Newsom’s Disastrous Offshore Wind Strategy

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Earlier this year, after the federal government leased 583 square miles of deep ocean waters off the coast of California for offshore wind farms, California Governor Newsom said “offshore wind energy has gone from a distant pipedream to a burgeoning reality.” But when it comes to “renewable energy,” it is difficult to imagine an energy project more impractical, more costly, more fraught with potential for disaster, or more certain to wreak environmental havoc.

When 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, because even offshore wind only blows intermittently, the actual yield of these turbines will be around 40 percent, which equates to 1.8 gigawatts of baseload power. That represents 5 percent of California’s current electricity consumption. If California goes all electric, which the state legislature remains absolutely committed to achieving, it will represent at best 2 percent of the electricity the state is going to need to generate. Two percent. But what is it going to take to get the proposed 1.8 gigawatts off offshore wind energy?

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 nearly four times higher than the Statue of Liberty including its base. These towering monstrosities are intended to float in the Pacific Ocean, remaining upright through storms, tsunamis and earthquakes, remaining in a fixed position via cables stretching from the bottom of the floating tower to anchors in the seabed over 4,000 feet under water.

What could possibly go wrong? Along with the natural disruptions, what about the impact of these turbines on birds, whales, other avian and aquatic life, or on planes, or boats and ships? But understanding just how problematic building just one of these turbines is going to be is magnified by what ought to be simple and compelling math. Because to generate 1.8 net gigawatts – a mere 2 percent of the electricity California’s legislature aspires to generate to achieve their “net zero” objectives – it will be necessary to build and float 450 of these 10 megawatt turbines. 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 4.5 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?

It is understandable that the people running a state as wealthy as California, with a culture of pioneering innovation that goes back nearly two centuries, would be inspired to set an example to the world. But the fatal flaw in California’s renewable energy strategy is that other nations aren’t going to follow this example. For everyone on earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans do, global energy production needs to double. Because energy is the foundation of prosperity, this needs to happen fast, and it needs to be affordable.

What Californians ought to be doing is developing new energy infrastructure that is practical and cost-effective. For example, instead of decommissioning its natural gas power plants, the state could upgrade them to the most advanced technologies available. Current combined-cycle designs harvest waste heat from the natural-gas-fired turbine to produce steam to drive a second turbine; new designs replace steam with helium, greatly improving efficiency.

For that matter, of course, why aren’t Californians at the forefront of both small modular and large next-generation nuclear reactor development? Why isn’t there a nuclear power plant in California that not only generates emissions free gigawatts of electricity, but utilizes the nuclear waste to produce still more electricity, rendering the eventual waste stream far less hazardous and harvesting far more electricity from each unit of fuel input?

When it comes to transportation, why hasn’t California’s legislature made a priority of widening and upgrading its roads and freeways to accommodate high speed, self-driving vehicles? And why did California’s state legislature ban, starting in 2035, the sale of advanced hybrids? Why is an all electric vehicle, requiring a half-ton or more of battery payload, plus a steel chassis to support all the extra weight, the only option? Why are hybrid vehicles excluded, with their much smaller batteries that harvest energy otherwise wasted from braking and downhill momentum? How can California’s lawmakers begin to predict what new advances may arise in hybrid technology, wherein the emissions from new combustible fuels may become negligible?

These are questions that ought to be front and center in Sacramento. Instead, Gavin Newsom is prioritizing offshore wind farms at a stupefying financial and environmental cost. California, and America, can indeed set an example to the world, but only if it is an example the world is willing to follow. When it comes to energy infrastructure, that boring but nonnegotiable prerequisite for any prosperous civilization, California has yet to live up to its illustrious legacy or its undeniable potential.

A condensed version of this article originally appeared in City Journal.

Should America Dominate the World?

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Forty years ago, during the final decade of the Cold War, nobody had any illusions about America being perfect. Without wallowing in the topic, we all knew our nation had ongoing social and economic problems, and that our history was filled with examples of oppression. But for most Americans, understanding the grim reality of life for people living in the Soviet Union provided clarity. It was understood that no country is perfect, and compared to the USSR, living in America was paradise.

The argument that America, by a wide margin, is the lesser of two evils, does not get the traction today that it got during the Cold War. But there is no justification for its diminished relevance. Despite alarming new challenges to the rights and freedoms of American citizens, the gap between America and its contemporary rivals, Russia and China, is as wide as it’s ever been. And in the case of China, the magnitude of the threat they now pose to American global leadership is far more than anything the USSR could have once posed.

These considerations give rise to a pair of sobering questions: First, is China an expansionist nation, committed to growing powerful enough to dominate the world and impose its vision of human rights onto all of humanity? Second, before we level well deserved criticisms on American foreign and domestic policies, shouldn’t we compare these policies to those practiced by the Chinese government? Forty years ago, those questions mattered. Today, we need to revisit these questions.

Does China Intend to Dominate the World?

China is committed to an expansionist strategy. In just the last century, an era during which Western powers were relinquishing their claims to foreign colonies, China has annexed Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The Chinese have absorbed Hong Kong, cracking down on human rights they had pledged to uphold. They have lopped off chunks of Indian Kashmir as well as the northern portion of Indian state of Assam. The Chinese openly declare their intention to absorb the independent nation of Taiwan. They’re even claiming virtually all of the South China Sea, in defiance of every other bordering nation.

China’s expansionist tensions with neighboring nations and Borglike assimilation of the occupied nations within its borders should provide clues to how it treats all its citizens. China’s population is over 90 percent comprised of the Han ethnic group, and they are probably the most surveilled, micromanaged population on earth. Any dissent that deviates from the collective is immediately suppressed.

One may go on endlessly about allegedly parallel encroachments on the rights of Americans to express dissent, but it isn’t remotely comparable to what Chinese people go through. The regime of Xi Jinping has turned China into the world’s biggest prison camp, with nearly 1.4 billion inmates. Law enforcement extends well beyond criminal behavior to “social behavior,” where not just what you do, but what you say, what you think, and how you worship are all strictly regulated.

China’s economic aggression is well documented and points to an unavoidable conclusion; nations that do business with China are going to be systematically robbed of their technological edge and their financial stability. According to Fortune, one in five corporations say China has stolen their intellectual property in the past year. Estimates of how much this costs the U.S. economy range as high as $600 billion per year.

China’s economic war with the United States has been unrelenting. Over the past 25 years the cumulative U.S. trade deficit with China is nearly 6.0 trillion. China retains some of its trade surplus with the U.S. in the form of debt, currently an estimated $1.6 trillion.

Another way China is expanding its economic reach and influence in the world is through the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a modern version of the ancient Silk Road connecting East to West. In theory this is a laudable series of infrastructure projects linking China with trading partners across Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond with a series of highways, railroads, and modernized seaports. But participating nations are realizing that Chinese investment carries a high price.

The way China intends to control the railroads and seaports being built across this new Silk Road is by using the so-called debt trap. This is a practice whereby China lends billions of dollars to an economically weaker country for them to construct infrastructure. Chinese firms then pour in materials and labor to build the project, which means the Chinese loan funds are repatriated right back into Chinese hands. Then when the debtor nation can’t afford to pay back the loan, the Chinese seize ownership of the project as collateral.

An article published by the Washington Post provides an extensive list of nations already victimized by China’s infrastructure debt trap. They include Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Montenegro, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. Some of these projects involve debt nearly equal to the entire GDP of the host nations. In many cases, Chinese-only gated communities are constructed, sometimes entire cities, swarming with Chinese security forces.

China’s economic imperialism is also reflected in its global buying binge. Using the savings generated from their huge trade surplus, China is buying companies and real estate all over the world. The United States is one of the only nations in the world that allows foreign companies to purchase controlling interests in U.S. companies, and China has taken full advantage of that. Michele Nash-Hoff, writing for Industry Week, posed this question: “Did we let the USSR buy our companies during the Cold War? No, we didn’t! We realized we would be helping our enemy. This was pretty simple, common sense, but we don’t seem to have this same common sense when dealing with China.”

American Globalism – The Alternative to China

The evidence that China is an expansionist nation is overwhelming. In addition to China’s territorial aggression and predatory economic policies, there are the precedents of history. Throughout recorded history, expansionist empires have risen and fallen. Across all continents and through the millennia, regardless of geography or ethnicity, empires have fought wars of conquest. Today is no different. America will rise to the challenge of China, or China will dominate the world. And this gives rise to the second question: How do America’s foreign and domestic policies compare to China’s, and how can they be better calibrated to unite Americans and set an attractive example for people in the rest of the world?

Only in this context can the American government’s current cultural priorities and globalist ambitions be fairly evaluated. Most American conservatives will agree that a month-long display of gay pride flags in front of every government building in America and every embassy America has in foreign nations, is pushing the woke narrative to ridiculous extremes. But compared to what? Compared to the Iranian regime hanging homosexuals from construction cranes? The Ugandans making homosexual acts subject to the death penalty?

