Mega Cities Require Mega Suburbs

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Housing is unaffordable in California, and, increasingly, housing is becoming unaffordable in every other part of the United States where Democrats control state legislatures and city councils. And in the spirit of nonpartisanship, it is fair to say that when it comes to housing, far too many Republicans share the same agenda and goals as their supposed Democrat opponents.

The shame of these policies is not only the misery they impose on growing proportions of Americans, but the pessimism they represent. Read beyond the initial recitation of mundane obstacles to share a positive vision of the future. The economics of affordable housing do not have to be complicated. Awesome housing for everyone can be realized merely by changing the conventional wisdom.

Here are four policy choices that have turned millions of Americans into slaves to their home mortgages, and pushed additional millions into cheap rentals that cost them most of their paycheck.

1 – Punitively high fees for building permits. These exorbitant sums are necessary to pay for infrastructure such as connector roads and utility conduits that cities used to pay for out of their operating budgets. But out-of-control expansion of government combined with overmarket pay negotiated by government unions has changed all that. Now local governments have to charge developer fees that can easily exceed $100,000 per home.

2 – Laws that require “inclusive zoning,” whereby low income people are given subsidized homes and apartments in high-income neighborhoods. This pushes up the costs for housing that people have to actually pay for without relying on government handouts.

3 – Endless litigation by environmentalist attorneys bent on collecting settlements for themselves and their organizations, as well as environmental litigation used by labor unions as leverage to force developers to use union labor.

4 – The policies of “urban containment,” whereby for environmental reasons, vast expanses of land that could be used for new homes are off limits to developers.

While the first three on this list are quite enough to push home prices up, it is the fourth that delivers the fatal blow to any hope of changing the equation and making homes affordable again. This one truism, that housing must be dense and packed within existing cities, is the conventional wisdom that has destroyed affordable housing and corrupted a generation of policymakers. It must be shattered.

Only when cities can build out as well as up can there be less expensive construction costs and lower land costs. And this policy, supposedly required to save the planetary environment, is based on two fundamentally flawed premises.

Urban Containment is 21st Century Green Apartheid

The first false premise is the density delusion, the idea that we are running out of land. In nearly every region on earth, this is false. In California, the urban footprint only consumes 8,200 square miles, barely 5 percent of the total land in the state. If you put ten million people into new homes on quarter acre lots, four per home, with an equivalent area set aside for new roads and new commercial and industrial use, you wouldn’t even consume an additional 2,000 square miles! California’s cattle ranches consume over 25,000 square miles. There’s plenty of room.

In the rest of the United States, the same surprising statistics apply. The lower 48 states in the U.S. are less than 4 percent urbanized. Even worldwide, there is plenty of available land. If you put ten billion people into new homes on quarter acre lots, four per home, with an equivalent area set aside for new roads and new commercial and industrial use, you would only consume 3.8 percent of all land excluding Antarctica. Most estimates of urbanization currently worldwide are around 2.7 percent. Allowing suburban dispersion of global population is very unlikely to require even 3.8 percent of available land. Not only will many people prefer to live in the high density urban cores, but breakthroughs in indoor agriculture and aquaculture, along with ongoing improvements in crop yields, will likely allow global reserves of farmland to shrink at a faster rate than mega suburbs expand.

The other false premise used to justify urban containment is that more single family homes means more “sprawl,” which will mean more “vehicle miles traveled,” which will contribute more “greenhouse gasses” to the atmosphere, leading to catastrophic “climate change.”

With apologies for the sarcasm quotes, and as Sleepy Joe Biden would say, “but here’s the deal, folks:” You can believe that greenhouse gas is a planet killer all you like, but building entire new low density cities will not cause an appreciable increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The studies that make this claim are biased, ignore crucial variables, and make no allowances for dazzling new technologies. Zero emission vehicles are just the beginning.

What we can barely imagine today will become passe by the middle of this century. For starters, the advancing world of virtual workforces, which just took a quantum leap forward during the pandemic lockdown, will become the rule rather than the exception. And the jobs that require physical presence will increasingly be jobs that are by their nature dispersed to where the people are – schools, restaurants, services, trades.

