conspiracy theory.”

If one does accept the idea that a handful of families own controlling interests in a hierarchy of financial institutions and corporations, that doesn’t necessarily mean the list published (or republished) by TheInfoNG is entirely accurate. Closer to home and more recently, Investopedia published an article “Top 10 Wealthiest Families in the World,” listing the following titanic dynasties: Walton, Mars, Koch, Al Saud, Hermès, Ambani, Wertheimer, Cargill/MacMillan, Thomson, and Hoffmann/Oeri. Is it them? Why aren’t the Rothschilds on this list? Where, for that matter, is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg?

Regardless of how you calculate wealth and financial control, and who you determine occupy the top spots, it is probably naive to think that individuals with stupefying wealth would not also be controlling the most powerful institutions in the world.

The chart reproduced by TheInfoNG is actually dated in a manner worth noting. The “People, Planet, and All Living Things” depicted below the pyramid are now themselves being securitized. People are now data commodities, and the “planet and all living things” are now packaged as “nature backed securities.” God help us.

The next pyramid diagram, roughly similar but published by India Times in 2021, in an article helpfully titled “These Are The 13 Families In The World That Apparently Control Everything,” adds a few missing segments to the paradigm. It depicts religions, governments, media, and schools at the lowest tier, exercising “world population control.” Above that it places corporations which exercise “world resource control.” On the next tier up, all levels of banking along with tax authorities, exercising “world financial control.” At the very top of this pyramid, working upward, they have placed elite think tanks, then the “Committee of 300” which they describe as the “world’s richest, most powerful families,” topped by the “Crown Council of 13,” or “the world’s richest, most powerful sub-families. And of course, their 13 differs yet again (with some overlap), naming: 1 – Astor, 2 – Bundy, 3 – Collins, 4 – DuPont, 5 – Freeman, 6 – Kennedy, 7 – Li, 8 – Onassis, 9 – Rockefeller, 10 – Russell, 11 – Van Duyn, 12 – Merovingian, and 13 – Rothschild. On the pinnacle? A “World Monarch.” Of course!

It isn’t at all clear that India Times came up with this diagram, a basic Google image search for this one yields over 30 similar images, many of them identical and some with intriguing variations. The Conspiracy Watch blog depicts a version of this pyramid that names Queen Elizabeth II as the global monarch (today, King Charles?), it lists members of the “Council of 13,” goes on to name many of the “Committee of 300,” then identifies some of the think tanks – Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations,” along with “secret societies” such as the Freemasons. Here again is evidence of an ironic inversion – we learned to fear the nefarious and all-powerful Trilateral Commission from our leftist professors back in the stone age, that is, when leftists had not yet turned into running dogs of multinational corporations. The seductive power of gender ideology and climate alarm! It turned leftists into corporatists.

To explore the question of who, or what, operates unseen and yet largely determines our collective destiny may be a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Maybe this global hierarchy, should it exist, evolved naturally and without the intervention of aliens or the inspiration of God contending with the temptations of Satan. But regardless of exactly how power is distributed at the highest levels, or whether it is right or wrong, it is increasingly concentrated in the hands of elite individuals and institutions, and preserving competition between them is one of the only ways we may hope to maintain whatever freedoms, or even illusions of freedom, we have left.

The coordinated efforts to reset our entire civilization in order to prevent a “climate crisis” are an obvious and troubling example of elites grasping for more control, and less competition. And their agenda is so fatally flawed – renewables cannot power the global economy, and “owning nothing” does not make people happy, it destroys their character – that it is fair to wonder what truly motivates them? Satanic greed? Malevolent reptilian aliens gaining the upper hand in earth’s cosmic battlefield?

A red-pilled American who is relentlessly bombarded with the same transparently false, transparently misanthropic messages from every mainstream institution can be forgiven for believing in conspiracy theories.

So perhaps none of the details can be known, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exactly how things are.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

The Consequences of Extreme Environmentalism

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AUDIO: A discussion of environmental extremism, California’s politically contrived energy and water crunch, and the dangers of “sustainable development.” Edward Ring with Greg Gordon, host of the California Liberty Project podcast.

(click here to listen to podcast)

 

A New City in California – It’s About Time

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It’s not news that California has a housing shortage, nor are the reasons for this shortage a mystery. For decades, California has restricted exurban development, passed building codes that are the most stringent in the nation and add tens of thousands to construction costs, imposed punitive permit fees on developers, neglected expansion and upgrades to the necessary enabling infrastructure for new housing, and enacted zoning ordinances within existing urban areas that prevent higher density redevelopment.

While controversial new state legislation is overriding some of the ordinances that block infill, this does not begin to make up the gap between housing demand and housing supply. According to Zillow, today the average home price in California is $741,789, compared to $348,126 in the rest of the U.S. The average rent in California is $2,923, compared to $2,054 nationwide.

Flying eyes wide open into a hailstorm of objections to “sprawl,” but saying all the right things about “walkability” and “environmental stewardship” is California Forever, the parent company of Flannery Associates. Since 2018 this development corporation has quietly spent over $800 million to acquire over 50,000 acres of rural land in east Solano County. From scratch, they intend to build a major new city.