Conservative Americans have ample reason to criticize the way establishment institutions, certainly including the federal government, have pandered to the extremist wing of the LGBTQ+ lobby. That the cultural pendulum will swing back to some more universally tolerable position is quite likely, and soon would be better. But which is worse? Nations where homosexuals are executed, or nations where activist gender extremists are overly indulged?

America’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, meeting with Chinese diplomats in Alaska two years ago, was criticized for acknowledging American imperfections, saying “we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.”

Blinken, and his boss, Joe Biden, may be leading America down a perilous path. But Blinken was right to acknowledge that America is “eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” The debates we are having in America over identity and equity may be tedious and threatening, and with good reason, but it’s a process at work in American society today that is unthinkable in China. America’s rival in the world is a fascist police state. For all of its flaws, and for all of its dangerous drift into decadence, America is a better place to live than China. The existential importance of that fact should not be lost on anyone, whether they are woke malcontents or appalled conservatives.

Moving towards a more perfect union will not be easy. Restoring colorblind meritocracy and reestablishing reasonable gender norms will take time, but is probably inevitable. The woke have simply gone too far. An even greater threat to a desirable Pax Americana, however, concerns how America’s establishment is responding to the “climate crisis.” Current policies, designed to stifle development of hydroelectric, nuclear, and natural gas sources of energy, are guaranteed to weaken America and alienate the world. They will impose a tyranny of surveillance and rationing in developed nations, and they will cause chaos, poverty and endless war in developing nations. They are outrageous, and will drive nonaligned nations into alliances with China.

It may be that the greatest test of American democracy in the 21st century will be whether or not the cabal of oligarchs that have hijacked America’s energy policy can be overcome by a media that has finally come to its senses and a population that awakens from its brainwashed stupor. Without adequate supplies of energy, civilization will falter and individual freedom will die. Claiming that adequate energy can be delivered worldwide exclusively via wind and solar power, without also relying on hydro, nuclear, and natural gas is a blatant, misanthropic, opportunistic lie. This lie, unchallenged, will fatally undermine the credibility of American leadership in the world.

Answering the question “should America dominate the world” requires recognition of an immutable prerequisite: If America does not, someone else will. And for all of its many flaws, some of them horrifically and even murderously misguided, when compared to empires of the past and rivals in the present, America’s empire is remarkably benevolent. That fact used to matter, and it still does. We would do well to embrace it, even as we work towards something better.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

CEQA Needs to Die

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The proposed Tejon Ranch development would deliver new housing for an estimated 57,000 Californians. Located along Interstate 5 about 60 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the development plan has something for everyone. A significant percentage of units are designated for low income residents. Over 90 percent of the vast private parcel will be permanently set aside as open space. The homes will be “energy neutral,” with hundreds of EV charging stations. Significant funds are pledged for wildlife habitat and preservation of cultural artifacts. But nothing will ever be enough.

For over 20 years, developers have attempted to build these now desperately needed homes, reaching agreements repeatedly with environmentalist coalitions. But thanks to yet another lawsuit, in March 2023 a Los Angeles judge has ruled the entitlements process will have to start over. In a recent disclosure to investors, Tejon Ranch Company warned that it may take another 25 years before any homes are built.

The reason for these delays, which are sufficient to deter most homebuilders from even operating any longer in California, is the California Environmental Quality Act, otherwise known as CEQA.

Ronald Reagan signed CEQA into law in 1970 to ensure that state projects anticipated and mitigated “significant environmental impacts.” But this is California, so by 1972 state judges had determined that “state projects” meant any construction project that required government approval – and that means all construction in the state of California.

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 has become the 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.

Since its creation in 1962,. But when they decided to tackle the monster called the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), they may have taken on more than they can handle.

Over the past four months, California’s Little Hoover Commission has held hearings on CEQA. Later this summer the commission intends to make recommendations to the state legislature. In over 20 hours of hearings, and with rare exceptions, what passed through the chambers was a cavalcade of special interests, almost all of them adroitly leveraging the CEQA body of law to pay themselves and their organizations.

CEQA is the reason that land, housing, water, electricity, oil and gas, lumber, aggregate, and even food costs so much in California. It’s the reason the state’s freeways are pitted, potholed, congested hellscapes, while off in the remote bowels of the San Joaquin Valley, a Stonehenge like monument to corruption rises ever so slowly, pylons to elevate the “bullet train,” consuming stupefying quantities of cement and steel, costing countless billions of dollars.

One of the rare, genuine victims to testify was Dan Dunmoyer, representing the California Building Industry Association. Because his industry hasn’t navigated a profitable workaround that transmutes litigious, bureaucratic CEQA-generated gridlock into bountiful grift, Dunmoyer can tell you the true cost of CEQA.

He told the Little Hoover Commission that the average CEQA-required environmental impact report for a 200-home subdivision in the 1970s ran two pages. Now it’s over 1,000 pages for the same scope of work and, best case, will cost at least $1 million to prepare. More likely, after the inevitable litigation and bureaucratic micromanagement, the entire CEQA process will cost many times that, and consume years if not decades.

An honest attorney, Jennifer Hernandez, told the commission that her advocacy on behalf of hapless builders, whose crime is trying to build homes so people can live with a roof over their head, has been remunerative. Most of the good guys aren’t so candid, as anyone will attest who has ever shared a conference room with a $1,600 per hour consultant who regretfully explains just how hard the fight is going to be, thanks to horrible CEQA.

But CEQA, like the natural world it has evolved to ostensibly protect, nourishes a robust ecosystem, with each species carving out a lucrative niche in a fantastic jungle of specialized and indispensable experts, academics, scientists, administrators, bureaucrats, judges, court personnel, professional activists, legislative staff, agency staff, accountants, carbon accountants, CPAs, attorneys, litigators, and tens of thousands of tradesmen who don’t care if they’re adding a desperately needed lane to Interstate 405, or reconstructing Stonehenge. For them, work is work. CEQA is a multi-billion-dollar industry, sucking the life out of California’s economy.

A common refrain before the commission was that CEQA doesn’t go far enough. One member of the public, useful to the professionals insofar as her unremunerated passion made their more calculated comments reasonable by comparison, claimed that without CEQA the genocidal assault against California’s disadvantaged would continue. Another volunteer, who wanted the commission to know that her bedtime reading was environmental impact reports, was embarrassingly explicit. CEQA is a weapon to stop projects, and that’s why we need it.

But the sharks and bloodsuckers who feed on CEQA have no shame. A social justice – or was it environmental justice – advocate, an attorney representing yet another “nonprofit,” not only demanded CEQA proceedings be transcribed and posted online, but transcribed into several languages besides English. Grow the industry. Feed the beast.

One disturbing takeaway from these hearings was its staid normalcy. From the tone of the remarks, mostly coming from attorneys representing environmental organizations or labor organizations, you wouldn’t get the impression that CEQA is tearing the life out of California’s economy. And when the discussion turned to serious recommendations for reform, most called for more exemptions instead of reforming the law for everyone. Make exemptions for low income housing permanent! Enact permanent exemptions for renewable energy projects! Favor us, we’re the good guys.

But can CEQA be fixed? Can the process be streamlined, so, for example, last minute lawsuits are no longer allowed, or agencies and courts can no longer slow walk applications and cases, killing projects merely due to delaying tactics?

There are plenty of incremental ways to make CEQA less of a beast, but most of them involve picking winners or introducing new complexity that will spawn as many challenges as it will alleviate. The best thing the Little Hoover Commission can do is recommend CEQA be scrapped in its entirety. The pros need not despair. California, and the federal government, have plenty of other laws and regulations guaranteed to ensure projects designed to lower the cost-of-living, which is genuine social justice, will never see the light of day. Let CEQA die.

An edited version of this appeared in the Orange County Register.

America for Sale

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The dollar’s status as the sole transaction and reserve currency of the world gives America’s federal government unique privileges. International demand for dollars enables federal budget deficits. It also creates an incentive for trade deficits, because incoming investments effectively collateralize American currency. To perpetuate this multi-decade debt binge, America’s real estate and corporate assets are for sale to any foreign investor with surplus dollars.

This is financial treason, because it is an unsustainable scheme that won’t end until there is nothing left in America that any foreigner wants to buy. The ultimate ramifications of this policy are all bad. Eventually, unchecked, they will be fatal. But like any addictive drug, the early stages of abuse are intoxicating. As Americans are systematically being deprived of their individual financial independence and their national sovereignty, they binge on imported consumer products sold at giveaway prices, heedless of the lost American jobs those products represent, or the fact that the dollars they’re exporting by purchasing these imports are used to finance hostile foreign militaries and purchase America’s most cherished national assets.

There are endless connections, and consequences, to the financialization of America as it might be described according to the following interrelated factors: Federal budget deficits require foreign demand for dollar denominated debt. Trade deficits create a surplus of dollars in foreign accounts available to purchase federal debt. Offshoring American jobs creates trade deficits and unemployment. Unrestricted immigration combined with environmentalist mandated scarcity causes inflation, which elevates the cost-of-living but slows the rate at which foreign investment eats up America’s assets. Government spending on entitlements mitigates unemployment and unaffordability caused by offshoring, unrestricted immigration, and environmentalist driven scarcity, but those entitlements cause even bigger federal budget deficits.