By the late 21st century, and contrary to Malthusian fearmongering, magnificent mega cities will be vital and evolving. Building materials will be more abundant than ever, with concrete harvested from desalinated ocean brine, and precious minerals arriving from mining the asteroid belt. With fusion power finally perfected, energy will cheap and inexhaustible. And connecting the mega cities to the mega suburbs will be not only next generation roads, but air lanes filled with passenger drones.

What motivates opponents of the single family dwelling – apart from their misanthropy, greed, and blinkered fanaticism – is a poverty of the imagination. Many future suburbs will be disbursed in areas inaccessible by road, with only flying vehicles providing access. Modular homes with almost no footprint, custom designed and mass manufactured at affordable prices, will be air dropped into place, sparing most of the required on-site construction. Other suburbs, more contiguous with major cities, will have the required connector roads and residential streets, but these roads will be fewer and smaller, since many residents will telecommute, and others will travel by air.

Space Travel, Spin-off Technology

Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was in a desperate rush to beat the Soviets to the moon, dissident Americans bemoaned the fact that we were spending billions to conquer space while there were still people living in poverty back down here on earth. Gil Scott-Heron, an artist of unimpeachable integrity, but more than a little bitterness, wrote the classic “Whitey On the Moon.”

With respect, Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. Everyone benefited from the moon landing. The American space program of the 1960s paved the way for everything from semi-conductors to integrated circuits, dramatic advances in rocketry, breakthroughs in civil, electrical, aeronautical and engineering science, complex software, durable and lightweight composite materials, and, for a few specifics—everything from CT scanners to liquid-cooled garments to freeze-dried food.

Maybe an overt cold war with China can’t come soon enough. A new space race could channel some of this six trillion dollars of suddenly manufactured money into building a permanent base on the south pole of the moon, to use as a jumping off point for asteroid mining. And it isn’t just abundant minerals that will result from the industrialization of the solar system. The spin-offs will be more sophisticated systems than ever to process and recycle air, water and waste, manage energy, and grow food. Imagine how these space technologies will translate into self contained and inexpensive, low footprint modular homes that can offer residential comfort anywhere on earth.

We have no idea today how many transformative innovations will come from a revitalized space program, but if the legacy of the 1960s is any indication, they will be miraculous.

Any examination of how cities and suburbs will look or should look on this planet one-hundred years from now must take into account these promising trends. Global population is leveling off. Science and technology is advancing at an increasing rate, and every year it offers new breakthroughs, solutions and cures. An optimist would look at the last several decades and conclude, despite the challenges, humanity is on a relentless march towards a better quality of life for everyone. An article published by the BBC last year lists several reasons “why the world is improving,” including rising life expectancy, falling infant mortality, falling rates of fertility, ongoing GDP growth, less income inequality, the spread of democracy, and fewer armed conflicts.

This argument for what Wired once called the “Long Boom” is embodied in the philosophy of “New Optimism,” with its principal proponent the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. According to Lomborg, “air and water are getting cleaner, endangered species and forests are holding their own, and the risks associated with global warming are exaggerated.” He contends that “more people than ever before, living in all parts of the globe, are becoming healthier, richer, and better educated; that the human race is living longer and more peaceably; that we’re considerably freer to pursue our happiness.”

As we await permission to venture outside our dwellings once again – or, for that matter, as we defiantly venture outside before they issue the all-clear – we have an opportunity to reflect on the many types of confinement we must overcome. Confinement to our homes. Confinement within politically contrived barriers around our cities, Green Bantustans, where our lives are needlessly dangerous and expensive. Confinement on this world, when treasures await in the most mega of the mega suburbs, the Habitable Zone, all around the sun.

The worst possible move that human societies can make is to panic now, as our species stands on the cusp of more options, more enlightenment, more freedom and prosperity than ever before.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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No, Antarctica is NOT “Rapidly Melting”

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The BBC, which in September 2018 announced its decision to censor any reports by climate skeptics, continues to propagandize for climate alarmists. On March 12, BBC “Science Correspondent” Jonathan Amos published an alarming article entitled “Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating.” According to Amos, “Earth’s great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions.”