Absent unforeseen and dramatic changes to California’s political landscape, there is a good chance this project will never get built. The example of the Tejon Ranch in Southern California, a massive and desperately needed housing development that has been stalled by regulatory obstacles and lawsuits for over 20 years, offers a likely example of what Flannery Associates are up against. But what if these well-heeled investors, including Sequoia Capital’s former Chairman Mike Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs and others, wield their financial muscle and political clout, and get their wish?

What if this new city is built? How many people can settle into a new city where right now the developers have 78 square miles of raw land to work with?

What’s fascinating about this opportunity is how rare it is, certainly in this century, for a new city to arise on this scale. Equally fascinating is the unique character of the proponents. These aren’t seasoned developers, deploying tested strategies against a Byzantine array of agencies and constituencies that have to approve the project, then parceling the land to major homebuilders and civil engineering contractors, while allocating the standard areas for parks, schools, and retail centers that will be filled with the same national chains. That is the generic pattern that defines exurban development in the United States. Emanating from the peripheries of innumerable cities, it generates indistinguishable penumbras of asphalt and tilt-up boxes, cookie cutter homes with the obligatory solar panels, and corporate outposts occupying “town centers” with Tuscan themed gingerbread to soften the prefab underneath.

That’s probably not what these folks have in mind. Marinating for decades in the heady ferment of Silicon Valley, and willing to spend billions to blaze a trail into a smart city future, it is reasonable to assume that Flannery and Associates want to break the mold. So what might rise on what are now bucolic cattle ranches and rolling hills, barely an hour northwest of San Francisco, flanked by the Sacramento River estuary to the south and east, and the vast Suisun Marsh to the west?

California Forever has launched a website that features artist’s conceptions of the new development. Mission style homes crawling down a gentle hillside to sun dappled waters, fishermen fishing, kayakers kayaking, beneficent wind turbines turning on the horizon. Men in hardhats installing solar panels. Children riding bikes, with row houses to their left, a verdant park to their right. Families, friends, lovers, dining on a spacious outdoor patio, shaded by sturdy oaklike trees. In the background, quaint storefronts with rounded archways, shutters adjacent to the 2nd floor windows, with peaked and gabled roofs. in the distance. Pastels. Earthtones. A trolley car. How pretty it will be.

And not an automobile in sight.

Sometimes these planned communities work. Over a century ago, Carmel by the Sea was developed, with block after block of Tudor style homes. If it was considered corny and pretentious at the time, it surely isn’t any more. As for planned urban environments, if you stand on the balcony overlooking the street at the Hotel Valencia in San Jose’s prestigious Santana Row, there is not one line of sight that will not afford a view of similar themed Italianate architecture. If you were dropped in from outer space, with no clue where you were, you might think you were in Tuscany. These are good examples of themed environments. But Carmel was built before, among other things, “zero net energy” governed new home construction, and Santana Row was built on the back of a robust existing urban grid. Solano Hills, or whatever they intend to call it, will arise where there is almost nothing today apart from cow pies and barbed wire.

The potential for pretentious schlock to emerge in vain pursuit of instant culture and architectural elegance is not unfounded. There are planned communities in California with faux town squares that are so transparently artificial it would be cruel to name them. Windows that aren’t windows, with shutters that aren’t shutters, and gables that aren’t gables – just puzzle pieces stapled in place to create “atmosphere.” And unless Flannery wants to fire the entire who’s who of consultants they’ve mustered to shephard this project through the many gauntlets and replace them with talented ingenues with no experience, they’ll have to hold their experts onto a tight leash. But at least they’ll have a loose budget. They’re going to need it.

Artist’s renderings aside, the fact that the ideological predilections of these well heeled developers are probably in general alignment with that of the California legislature and regulators is not going to make anything terribly easy. Even as we grant the huge assumption that all legal and bureaucratic obstacles are overcome and construction begins, and even if we assume – hopefully somewhat more reasonably – that the aesthetics of the city will be sufficiently authentic, still, what will be its basic parameters? How many people? What mix of housing? What transportation, energy, water, and waste management solutions?

Reports on the proposed development reference “thousands of homes.” Let’s assume 20,000 homes, plus another 20,000 apartment/condo units of various density. Starting with the homes: will they have any sort of yard? In research reported by the Urban Reform Institute in a 2022 study found that the clear preference of families, seniors, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans and the foreign born is to live in single-family detached homes, located in suburbs and exurbs.

With over 50,000 acres, or 78 square miles to work with, there’s enough land to give people what they want. If half the area was left as open space, there would still be 25,000 acres for the urban footprint. That would be enough room for 20,000 single family homes on quarter acre lots, occupying 5,000 acres, only 10 percent of the area, which at four persons per household would support a population of 80,000 people. Add to that another 20,000 apartments, condominiums, and townhomes, at three persons per unit, occupying a generous 1/8th of an acre per unit, and you have another 60,000 people consuming only 2,500 acres, or 5 percent of the land. This leaves a lot of flexibility for the rest of the urbanized portion of this project – an improbable 3,500 acres for roads and other transit corridors and hubs, 5,000 acres for retail and commercial development, and 10,000 acres for parks.