Got all that? Some of these connections are obvious, others far more subtle.

The Financial Hijacking of the American Dream

Ever since trade deficits got out of control starting in the 1990s, and especially since federal budget deficits got out of control starting in the 2000s, American economic policy has been to monetize the world with dollars to preserve demand for dollars. This explains one motivation for America’s de facto policy of unrestricted immigration from impoverished nations. Total remittances – not all of them can be tracked – from foreigners working in the United States to their families in their nations of origin are estimated to total around $100 billion per year. In small nations, dollars become an alternative currency, often considered more reliable than the local currency.

Unrestricted immigration also increases the global demand for dollars in a more subtle but more profound way insofar as the massive numbers of people arriving drive up demand for housing and durable goods, which increases the value of real estate and the value of stock in manufacturers of durable goods. The impact of 8 million people arriving since Biden took office in January 2021 is an unheralded but major cause of inflation over the past two years. And as the value of American assets explodes to levels unaffordable to the average American citizen, the value of collateral for the American dollars goes up. Foreign buyers still want that beach house in Malibu or that Pied-à-Terre overlooking Manhattan, but now they’re paying $20 million instead of $10 million. Thanks to asset inflation, balancing the current account just got twice as easy.

Policies deliberately calculated to inflate the value of American assets also help explain why environmentalist extremism is tolerated in America. The war against suburban “sprawl” may have support from many constituencies, ranging from environmentalists who oppose all growth to rural inhabitants who don’t want to see their bucolic county transformed into just another undifferentiated slurb. But there are hard economic motivations that underlie the institutionalization of environmentalist inspired de-growth policies. When supply is artificially constrained, prices go up. An entire coordinated series of restrictive policies ensure this happens.

For example, not only is development on raw land increasingly difficult, as open space “nonprofits,” backed by billionaires, continue to buy up the land surrounding America’s urban centers for “conservancies.” There are also building codes, now designed to require “net zero” homes, that drive up costs, at the same time as America’s domestic timber harvesting and milling industries, decimated by excessive regulations, have driven up the cost of lumber. Not just lumber, but all building materials are impacted by unreasonable environmentalist restrictions: aggregate, steel, along with construction equipment and the required fuel.

The results of this deliberate squeeze on the ability to develop affordable unsubsidized housing are clearly irrational. Dilapidated 900 square foot shacks in the mountains surrounding the Silicon Valley are selling for over $1.0 million, while regular homes on modest acreage can go for ten times that much. And small wonder. Santa Clara County, host to the Silicon Valley, has a population that is 40 percent foreign born, a total population that has tripled within the past 50 years, and the most extreme environmentalist building codes and restrictions in the nation. Chinese billionaires buy these homes with what for them is pocket change, as long-time residents move to adjacent states in hopes of staying ahead of the inflationary wave.

Replacing Economic Freedom with Government Dependency

Where there is unaffordable shelter, unaffordable utilities, unaffordable food, and ridiculously high taxes, in steps the government, ready to subsidize households that have lost any hope of ever achieving privately earned financial security. One might even argue that deficit spending by the government is justifiable, if it is used to make long-term investments to build enabling water and transportation infrastructure so cities can expand, the stock of single family detached homes can increase, and home prices can come back down to earth. But that strategy belongs to a bygone era.

Today America’s federal and state budgets go broke and into the red in order to give to people the amenities they’re no longer asked to earn, or often are even capable of earning. Housing. College tuition. Food. Coupons to ride trains for free. At staggering cost, and like dominoes falling, Americans are being trained to forego hard work. Instead they’re taught to exchange personal responsibility for collective dependence on the government. The impact on character is insidious, and as Americans by the millions are driven into wallowing indigence, more foreigners arrive to take the remaining jobs.

Connectivity abounds. If Americans demanded reasonable environmental regulations and domestic sourcing of raw materials and manufactured goods, it would break the cycle. Without foreign demand for dollars, the federal government would have to limit its spending to its revenue, which would take away its ability to keep millions of Americans dependent on hand-outs. In a virtuous cascade of impacts, the availability of raw materials and finished goods including housing would go down, because foreign buyers would no longer be bidding up prices and American companies and workers would be turned loose to compete to produce products and housing at affordable prices. Who loses?

Contemporary Globalism is Misanthropic

This is a loaded question, because there is a moral case for financializing America to fund the economic development of foreign nations. At same time as we impoverish and erase our own people, loading them up with Fentanyl and brainwashing them with bizarre race and gender ideologies and climate panic, we are creating jobs in developing countries. The upside, so the globalist argument goes, is that the economic harm we do to our own nation is more than offset by the economic benefit we stimulate in every other nation. This argument, for all its seductive value to neoliberals who parrot it without bothering to understand its nuances, falls short in ways that actually harm foreign nations.

For starters, while overall economic growth may be maximized when every nation exports those products that they produce most cost-effectively, the local impacts are not all benign. Nations that produce coffee at competitive global prices, for example, end up with valuable cropland converted from food production to coffee plantations. These coffee plantations are typically owned by multinational corporations that repatriate profits to low tax nations elsewhere, while buying off a small local elite that streamlines the regulatory environment. Meanwhile, the nation becomes dependent on imports for everything except coffee, and even the coffee ends up priced out of reach for the average citizen. Replace “coffee” with any specialty product and the “gains of trade” translate on the ground into nations with seething, destitute populations dependent on accumulating debt and foreign aid.

Such is the value of globalist pieties. Environmentalism. Neoliberal free trade. It enriches multinational corporations and international banks, oligarchs and autocrats, NGOs and nonprofits. It empowers supranational institutions, and is presented as the only enlightened course for nations in a shrinking world. But everyone else loses. All too often the more general impact of globalization is to disenfranchise the vast majority of ordinary citizens from the United States to Somalia by denying them a diverse economy that might bestow a robust job market and national self-sufficiency.

America is for sale, because selling America helps preserve our federal government’s unique ability to print as many dollars as it wishes without short-term consequences. This enables an American oligarchy to impose its economic vision on the world. But there are alternative visions for global development that do not adhere to an agenda of artificial scarcity, populations dependent on their government, and nations beholden to a single crop or commodity for their economic survival. We may hope America’s leaders again recognize the value of investments and policies that foster abundance instead of dependency, for foreign nations as well as for their own citizens. Adopting that strategy may require a tumultuous rebalancing, but the sooner it happens, the easier it will be.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Creating Water Abundance – Total Cost and Capacity

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AUDIO: California needs more water. Environmentalists demand increasing percentages of river runoff stay in the rivers to improve fish habitat. Groundwater withdrawals have exceeded rates of recharge for decades. The massive storage dams on the Colorado River are nearly drained. But California has a terrific opportunity to make up these deficits and create water abundance. New off-stream reservoirs, expansion of existing reservoirs, better systems to capture storm runoff, urban wastewater recycling, urban storm runoff capture, and desalination. The recommendations made in this video (best viewed at 2X speed) are an attempt to define the capacity of these project categories, how much they will cost, and how much energy they will require to operate. Edward Ring speaking at the Metropolitan Water District of Orange County Water Policy Forum & Dinner.

A Libertarian Case for Public Works

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Libertarians are a diverse lot. Some are stone cold anarchists, prepping in remote hills for the day when governments fail and a blood dimmed tide is loosed upon the world. And then at the other extreme there are libertarian billionaires and their paid for intelligentsia, rationalizing everything from erasing national borders to legalizing opium.

It’s a strange mix. Some libertarians bristle at the suggestion they might support open borders, while staunchly defending the natural and inalienable right for people to choose to mainline heroin. Others would have that exactly the other way around. If there were a convention of libertarians, and someone asked the true libertarian to stand, they would all stand up, and not one of them would be fully in agreement with any other one.

This is the fractious gang that nonetheless at times will run third party candidates who manage to attract enough votes to swing elections in battleground districts. Despite convoluted denials, these close elections almost invariably tilt Left if a libertarian candidate runs a viable campaign. But it’s in the intellectual sphere where policies are imagined and policies are defended where libertarians have the most political influence.

Libertarian ideologues inform the well funded factions who justify neoliberal policies that import cheap labor and export jobs to nations where labor is cheaper still. From some of the most well heeled libertarian policy shops, bought by billionaires, libertarians strive for additional relevance by making common cause with progressives. Legalize drugs. Open the borders. Of course there is a climate crisis. And of course this attempt by libertarians to ingratiate themselves is used and abused by progressives, who know better than to ever trust a Social Darwinist!

If there is one broad area of agreement among libertarians, however, it might be regarding the general principle of limited government. And in the messy real world where politicians who actually get elected have to operate, the principle of limited government must find expression in policy. It’s boring to be a wonk. But unless you turn the destiny of your nation over to the murderous clarity of authoritarian warlords and dictators, it’s the wonks who design the policies that determine your future.