The BBC was not alone, of course. Generic journalist NPCs around the world ran with the story. The Guardian’s version came with a predictably terrifying subhead “Losses of ice from Greenland and Antarctica are tracking the worst-case climate scenario, scientists warn.” USA Today offered its version on March 16, with a story entitled “Greenland and Antarctica are now melting six times faster than in the 1990s, accelerating sea-level rise.”

The source of these dire statistics was a report in the journal Nature, published in late 2019 and released online on March 12. The key findings were summarized by NASA/JPL, and come down to certain quantitative assertions that invite skeptical analysis.

Perhaps the most alarming sounding statistic was the following, quoting from NASA/JPL:

“The two regions [Greenland and Antarctica] have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in three decades; unabated, this rate of melting could cause flooding that affects hundreds of millions of people by 2100.”

This sounds like a lot of ice. “6.4 trillion tons.” But it’s not. This equates to 6,400 billion tons, which may also be referred to as 6,400 gigatons, which is 6,400 cubic kilometers. That would be an ice cube 18.5 kilometers on a side, or, to revert to the imperial system of measures, an ice cube 11.5 miles on a side. If you dropped this ice cube in the world’s oceans and let it melt, it would raise the level of the oceans by 18 millimeters – that’s 9/16ths of one inch. Over thirty years.

How horrible.

To focus on Antarctica, the report in Nature reported Antarctica losing, in recent years, 190 gigatons of ice per year, an amount that supposedly portends an ominous future for coastal cities around the world. But the total ice mass of Antarctica is generally estimated at 26.5 million gigatons. This means that the participating scientists claim they can observe a change in the total ice mass of Antarctica of one seven millionth per year. You can’t even make an easily comprehensible fraction for an amount this infinitesimal. Expressed using decimals, it’s .000007. Expressed as a fraction, it’s 0.0007%.

It doesn’t take a scientist to wonder if these scientists aren’t jumping to conclusions. This amount of change is way below the noise level. How on earth, using satellite-based imagers screaming through a polar orbit at nearly 20,000 miles per hour, observing a continent 5.4 million miles in area, covered with an ice sheet that is up to three miles thick, can these scientists claim with confidence that they’re detecting an annual change in the total ice mass of .0007 percent – and, worse, announce this to the world as if it’s terrifying?

This is the sort of reasoning that the BBC openly censors. But thank God for the blogosphere to debunk alarmist reports about the cryosphere. A good anthology of links and summaries of contrarian, non-alarmist findings can be found on the indefatigable Marc Morano’s Climate Depot website. Included on a recent post are articles by NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally claiming Antarctica is actually gaining ice.

One of the biggest obstacles to accurately measuring the volume of an ice sheet is that the underlying terrain will itself change, uplifting or subsiding depending on tectonic shifts and other geologic variables. Available online, from the Journal of Marine Science Research and Oceanography, is an article entitled “The Views of Three Sea Level Specialists.” The observations by meteorologist Thomas Wysmuller, formerly with NASA, are particularly helpful in understanding the difficulties with measuring Antarctica’s ice mass, as well as sea level trends.

With respect to sea level rise, Wysmuller explains that “the most influential driver of local sea level trend happens to be local tectonics,” and therefore the most accurate long-term measurements of sea level can only be found in places that are “tectonically inert.” He cites these areas as reporting a 1mm to 1.2mm rate of annual sea level rise over the last century, with scant evidence of acceleration.

Wysmuller provides an excellent example of how sea level data is manipulated by alarmists, by showing a chart from NOAA depicting mean sea level at Seward, Alaska. The trend line of the long-term tide gauges shows a supposed rapid rise in sea level, but when you observe the actual year over year data, it is clear that sea level was stable both before and after the Alaskan 1964 earthquake. At a magnitude of 9.3, this devastating earthquake caused the coastal land to fall by 0.9 meters. But what is reported is the long-term trend line (red on chart below), with the long-term C02 PPM line (green) helpfully superimposed.

It is impossible to refute every argument made by climate alarmists, because there is a perpetual onslaught of propaganda connecting virtually any topic to climate change. But voters and politicians have an obligation to look past the hype and perform their own critical reasoning. Six-point-four-trillion-tons. That sounds like so much, but it’s literally just a drop in the ocean.