It is possible, of course, to squeeze even more people into even less space. But most people don’t want to have “less space.” They want more space. And the first question we should be asking is why, in a state with 25,000 square miles of cattle ranches, is it necessary to set aside as permanent open space any more than 50 percent of developable land, when that land is in close proximity to a megapolis that suffers from an acute housing shortage?

The challenges of energy, water and transportation are equally daunting, mostly because of the straightjackets that have been intentionally donned by virtually every influential decision maker and investor in the state. We can start with the whole “net zero” fiasco. California has locked itself into a future of EVs and mass transit, with “road diets” and an explicit goal of getting people out of their cars and onto bikes, scooters, and pathogen pits otherwise known as buses and trains. Even if this new city has robocops – it probably will – and other decisive innovations that yield effective law enforcement, they’re not going to move people voluntarily into mass transit. You can evict the junkies and the predators, but you can’t evict the germs. And people like their cars. They like them. That should matter.

This speaks to the coercive essence of what passes for an enlightened conventional wisdom in California today. Live in apartments. Get rid of your car. But most people don’t want to live that way. More to the point, it isn’t necessary. There’s plenty of land. What about energy? What about synthetic fuels, just around the corner, that will deliver liquid hydrocarbon, combustible fuels made from nothing more than electrolyzed hydrogen combined with CO2 taken from the atmosphere? We’re willing to put our faith in battery technology evolving to the point where EVs no longer require 10X the resources of conventional vehicles, are affordable, replaceable and recyclable, can be fully recharged in five minutes, and can reliably tolerate fires and floods. But we don’t believe synthetic fuel can be commercialized? Really? Silicon Valley investors, living in the heartland of global innovation, can’t imagine synthetic fuel? Or safe nuclear power? Or energy efficient desalination?

A truly cutting edge future city would design an infrastructure that sets an example the world is willing to follow. Deploy a modular nuclear reactors that generate 50 megawatts each and can be swapped for new ones every 50 years. Build a cutting edge natural gas fueled power plant with an advanced combined cycle design that converts 80 percent or more of the embodied energy in the natural gas fuel into electricity. If every fossil fueled power plant in the world were retrofitted to this emerging technology, it might not achieve “net zero.” But the ratio of CO2 emissions to gigawatt-hours produced would drop by a factor of 4X. That’s a technology the world will buy. That’s an aspiration worth fighting for, because unlike wind and solar, it’s practical, scalable, sustainable, environmentally responsible, and cost-effective.

With all that in mind, it would be advisable to include gas stations in the master plan. They can easily be retrofit to dispense synfuel, and in the meantime can fuel hybrid designs for cars and buses that are becoming more ingeniously efficient every year.

As for water, it would be a welcome assist if these billionaire investors can commit to building a futuristic city that delivers its households and businesses abundance. Will this city adhere to the planned 42 gallons per person per day limit on indoor water use that is roaring down the legislative tracks in the Capitol like a freight train? Nobody wants to live this way, and why should they, when 80 percent (or more) of the water that goes down the drain in homes and businesses can and should be recycled and reused? When it comes to lawns and other supposed abominations, why not just ban fertilizers and pesticides, and allow lawns to suddenly become productive permeable surfaces, able to filter and percolate runoff?

Investing in infrastructure to create water abundance in California is a statewide challenge, but there are local sources. Construct state-of-the-art runoff capture and wastewater recycling facilities. Contract for water from the Sites Reservoir – maybe then the agency directors and state bureaucrats will finally decide that instead of having a job-for-life “planning” the reservoir, they’ll actually build it. Follow Antioch’s example and purify brackish water – there’s plenty of that in the surrounding estuaries. Spend extra to ensure environmental impact is minimal, but do it all the same. Maybe, gasp, even push for raising the Shasta Dam a mere 18 feet, which would create another 600,000 acre feet of storage, ensuring more low-temperature downstream flows to benefit salmon habitat and supply new cities.

How this new city takes shape, should it ever be built, will say a lot about what sort of future is in store for Californians. Will this city use the many new tools becoming available to monitor behavior to enforce lives of managed scarcity, or will that be less of a priority because we have instead made up our minds to achieve sustainable abundance? What ostensibly public spaces will be privatized, and how will that affect the rights of citizens and the texture of law enforcement? How will they manage low income housing? Will they develop covenants that aim to maximize the percentage of owner occupied homes and businesses, or will they sell entire neighborhoods to Blackrock?

The people who want to build a new city in Solano County are thinking big. It could be the biggest completely new city the state has seen in decades. And California needs new cities. But the implications are bigger than the project. They can create a dystopia as easily as they can create a utopia. And they are among the few with the resources to make that decision, knowing full well how it may be a defining example, altering our destiny for better or for worse.

An edited version of this article was published by the Pacific Research Institute in two installments, part one, and part two.