So in recognition of the role libertarians play in defining an ideological foundation that translates into policy, here is a libertarian case for public works. The goal of government spending on infrastructure is to help fund practical projects that yield long-term returns on investment in the form of a lower cost of living: water, energy and transportation infrastructure with proven value and durability. Up until a few decades ago, that goal was generally fulfilled. There may have been wasteful spending, but the projects delivered obvious public benefits that last for generations.

Today, unfortunately, the government is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidizing wind turbines, solar farms, battery farms, and surveillance infrastructure to “help” Americans conserve energy. The result of these programs will be to raise the cost-of-living. What America needs is to deregulate the energy sector, removing constraints on the development of practical, cost-competitive energy technologies, and without spending a single tax dollar, let private companies compete to sell abundant, affordable electricity and transportation fuel. But with water and transportation, however, it’s more complicated.

Even with deregulation, the inherent costs to design, build and upgrade the broad, smart-car enabled roads and freeways needed to bring America’s transportation infrastructure into the 21st century are higher than the average driver can afford. With water, particularly in the arid Southwest from Texas to California which nearly 100 million Americans call home, the costs can be even higher. Massive projects to transfer water between basins, recycle water, capture storm runoff, and desalinate water can only be built at costs that millions of ratepayers cannot afford. Policymakers have to make tough choices.

They can impose scarcity on the population, igniting general inflation that victimizes working families. They can make energy and water cost so much that small businesses fail, more manufacturing goes overseas, and only big corporations survive by passing on to customers the costs of excessive regulations and politically elevated costs for inputs. That is current policy. It consolidates wealth in the hands of an ascendant oligarchy, and is marketed to gullible Americans as a necessary sacrifice to cope with the climate crisis.

In this economic strategy, the government has to spend billions to subsidize low income households that cannot possibly afford to pay for their electricity, natural gas, or gasoline, or to drive on toll roads, or to purchase food that costs more because the irrigation water cost more. The government has to build housing because the regulatory environment, combined with the shortage of entitled land and available water has made housing unaffordable. These become permanent subsidies, costing hundreds of billions, if not, over time, trillions of dollars. They consume a growing share of state and federal budgets, requiring higher taxes and taking away funds from other spending options. But there is an alternative.

If the government instead subsidizes the capital cost of road improvements and water supply projects, the required investment by private sector partners is reduced proportionately. This reduces the amount ratepayers will have to spend for water and transportation, at the same time as it lowers the overall cost-of-living by reducing the costs for these basic inputs. Since even with water, more than half the price the ratepayers are charged is to amortize the capital investment, using general tax funds to lower the necessary amount that has to be recovered by the private utility will significantly lower the cost to the consumer.

This is the libertarian case for public works. It is based on the assumption that once a generation the government makes a significant investment in water and transportation infrastructure upgrades, building assets that can last 50 years or more before requiring significant retrofits, and that these costs, while seeming wasteful or extravagant in the moment, are far less than the cost of providing permanent subsidies to households that cannot possibly survive in a totally privatized system.

These assumptions are far from beyond debate. But this gives rise to additional nuances. To what extent can regulations be abolished to lower costs to the private sector? At some point, the private sector probably can deliver water and energy at a price that even low income households can afford. But what is sacrificed in order to achieve this? It ought to be credible to assert, for example, that anthropogenic CO2 will only assist humanity and ecosystems, by creating a slightly warmer world with air that fertilizes plants far more efficiently. But to suggest that industries in general can go back to polluting the air, water and land with the impunity that defined their emergence two centuries ago is absurd. Externalities exist, no matter where reasonable people draw that line, and managing them adds cost.

The 1950s and 1960s was the last golden age for public works in the United States. Resuming the momentum established by the great public works projects of the 1930s, we built dams and aqueducts, interstate freeways, and a power grid that delivered an oversupply of water, energy, and road capacity. But for the last half-century we have been coasting on those assets, and we have wrung as much conservation out of the system as can be achieved in a nation that continues to grow its population. It is time to build again.

Libertarians can play a powerful role in influencing America’s infrastructure strategy in the near future. They can support totally private solutions, but must recognize that will involves costs so high that it will require government subsidies to low and even middle income households that may last in perpetuity. Or they can support public investment to lower the percentage the private sector has to invest and recover when financing infrastructure, which will trigger one-time public investment, with the ripple effect of lower costs throughout the economy.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Trump Distraction

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Whether it’s due to actual incriminating words and actions, or due to endless assaults without merit, or some combination of both, there are millions of Americans for whom Donald Trump has no credibility. Beyond the damage this has wrought on Trump’s personal and political life, this has dire consequences for the nation. It has enabled the special interests who oppose policies that Trump supports to fatally stigmatize those policies by associating them with Trump.

It’s a dirty trick, but politics is a dirty business. Every political sentiment that special interests who run the country find objectionable is labeled “Trumpism,” and hence becomes toxic.

This game of distraction is bigger than Trump. Americans are beginning to realize that they’ve been betrayed by their elites. The globalist agenda of open borders, unfettered movement of capital, the rejection of traditional values, the rejection of meritocracy, the deliberate overreaction to “climate change,” and the heedless accumulation of debt to fund the development of foreign economies—including the Chinese military—has been accepted and promoted by virtually every major institution in America: unions, corporations, academia, K-12 public education, the media and entertainment industry, Democrats, and most Republicans. They profit by this agenda, and in so doing elevate the cost-of-living at the same time as Americans are deprived of good jobs.

When Trump entered politics in 2015, he exposed and rejected this agenda in its entirety. Within a few years, tens of millions of Americans who hadn’t considered these issues as part of a connected whole, if they’d even considered them at all, were awakened and voting for a politician that was committed to dismantling the entire globalist project.

Trump’s continued relevance promises to blur even further the conventional dividing lines in American politics. What is the significance of Left vs. Right, when communists and corporations in 21st-century America are working together to advance big government globalism; they both support an authoritarian, collectivist, micromanaged society. There is ample evidence for this seeming paradox.

On most of the big issues of our time, including the rejection of traditional moral values, the centrality of “climate change” as a transformative economic and political agenda, and the need for affirmative action, racial redress, and open borders, communists and corporatists share a surprisingly congruent agenda. Only on the issue of private property do they diverge, and even that may be illusory when considering the realistic prospect of publicly held corporations with activist directorates and activist shareholders owning and controlling virtually the entire economy.

Trump blew the lid off this whole artificial dichotomy, and from coast to coast, Americans are still digesting the implications. No wonder there is a coordinated, ongoing corporate obsession with race and gender disparities, paired with a constant effort to nurture tribalism. Because if you take away a polarizing perspective on race and gender, what can unite the grassroots on the Left with the grassroots on the Right may be bigger than what divides them.

The common thread in the globalist agenda is that it will disproportionately harm middle and low-income Americans regardless of their group identity. Children need a father and a mother. Climate change policies that enrich corporations and empower leftist bureaucrats will impoverish everyone not wealthy enough to be indifferent to the crushing cost. Abandoning meritocracy in favor of quotas will destroy America’s ability to compete and innovate at the same time as it will breed cynicism and alienation. Unregulated immigration drives down wages and bankrupts social services.

It is no wonder, then, that Democrats, establishment Republicans, and corporate globalists want to distract us by turning us all into alleged bigots and anti-bigots who consume one another in endless conflict. Without this massive distraction, how would globalists get away with destroying America’s standard of living while enriching themselves?

It is an opportunistic, debilitating lie to define everyone as either a victim or an oppressor in order to get everybody fighting. It is a devious, epic, diabolical fraud and hidden agenda that must be exposed at every opportunity. But there is also a positive message, promoting hopeful solutions, that is desperately necessary in order to avoid radicalization.

There are alternatives to every one of the pillars of corporate globalism that must be promoted without apology and unequivocally. The traditional family is the backbone of society. Fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear energy are absolutely necessary to grow a healthy and prosperous economy, not only in America but even more so in the aspiring nations of the developing world. Domestic manufacturing to maintain self-sufficiency in essential products creates good jobs and is vital to national security. Immutable colorblind standards based on merit are the only fair and legitimate way to allocate opportunities in all aspects of society. Immigration must be strictly regulated to protect the interests of American citizens, even if that conflicts with the interests of global corporations.

With these principles forming an uncompromising foundation, opponents to globalism have an appealing, prosperity-oriented narrative that will attract wavering adherents of MAGA as well as reluctant globalists. These principles offer common sense and hope. They offer calm unity. They can reject extremism of all types, whether it’s classic racism or teaching transgender ideology to prepubescent students in the public schools. And they embody a love for America.

Apart from Trump and the MAGA movement, emphasizing all these policies—pro-family, pro-conventional energy, and pro-meritocracy—have not been the common currency of Republicans. Instead, with good reason, they’ve been stereotyped as waffling on immigration, lukewarm on climate realism, AWOL on expressing the problems with race and gender quotas, and, all too often, antagonistic to pro-family sentiments. No wonder they are barely relevant. And no wonder Trump’s enemies get away with accusing him of catering to ethnic-nationalists and conspiracy theorists. They claim nobody else is out there, and in one important respect, they’re right. The MAGA movement, despite its potential to become the center of gravity in American politics, lacks a critical mass of committed leaders with the voice and visibility to give it an undeniable presence.