And as for Greenland, why is it called Greenland? Because in “Old Greenland,” back in the tenth century and for a few hundred years thereafter, parts of this harsh land were green. To this day there are ruins of churches, anchoring settlements where thousands lived until the little ice age drove them out. And what about “thermal expansion” of the oceans? Then why is there no indisputable evidence of sea levels rising? And why wouldn’t increased evaporation in a thermally expanded, warmer ocean, offset the thermal expansion? These questions deserve discussion and answers. But the BBC, along with most other mainstream and online media, suppress discussion, and suppress answers they don’t agree with.

Former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, when talking about his policy positions, was fond of prefacing a remark with the phrase “science says…” But using the words “science says” as a way to gain credibility and stifle debate is not scientific. The lifeblood of science is skepticism. It is supposedly the lifeblood of journalism as well. And when it comes to climate change, “science” knows a lot less than its self-proclaimed spokespersons claim.

It’s easy to wonder if the sheer volume of panic being spread on the issue of climate change is a conspiracy. But it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to be this pervasive, it just has to fit the world view of a critical mass of special interests. And that it does. Anyone who believes in socialism, or just in bigger government, will favor the climate alarmist narrative. Anyone who believes in globalism and the withering away of national sovereignty will be similarly attracted to climate alarmism. As for private opportunists, from rent-seeking multinational corporations to local environmental impact consultants, climate alarmism is a gold mine.

Worst of all is not just the censorship of skeptical voices, but the demonization of skeptics. For example, a Google search on Thomas Wysmuller reveals links to several websites devoted to nothing but smearing and defaming him and everybody like him. But it is the documented facts and logical integrity of Wysmuller’s arguments that must be considered, not the attacks on his character made by his ideological enemies. And on that note, perhaps these left-wing slime slinging websites is the best way to quickly learn who’s willing to tell the other side of the story; perhaps it’s where we find the good guys.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Flawed Premises of Recycling

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AUDIO: A review of the plastic bag ban, the suspension of the plastic bag ban, and the underlying flawed premises of recycling – 9 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Plastic Bags and the Recycling and Reuse Scam

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Back in 2014, the California Legislature passed Senate Bill 207, which banned grocery stores from offering customers “single use” carryout bags. Permanent implementation was delayed by a November 2016 voter referendum, Prop. 67, that unsuccessfully attempted to repeal the measure. Today it is well established law.

The only way SB 207 was sold to the grocery industry was through an incentive that permitted them to keep the ten cents per “reusable” bag that they would be required to charge customers.

California’s pioneering ban is touted by environmentalists as an example for the nation, and progressive cities and states have enacted similar laws. But in reality, it is misguided policy that does more harm than good.

Today, instead reusing the free single-use bags to line their trash cans and dispose of their cat litter, Californians now pay ten cents every time they exercise that privilege. And how does this help the environment, when reusable plastic bags have 11 to 14 times the mass of disposable plastic bags, and hardly anyone reuses them that many times?

Further evidence of the absurdity of laws banning single-use plastic bags is found in a study commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Environmental Agency, which estimated reusable grocery bags made of cotton fabric to have 131 times greater “global warming potential” than conventional disposable plastic bags.

And now consumers have less reason than ever to reuse their reusable bags, because they’re germ carriers.

This isn’t new information. Common sense would dictate that when consumers purchase grocery items, and allow them to knock around inside a plastic bag, pathogens will be transferred from the surfaces of the grocery items onto the surface of the bag.

Similarly, when consumers set those bags down, such as on the seat or floor of a bus or subway car, or in a shopping cart that someone else is about to use, any pathogens on that surface or on that bag will transfer back and forth – presumably over and over. And even among those who reuse these bags more than 11 times, or 14 times, or 131 times, how many people disinfect them, every single time?

A recent article entitled “Greening Our Way to Infection” appearing in City Journal, provides an excellent summary of the disease risks attendant to reusable grocery bags. Author John Tierney exposes the absurd denial of public health authorities, both before and since the Covid-19 outbreak, to the risks of using reusable grocery bags. He writes:

“A headline on the website of the New York Department of Health calls reusable grocery bags a “Smart Choice”—bizarre advice, considering all the elaborate cautions underneath that headline. The department advises grocery shoppers to segregate different foods in different bags; to package meat and fish and poultry in small disposable plastic bags inside their tote bags; to wash and dry their tote bags carefully; to store the tote bags in a cool, dry place; and never to reuse the grocery tote bags for anything but food.”