This may sound inaccurate and harsh, but it isn’t. Those Republicans with access to major donors and establishment recognition use Never-Trump rhetoric as a smokescreen to obscure their commitment to the globalist agenda. At the same time, too many MAGA Republicans have either drifted into peripheral and often extreme territory, or they emulate Trump’s rhetoric while lacking any underlying sincerity. The focus of the MAGA movement, if it is to earn the massive tide of votes that realignment requires, needs to convert its unifying principles into a pragmatic agenda that thousands of candidates from the local to the national level articulate and fully intend to carry out. At the least, that agenda must embrace restoring quality and apolitical public education, dramatically reducing crime, and lowering the cost of living through managed immigration, deregulation of domestic industries, and realistic energy policies. Focusing on those priorities will win elections.

The one candidate who appears to agree with Trump on these critical and winning issues is Vivek Ramaswamy. Among all politicians on the national stage whose policies emulate Trump’s, he is the only candidate that has the brains, the youth, and what appears to be the uncompromising passion.

Ramaswamy also offers Americans an example, which he emphasizes in his campaign speeches, of how Americans can unify as a single, colorblind culture. There is no reason why any American citizen, of any color, cannot read the founding documents of America and be inspired by them. There is no reason why any American, regardless of ethnic background, cannot appreciate America’s unique commitment to individual rights and free enterprise and private property, and understand its transcendental value. There is no reason why Americans of all races cannot view America’s history not as “deeply flawed,” but instead as an illustrious story of evolution from an inspiring beginning to what it is today – through perpetual refinement—a nation of unparalleled opportunities for everyone willing to work hard.

America’s destiny can be to remain a leader and an example to the world, while caring for its own citizens in a way that doesn’t alienate the world, but inspires other nations to do the same. America’s destiny can be to invest in practical, prosperity-oriented projects at home and abroad, to maintain technological and military preeminence, and to blaze a trail into the solar system. This is a vision that every American needs to know they can share.

It will be a shame, and a national tragedy, if the allegedly toxic Trump and MAGA distraction, piled atop the race distraction, the gender distraction, the “trans” distraction, and as if that isn’t enough, the distraction of a horrific proxy war in Eastern Europe, prevents the American people from seeing the future being prepared for them. Globalism as it is being currently prosecuted is death to America. It can and must be rejected.

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

Specific Policies to Realign Voters and Fix California

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AUDIO: California’s voters will support common sense policies designed to accomplish three objectives of universal urgency: Restoring quality public education, reducing crime and homelessness, and lowering the cost-of-living. Voters, regardless of their ethnicity, will support politicians who offer credible policy proposals to accomplish these nonpartisan objectives. The recommendations made in this video (best viewed at 2X speed) are an attempt to define specific policies that will fulfill each of these three broad objectives. Presentation begins at 6:30 minutes into the video. Edward Ring speaking to the California Federated Republican Women.

 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like CEQA?

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The California Environmental Quality Act, universally known by its serendipitously phonetic acronym “SEE-kwa,” was passed by the state legislature in 1971. At that time, it was the first legislation of its kind in the nation, if not the world. Its original intent was to “inform government decisionmakers and the public about the potential environmental effects of proposed activities and to prevent significant, avoidable environmental damage.”

Over the past half-century, however, CEQA has acquired layers of legislative updates and precedent setting court rulings, warping it into a beast that denies clarity to developers and derails projects. When projects do make it through the CEQA gauntlet, the price of passage adds punitive costs in time and money. Knowing this will happen deters countless investors and developers from even trying to complete a project in the state.

Starting earlier this year, California’s nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission began studying the impact of CEQA and soliciting suggestions from the public. They have held four public hearings so far, on 3/16, 4/13, 4/27, and 5/11. The live hearings, lasting in total over 12 hours, in all four cases were attended by almost nobody apart from the commissioners and the people invited to testify. Altogether, so far on YouTube these four hearings have attracted just over 1,000 online views. Not much, considering CEQA’s impact.

Anyone who has waded through all 12 hours of these hearings may agree that certain themes came up again and again, and will doubtless factor significantly in determining what the commission ultimately recommends. The remainder of this report will summarize some of the recurrent or noteworthy observations and recommendations from these hearings, along with ideas solicited elsewhere from Californians that have had to deal with CEQA either as attorneys, judges, developers, or activists. To be clear, and in the interests of full disclosure, this report is not intended to offer a neutral perspective on CEQA. It is rather an attempt to further expose how problematic CEQA has become, and offer alternatives.

While CEQA is most often associated with housing, and is often cited as a major obstacle to building more housing in California, it affects any project that has potential environmental impacts. Along with housing development, this includes commercial development, sports facilities, and all types of infrastructure including dams, aqueducts, wastewater treatment plants, desalination plants, power plants, power transmission lines, pipelines, ports and port upgrades, rail, road, mines, quarries, logging, land management; anything that changes land use and may cause “significant” environmental damage. And in every case, the influence of CEQA has its champions and its detractors.

What may inform CEQA judgments has changed over the decades. In one of the first of the Little Hoover Commission’s hearings, a panelist informed the group, speaking with almost reverent certainty, that five of California’s major airports “would be underwater by 2050.” Such remarks and sentiments now pervade CEQA proceedings. Climate change impact, which was absent from CEQA cases in the 1970s, has become one of the dominant concerns brought in CEQA cases today.

The Labyrinth Called CEQA

The concept of CEQA is unassailable. If a project may cause “significant impact” to the environment, the CEQA process will ensure that either the impact is appropriately mitigated, or the project is stopped. The chart depicted below, courtesy of the California Department of Conservation, depicts the CEQA process. If anything, this elaborate flow chart understates what a project developer is up against thanks to CEQA. There is rarely just one “responsible agency.” If any of these agencies determine there are any flaws or omissions in the required “Environmental Impact Report” (EIR), the process often has to be restarted. The delays between inter-agency responses can consume months if not years. The “public review period” leaves room for a 3rd party to file a time consuming lawsuit right up to the last minute before a project is finally approved.

If the complexity of CEQA as depicted in this flowchart makes obvious the difficulties facing anyone who develops property or manages land, it also explains why exemptions have become the shortcut taken for politically favored projects. Exemption from CEQA has been the default remedy pursued by the state legislature whenever they decide it is important to prioritize any project, or category of projects. But carving out one exemption after another does not fix CEQA. Even if the state legislature were capable of correctly prioritizing projects, which is an absurd reach, it remains an absolute process without gradation. Anointed projects skip through the exemption portal and are fast-tracked, even though many of them may cause environmental impacts that are significant. Meanwhile, all other projects, many of which are just as urgently required, must go through the labyrinth called CEQA.

Would True Environmental Justice Include More “Greenfield” Development?

Along with the relatively new and central role of climate change impact in the CEQA process, another major new concern now considered in CEQA cases is “environmental justice,” that is, the alleged disproportionate effect development projects may have in low income neighborhoods. This allegation is not unfounded, although the causes predictably attributed to this – a legacy of systemic racism – are more nuanced than conventional wisdom may acknowledge. Residential areas that are situated in close proximity to a network of freeways, industrial parks, airports, seaports, and warehouse districts, for example, are going to have more noise and more air pollution than residential areas that are in the foothills peripheral to a major urban center. Homes and apartment rentals in less desirable neighborhoods will be more affordable, so it is natural that on average, residents with lower household incomes will be living there. Campaigns for environmental justice can be based solely on economics without sacrificing credibility or moral worth.

Regardless of the underlying causes, it is valid to argue that yet another industrial project in a neighborhood that already has a high density of industrial development is going to add its incremental contribution of noise and pollution to a place already saturated with noise and pollution, whereas putting that same project in a pristine affluent suburb will not. It is also valid to argue that the residents and elected officials in wealthy neighborhoods have the economic wherewithal to hire attorneys to litigate against industrial projects and high density housing in their neighborhoods, whereas these same projects can be directed into lower income neighborhoods where the residents do not have the resources to resist.

This gives rise to a criticism of CEQA that is double edged. On one hand, CEQA offers people in low income communities one of the only legal tools available to fight high density housing and industrial or warehouse development that will create more noise, more congestion, more of a service burden, and more pollution in their communities. But at the same time, while residents in these low income communities have to find an attorney willing to carry their objections, often pro bono, into a legal battle, CEQA is an off-the-shelf, potent weapon in the hands of wealthy residents across town, who deploy it at will to keep high density housing and unwanted commercial development out of their communities.

One solution to this conundrum which some would consider a win-win would be to develop entire new cities on open land in California. Doing this would preserve the ambiance of existing neighborhoods, regardless of their average household income, and might even facilitate de-densification. It would lower the price of housing everywhere, making it easier for low-income residents to afford to either improve their neighborhoods or migrate to new communities. Doing this, however, would require massive state investment in enabling energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, building enabling infrastructure was something the state made a budget priority and performed remarkably well. Today, California’s state government has not made infrastructure investment a sufficient priority, and this failure to maintain and expand California’s infrastructure is frequently blamed on the roadblocks thrown up by CEQA.

Should densification and rationing be the only answer to environmentalist concerns? This question should be faced honestly. Is it impossible to construct new infrastructure to enable suburban growth? Why? California is a big state, with thousands of square miles of land that seems to be ripe for carpeting over with sprawling wind and solar farms, while new homes and new roads remain anathema. There’s room for both. California’s urban footprint consumes about 8,000 square miles, which is only about 5 percent of its area. You could build new cities housing 10 million people on raw open land, in four person households in single family dwellings on quarter-acre lots, with an equal amount of space allocated for roads, schools, parks, and commercial and industrial space, and it would only require 2,000 square miles. In the geography of vast California, that is an insignificant amount of land. Why not?

It is ironic that CEQA and related laws have made it almost impossible to build on “greenfields,” that is, on raw undeveloped land on the periphery of cities, and yet the laws are streamlined to fast-track infill development in relatively toxic and already densely populated urban environments. Perhaps in the interest of environmental justice, low income communities should be supporting laws to permit the expansion of California’s urban footprint.

The Tentacles of CEQA Intersect with Other Regulatory Beasts

It’s easy to digress into a discussion of urban planning, and ask why a green straightjacket has been thrown around every major urban center in California, but at the center of such a tangent one still finds omnipresent CEQA. And CEQA, for all of its regulatory tentacles, is only part of a consortium of similar regulatory creatures. The Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32, passed by the state legislature in 2006), and seemingly infinite laws, executive orders, agency regulations, and court rulings pursuant to these and others, along with CEQA, have combined to make development in California nearly impossible.

For example, development proponents who testified in the Little Hoover Commission hearings repeatedly brought up a relatively recent regulation pursuant to AB 32, the requirement that any new housing development calculate the projected annual “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT) the residents will generate. Taking effect in 2018, this new analysis must be done in order to determine how much mitigating fees the developer will be assessed in order to fund mass transit or otherwise offset the anticipated greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles owned by residents of a new community.

But in the meantime, developers whose projects have been mired in the CEQA process since well before 2018 are now required to supplement the portions of their EIR that evaluated traffic impacts based on congestion with a new evaluation that estimates vehicle miles traveled. And while this VMT analysis is meant to supersede the traffic congestion as “the new lens for assessing transportation impacts,” potential congestion remains grounds for 3rd parties use CEQA to sue developers to stop their projects.

More generally, critics of CEQA have made clear that the law, in combination with other environmentalist inspired laws, have created a web of regulatory hurdles that are so unclear and so costly that only a small handful of housing developers, government agencies, or civil engineering contractors are big enough to navigate them. As one person testifying said, CEQA will turn a $1.0 billion project into a $1.5 billion project simply because when it takes ten years to go through the typical rounds of CEQA reviews, then debt financing taken out at 5 percent interest after 10 years will have ballooned up to a sum more than 50 percent higher than at the start.

Another compounding problem with CEQA and related laws designed to protect the environment is because so many years are required to get approval, by the time the design of a project is approved, the design has become obsolete.

Changing the rules in midstream, conflicting rules depending on the agency, an approval process that takes years if not decades, financing that dries up or is driven up to punitive levels, excessive, unreasonable fees, projects that take so long that if and when they finally get the green light, either the market or the technology has left them far behind. Start over. This is life with CEQA. This is California. For all its virtues, and there are plenty of them, environmentalism run amok is destroying economic opportunities for all Californians, and CEQA is the beating heart of the beast.

The Exemptions Cop Out

One solution to CEQA’s hurdles is to declare exemptions, and California’s state legislature has done this again and again. Sports stadiums. Low income housing. Transportation projects. But what if other projects – vital public infrastructure projects and major private developments – are just as legitimately in need of relief from CEQA and are just as vital to the economic health of California and its people?

At one point the Hoover Commission panelists seemed to agree that instead of revising CEQA, they might just agree on what sorts of project categories should be exempt. This mentality was evident as well in the recent legislative package submitted by Governor Newsom that would have streamlined the CEQA process for vital infrastructure. Killed almost immediately in committee, Newsom’s bills in any case were picking winners. If you want 10 megawatt wind turbines floating off the northern coast, or giant solar farms in the Mojave Desert and South San Joaquin Valley, you would like Newsom’s proposals. If you want more “affordable housing,” where both the needlessly overpriced construction cost and the eventual rental payments by occupants are subsidized by taxpayers, Newsom’s proposals were great policy. Put another way, if you want to burden taxpayers with heavily subsidized, overpriced energy and housing, you may adhere to the prevailing wisdom on CEQA, which is to identify what to exempt from CEQA, favor those project categories, and let everything else continue to wither under an unreformed body of law.

Instead of carving out specific exemptions to CEQA, why not eliminate all exemptions? That might drive all the politically connected special interests back to the table, focusing their minds on what parts of CEQA can stay and what can be scrapped. According to Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, back in the 1970s a CEQA report that was only two pages is, today, going to require over 1,000 pages. Dunmoyer said that for a typical 200 home subdivision project the developer can expect to spend at least $1.0 million on CEQA reports in a process that will take 2-3 years, and that’s best case. If there is any litigation, those budgets and timelines go out the window.

One of the most articulate critics of CEQA in the Little Hoover Commission hearings was attorney Jennifer Hernandez, who offered a blistering rebuke of the “infill” mantra that streamlines the process for “tiny homes” and “accessory dwelling units.” Explaining that “welders cannot bike to work and should not have to live in a backyard cottage,” Hernandez suggested that the conversation about CEQA needs to include working people who have practical needs for affordable utility bills, practical transportation infrastructure, and good jobs. She’s right. The impact of CEQA on the price and availability of essentials – housing, water, energy, transportation – imposes direct and often crippling costs on residents. At the same time, California’s politically contrived, uncompetitive prices for land, utilities, and CEQA driven regulatory costs also deters companies from locating in California, or remaining in California, also depriving Californians of job opportunities.

While CEQA debates focus on how to streamline the process to get more renewable energy and subsidized housing, these deliberations ignore the fact that exempting renewables and low income housing actually increases the tax burden on workers who already confront a cost-of-living that is artificially elevated thanks to CEQA. As Hernandez put it, “we are expelling people from California.” Population decline for three years in a row in California, for the first time since statehood was achieved, backs up that statement. It isn’t the weather.

The Use and Abuse of CEQA

Several people addressing the Little Hoover Commission brought up the problem of abuse. Hernandez characterized CEQA as a body of law so complex that uncertainty is inherent and outcomes to litigation cannot be predicted. Lawsuits without merit often win and meritorious lawsuits often lose. Judges will often find just one unforeseeable part of a CEQA report that has fallen short of what they believe is required and send the applicant back to do it all over again. She claimed there is no area of law that has the level of uncertainty of CEQA. She claimed that almost half of California’s production of housing was sued in 2022.

For developers, the almost inevitable arrival of a lawsuit has turned CEQA, as Hernandez described it, into a “litigation defense tool.” The applicant tries to anticipate and answer in advance every conceivable objection to their project, which is, thanks to the complexity of CEQA, an impossible task. Then so-called bounty hunters pounce as soon as the application is filed. Lawyer trolls who identify a crack in the CEQA report and threaten to sue. Settling with these attorneys becomes another cost of doing business.

In CEQA lawsuits today, “significant impact on the environment” has never been defined more broadly. This opens up avenues for litigation that are available not only to environmentalists who may or may not have a legitimate concern about the project’s impact on the environment. It also invites lawsuits from parties with ulterior motives. Labor unions that want the developer to accept a project labor agreement often file CEQA lawsuits, a practice that has come to be referred to as “greenmail.” Business interests that compete with a project developer will often file CEQA lawsuits.

It’s important to recognize how CEQA is abused by special interests with an environmental concern that is indirect at best, but CEQA’s impact is abusive in ways that are explicitly environmentalist. When attorneys representing environmentalist organizations spoke to the Little Hoover Commission panel, their observations reflected what might be characterized as demanding the impossible.

In particular, one environmentalist in their testimony claimed that CEQA prevents housing from being foolishly built if there isn’t any available supply of water for those homes, and that CEQA keeps housing out of fire zones. But it is CEQA that prevents water supply infrastructure from getting built, and it is CEQA that prevents mechanical thinning, controlled burns, and responsible logging in order to prevent dangerous buildup of fuel in forest and chaparral where natural, forest thinning fires have been suppressed for decades.

Some of the environmentalist objections invited immediate rebuttal. One environmentalist explained that “uncontrolled sprawl” cuts into wildlife habitat, harming mountain lions. But only 5 percent of California’s land is urbanized, and California’s mountain lions are thriving. An analysis released by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture in 2020 estimated that California’s population of mountain lions has grown from less than 600 prior to gaining protected status to over 6,000 today. But this fact is unconvincing for environmentalists who are intent on preserving and increasing mountain lion populations in every subregion of the state.

This preservationist mentality is not limited to mountain lions, of course. Environmentalist lawsuits are filed to stop projects that may threaten the habitat of any species, or subspecies, not only of animals, but also of plants. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to save mountain lions, or, for that matter, any species of animal or plant, anywhere. How environmentalists have worked to save the California Condor from extinction is an inspiring story. But the values and priorities of environmentalism must be balanced against the consequences of denying, delaying, and driving up costs for development. And it is ironic, at best, that CEQA exceptions are proliferating for solar and windfarm sprawl, while badly needed housing and vital enabling infrastructure that might consume far less of the “urban/wildland interface” remain under the debilitating scope of CEQA.

Solutions to CEQA

What was never mentioned in the Little Hoover Commission’s hearings on CEQA, but deserves consideration, is to simply repeal the entire law. Get rid of it. The idea that development projects would suddenly proliferate, out of control, if CEQA went away is ridiculous. Every other law to protect the environment would still be in place, including the Endangered Species Act, the Global Warming Solutions Act (which should also be repealed), and the National Environmental Policy Act, which is the federal counterpart to CEQA and which is more than adequate to protect the environment.

Eliminating CEQA would go a long way towards restoring opportunities for low and middle income Californians, but eliminating CEQA is a fantasy. Equally impossible would be to eliminate the ability of private parties to sue developers under CEQA. This would eliminate the bounty hunters and lawyer trolls who have created a lucrative industry using CEQA to shake down developers. While it would also remove an avenue for members of low income communities to protect their neighborhoods, that benefit is overstated when developers target low income communities for high density housing, protected by laws that have exempted them from CEQA, and also permit them to circumvent local zoning restrictions. There is another path to environmental justice, which is to lower the cost-of-living, and the biggest barrier to lowering the cost-of-living is CEQA.

A solution to CEQA that might be politically viable would be to restrict 3rd party lawsuits to parties that are specifically concerned about environmental impact and reside in the affected communities. This reform, if it was properly calibrated, might reduce or eliminate greenmail, lawsuits brought by competitors to a developer, and settlement bounty hunters. Another solution, mentioned earlier, might be to eliminate all exemptions, and recognize that if CEQA is a necessary process to protect the environment, there is no justification to place any category of development outside its purview.

Here then, are some incremental, and not so incremental, solutions proposed for CEQA:

1 – Eliminate all exemptions. Anyone wanting an exemption is speaking just for their special interest.

2 – End anonymous lawsuits; require environmental standing to sue. Accept only environmental criteria for litigation. Only allow standing to people directly impacted on environmental grounds. For example, NEPA does not give standing to labor.

3 – Clarify the conditions under which if a development conforms to a county’s standing environmental impact report for that category of project, then it is not subject to further CEQA review.

4 – Allow applicants to rely on previously approved EIR. If a proposed project is consistent with the county’s specific general plan, community plan. and zoning, eliminate the requirement for additional environmental review.

5 – Make reviews of housing projects ministerial, or, make review of any project – including energy development – ministerial.

6 – Require the loser in CEQA lawsuits to pay the prevailing party’s legal fees.

7 – End duplicative lawsuits; once a plan or project is approved with CEQA it can be challenged in a lawsuit once but not multiple times for each subsequent agency approval.

8 – Do the CEQA process just once, with all involved agencies operating together, not sequentially.

9 – Change the timeline for notifying agencies of the objections to EIRs. Designate a final review step in the CEQA process after which further litigation is prohibited. This is already a provision of NEPA. As it is, objections including litigation are filed at the last possible moment, often in the final public hearing before approval of a project.

10 – For all private proposals, eliminate the requirement that the EIR include an evaluation of alternative sites for the project.

11 – Impose a maximum time limit on how long an agency has to respond to an initial or revised environmental impact report.

12 – Expedite the process so problems identified in an EIR review can be fixed right away by the developer. As it is every time the process is restarted there is potential for new claims.

13 – Match the CEQA remedy to the CEQA deficiency. Specify that while a court can order more CEQA analysis and mitigation, it cannot block a project or rescind a project approval unless there is a significant adverse health or safety impact if the project is constructed.

14 – Flaws found in EIRs are often extremely technical and it is often questionable whether or not a particular technical deficiency would prevent the project from being approved in its current form. Therefore if there is a technical flaw but it is not prejudicial and will not really make a difference, a harmless error standard should apply, such that if the project would be approved anyway notwithstanding the technical deficiency that should not be a basis for denying the EIR.

15 – Judicially enforce California Public Resources Code PRC § 21083.1. Judges should not require anything more than what is expressly required in CEQA statutes and guidelines. Doing this would make CEQA more predictable, which would improve the law and its effect on development.

16 – Replace the right to appeal with the right only to a writ of mandamus. This way if the court of appeal believes the appeal is frivolous they can deny the writ and hence avoid a full briefing, oral arguments, and having to write an opinion. A writ of mandamus can be evaluated within months. If an appellate court does think an appeal has merit, they can approve a writ of mandamus and then it becomes treated like an appeal. The reform language can include a provision that if there is a “likelihood” the petitioner is right, the appellate course must accept the writ.

17 – If a project is approved, that approval shall remain recognized for a set number of years even if rules are subsequently updated.

18 – Repeal CEQA entirely. Rely on NEPA and other environmentalist legislation to protect the environment from developments that may have a significant impact.

The Benefits of CEQA Reform

Despite objections from environmentalist organizations, environmental justice advocates, and some labor union representatives, there is a growing consensus within the State Legislature that something has to be done about CEQA. This is evident in the countless exceptions that the legislature has enacted to accelerate development of low income housing and renewable energy projects.

One of the most intriguing testimonies before the Little Hoover Commission came from Danny Curtain, representing the California Conference of Carpenters. He argued that a labor union is justified in seeking prevailing wages and a project labor agreement whenever a private developer receives public subsidies and streamlined permitting benefits. As he put it, “if you give the developer a break don’t let the developer take out profits on the backs of the workers.”

Curtain’s point is that if there is a special public benefit then you can argue the public sector now has equity in the project and therefore you can argue it is to some extent a public work and therefore should be subject to the labor laws impacting public works. This is a reasonable argument. One may object to the idea that public works should be subject to project labor agreements at all. But that is a separate debate.

The role of unions in CEQA raises a more fundamental question. How do you bring construction workers, or, for that matter, all skilled workers, back into middle class status? Do you accomplish this via union mandates or via business competition for workers in a prospering economy? As it is, there is a shortage of highly skilled workers, ready to take on more public works projects or work in California’s industrial sector. Where are the apprenticeship programs to address this shortage?

One of the last people to speak was involved with the Sierra Club, who proudly declared they “go to sleep with EIRs.” This person, and countless similarly committed activists and professionals, have become expert at using CEQA to stop projects. Whether it is housing, or critical enabling infrastructure, seemingly no major project, anywhere, is acceptable to them. CEQA is their weapon to stop California from building the physical assets to match its population. And for years, with increasing effect, it’s been working.

This is where unions, if they’re serious about seeing more workers acquire middle class status, may want to consider the upside of diminished CEQA statutes. If California’s civil engineering contractors were permitted to build practical solutions to supply the state with abundant energy and water, not only would this create tens of thousands of high paid construction jobs for highly skilled workers, it would lower the cost-of-living for every household in the state.

There are two paths to financial security for households. The traditional union solution is the path of higher wages. But an equally effective path with broader benefit is to lower the cost of life’s essentials – housing, water, energy, transportation and food. Union leadership in California should consider the impact of CEQA in this context, and if they do, realize their alliance of convenience with environmentalist extremists is not in the interests of all workers, even if it has worked to the more narrow benefit of their own memberships.

Reducing the power of CEQA may be the first of many steps necessary to rescue California from a mentality of scarcity and rationing that, to-date, has only been challenged rhetorically. Declaring more exemptions to CEQA is a terrible solution. The many steps recommended here may fall well short of a complete repeal of the law, but would all nonetheless help make California a place where working families may have a better chance to find a good job, afford to pay their bills, and begin to achieve financial security for their households.

CEQA reform, however, is only one big part of a much bigger debate. Do Californians want to develop their state again with the confidence and efficiency that defined the big projects of the 1950s and 1960s, when roads, reservoirs, and a power grid were constructed using mostly public money and for a time actually delivered an oversupply of affordable transportation, water and energy? Do Californians want to recognize that setting an example that other nations of the world find attractive and practical? Because to do that, more than CEQA will have to be revised.

For example, modern natural gas power plants employ combined cycle designs that harvest waste heat from the natural gas-fired turbine to produce steam to drive a second turbine. But new combined cycle designs replace the steam with helium, which harvests waste heat at much higher temperatures than steam can, which means less heat wasted to the atmosphere, greatly increasing efficiency. This advanced design can convert up to 80 percent of the embodied energy in natural gas fuel into electricity. Why not reclassify these new ultra-efficient natural gas solutions as renewable energy?

For that matter, why aren’t Californians at the forefront of both small modular and large next-generation nuclear reactor development, and reclassifying them as renewable energy?

Why can’t advanced, still emerging hybrid automotive technologies, which use a battery one-tenth as heavy to harvest the energy otherwise wasted from braking and downhill momentum, remain eligible for sale in California after 2035?

Why isn’t the California Water Commission required to declare “beneficial use” of water diversions to be equally applicable to urban and agricultural users as it is when allocated to preserving aquatic ecosystems?

Answering questions like these with policies that are once again designed to nurture economic growth instead of economic stagnation is a prerequisite for California to recover prosperity for every worker in the state. Unions should recognize this, as should social justice activists and progressives. The impact of CEQA in particular, and overwritten environmentalist legislation in general, only benefits special interests. It is time to restore balance between what is possible to protect the environment, and what is necessary to empower the people living here. Reforming CEQA is the first step in that process.

This article was first released in three installments in the California Globe: Part 1 “How Do You Solve a Problem Like CEQA?,” June 14, 2023, Part 2 “The Abuse of CEQA, and the Exemptions Cop Out,” June 16, 2023, and Part 3, “Solutions to CEQA,” June 21, 2023

Suburban Sprawl is Beautiful

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There are three disabling myths that have crippled the economy of California, and the impact of these myths are most painfully felt among California’s poorest and most vulnerable. To live well in California today, one must be affluent enough to be indifferent to a cost-of-living that would otherwise be punitively high.

The three myths that have led to this predicament are the following: Nuclear power and natural gas power causes unacceptable harm to the environment, reservoirs and desalination plants cause unacceptable harm to the environment, and single family homes nestled in sprawling suburbs cause unacceptable harm to the environment. These are myths. They are false. Yet they are being exported to the rest of America, where they will wreak the same havoc they’ve already inflicted onto Californians.

The consequences of the first two myths are chronic shortages and high prices for energy and water. Instead of building state-of-the-art, highly efficient and clean natural gas power plants, and ultra safe nuclear power plants that even reuse the spent fuel, Californians are planning to carpet hundreds of square miles of land with solar panels and befoul thousands of square miles of ocean with floating wind turbines. This brand of “sprawl” will consume far more land than new suburbs ever could, and implementing this scheme will guarantee that Californians never have an adequate supply of affordable and reliable energy.

Similarly, Californians could be building desalination plants and off-stream reservoirs, adhering to the most stringent environmental standards anywhere in the world. Even the environment would benefit from water abundance, as the surplus water would be available to nurture streams and wetlands. But instead, even after a legendary procession of storms blasted the state this winter, California’s lawmakers are planning to restrict indoor water consumption to 42 gallons per person per day. The proposed legislation also intends to require homeowners to implement “watering budgets” for their outdoor landscaping.

And the money that might go to paying for practical water supply infrastructure? That will instead be spent on installing dual water meters in every one of California’s 13 million households, one to ration indoor use, one to ration outdoor use. It will be spent on subsidies to low income households who can’t afford their water bill, since even though the quantity of water sold will go down with rationing, the unit price will go up since most of water district operating costs are to pay fixed overhead and pay off financing for existing infrastructure.

If you don’t have enough energy or water, you can’t build new homes. But to make a virtue out of an unfortunate and altogether avoidable necessity, the third myth was created: suburban sprawl is an ugly blight on the earth. But this perspective inverts reality. Suburbs – leafy, spacious, pastoral and peaceful – and the welcoming, private, detached homes for which they are best known, are the nourishing refuges that anyone raising a family would choose. And there is no reason why suburbs cannot be affordable again. Lack of affordability is a choice made by politicians in Sacramento and Washington, a choice based on myths.

The mythology begins with the notion that California doesn’t have enough “open space” to permit new construction. This is preposterously false. California is a vast, underpopulated state, encompassing 163,695 square miles. The state is less than 5 percent urbanized at present, that is, nearly 40 million inhabitants are crammed into barely 8,000 square miles. To put this into context, imagine what it would take to add 10 million people to the state’s population. Imagine if all 10 million people were to live in brand new, “sprawling” suburbs.

This isn’t hard to calculate. If 10 million people, living in four person households, moved into detached homes that each occupied a quarter-acre lot, it would consume just under 1,000 square miles. Taking into account an equal amount of land set aside for roads, schools, parks, retail centers and industrial districts, these 10 million people and their new suburbs would consume 2,000 square miles. Which is to say that even in the unlikely event that 10 million people moved to California, and every one of them realized the California dream of their own home on a big lot, the urban footprint of the state would merely grow from 4.9 percent to a still insignificant 6.1 percent.

Further context can be offered to these calculations by estimating how much land and ocean are to be set aside for solar and wind development. Again these aren’t difficult calculations. If California wanted to go all electric, at a minimum they would have to triple the capacity of the power grid, and they would have overbuild renewables in order to yield on average at least 100 gigawatts of baseload power. How would they do this?

It turns out, solar power would be the most space efficient. Utility scale solar farms in sunny California can deliver, taking into account buffering with massive battery storage, about 50 megawatts of baseload power per square mile. This equates to a 2,000 square mile requirement for solar to fulfill all of California’s electricity requirements in a totally electrified state. California’s legislature is issuing exemptions and clearing away every regulatory obstacle ever enacted in order to expedite solar sprawl. One may argue whether or not this is desirable, but they’re right about one thing: There’s plenty of available land. But why is solar ok, when homes are forbidden?

As for wind, it is an amazing space hog. Even offshore, where wind is more reliable, generating adequate electricity would require a stupefying amount of ocean. The biggest offshore wind turbines available, taking into account the intermittency which would require massive battery farms, only deliver about 4 megawatts of baseload power. And because these floating leviathans are 1,000 feet tall, and have to be anchored using cables connected to the ocean floor over 4,000 feet below the surface, each of them requires a square mile of area to operate. That equates to 25,000 square miles, off a coast that is only 600 miles long. And to build and maintain them? The ships, the submarines, the ports, the workforce housing, the undersea cables, the battery farms, the high-voltage connections from remote coastal cities to the main grid?

If you want to know where California is squandering its wealth, look no further. And yet, amidst these sprawling renewables projects, single family homes will supposedly harm the environment. This, too, is a myth, and not only because the amount of land required is a minute fraction of California’s open space. It is also a myth because the so-called “greenhouse gas emissions” allegedly exacerbated by new suburbs are not nearly as significant as claimed. Despite the sanctimonious pronouncements of environmentalist sages who oppose any suburban “sprawl,” and even if you still believe that CO2 and modest warming aren’t benefits to the planet and to humanity, studies claiming excessive greenhouse gas from suburbs are easily challenged.

To begin with, California is on the bleeding edge of going “net zero.” And even if they step back from that impoverishing extreme, vehicles in California are going all-electric, or – hopefully – at the least there will still be a role for combustion engines in vehicles, but the advanced hybrid technologies they’ll employ will result in negligible emissions. And even that is beside the point, because work commutes are becoming a thing of the past. An honest VMT (vehicle miles traveled) study would take into account the migration of jobs to where new homes are, as well as the enduring viability of remote work. Cars will not pollute, and cars will not be used as frequently anyway. The idea that new suburbs will cause too many emissions of “greenhouse gas” is a myth.

There is a powerful economic argument at work in favor of new suburbs, but it is ignored by California’s legislators. The infrastructure cost of densifying existing cities is more than the infrastructure cost of suburban “sprawl.” This is because existing utility conduits have to be torn up and modified atop existing roads and developed properties. It’s much cheaper to install new utility conduits on open land. In terms of building cost per square foot, anything over three floors requires far more reinforcing materials to withstand the weight of the building; the cheapest building cost per square foot are one and two story, wood framed homes. And, of course, when cities are cordoned off with “greenbelts,” the cost of properties is artificially inflated, often to stratospheric levels, at the same time as land on the other side of the “urban service boundary” is dirt cheap.

The necessity of subsidies to construct enabling infrastructure is also a myth in many situations. For example, if energy regulations were lifted and civil engineering contractors were able to swiftly design and build nuclear power plants and advanced combined cycle natural gas power plants, California’s taxpayers and ratepayers wouldn’t have to pay one dime to subsidize renewable energy projects. Energy would be privately financed and energy costs would be affordable.

Subsidies for water infrastructure are more nuanced, because even with major regulatory reform, the cost for some water infrastructure remains prohibitive to ratepayers without subsidies offsetting a major portion of the construction cost. But here again, California’s legislators, including some of those legislators who are against subsidies on principle, go off the rails. Because the subsidies necessary to finance the water supply infrastructure needed to guarantee abundant and affordable water represent one-time, long-term investments that will more than offset the perpetual subsidies that will otherwise be necessary to provide assistance to low income families that cannot afford their utility bills.

There is nothing ugly, unsustainable, or uneconomic about single family suburbs. They are beautiful expressions of a society that has rejected myths, and gotten their priorities properly aligned with the interests and aspirations of working families. Change the codes. Deregulate. Start building again.

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