This is the world the green extremists want us to live in. Not only shall we reuse our reusable plastic bags more than eleven times, just to break even on the “carbon footprint” vs. a disposable plastic bag, but we shall “segregate different foods in different bags; to package meat and fish and poultry in small disposable plastic bags inside the tote bags; to wash and dry tote bags carefully; to store tote bags in a cool, dry place; and never to reuse tote bags for anything but food.” And cat litter.

The Irrational Extremes of Recycling and Reuse

While recycling is both profitable and green in certain cases such as with newsprint and aluminum, for most garbage it is neither. Plastics, bags and all, are a compelling example of this. For starters, there is no factual basis for the argument that plastic must be recycled because we may eventually run out of petroleum. This is easily documented.

According to the energy news site OilPrice.com, in 2012 “plastics production accounted for about 4 percent of global oil production.” Four percent. According to the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, over the past twenty years, proven oil reserves increased faster than consumption. In 2018 there were 1.7 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves worldwide, up from 1.1 trillion barrels in 1998. Plastic, which can also be made out of natural gas or coal, will never run out of the raw materials required for its manufacture.

As for plastics accumulating in the environment, the ocean in particular, much of it comes from fishing nets. One of the largest accumulations of ocean plastic is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of concentrations of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean created by ocean currents. According to Sea Shepherd Global, nearly half of the plastic in these areas come from discarded fishing nets, and “more than 70% of marine animal entanglements involve abandoned plastic fishing nets.”

As for the source of ocean plastic coming from sources on land, a report in USA Today cites a study published in the journal Science that estimates 242 million pounds of plastic waste are discharged by Americans into the oceans each year, and that the total discharge of plastic waste into the oceans, worldwide, is between 8 to 12 million tons. A quick, somewhat innumerate read of those numbers might incline one to believe that America is the prime offender, but that would be wrong. Once pounds are converted into tons, it turns out that plastic waste from America, at most, constitutes only 1.5 percent of the plastic trash currently going into the world’s oceans.

This is where it becomes problematic to focus on recycling and reuse, rather than containment in landfills. Because even in America, it is a costly indulgence to recycle most of the waste stream. To emphasize recycling in developing nations, it is futility. The scarce economic resources of developing nations in Africa and Asia would instead be much better used to develop landfills.

There is No Shortage of Landfill Capacity, and There Never Will Be

One of the earliest serious intellectual revolts against the modern recycling industry came in an in-depth 1996 essay in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Recycling is Garbage.” Authored by the same John Tierney who recently joined City Journal after more than two decades as a reporter and columnist with the New York Times, it exposes how misguided environmentalism and government subsidies corrupted the waste management industry.

In his 1996 essay, Tierney described how environmentalist journalists and activists convinced the nation that if something wasn’t done, and soon, Americans were destined to be “buried alive” under the mountain of trash they were creating. He explained that most materials in garbage are not worth recycling, but that politicians are now afraid to oppose recycling. He explained that modern landfills are now required by federal law to be “lined with clay and plastic, equipped with drainage and gas-collection systems, covered daily with soil and monitored regularly for underground leaks,” but the perception remains that opening new landfills will poison the local populace.

Nearly 25 years later, for most Americans, all of these misconceptions still constitute conventional wisdom. The biggest misconception of all is the claim that there is no room left in America’s landfills. Today more than ever, there are plenty of alarmist reports making that claim.

From Waste Business Journal: “Time is Running Out: The U.S. Landfill Capacity Crisis.” From Global Citizen: “Where Will The Trash Go When All the US Landfills Are Full?” Perhaps the biggest scare story of all appears on the website “How Stuff Works,” where they visualize what America’s roughly 258 million tons of municipal solid waste each year would look like, if it was dumped onto one pile, year after year for 100 years. The estimate takes into account a doubling of the U.S. population over this hypothetical century, apparently assuming the annual waste flow would also double during that period as well.

“If you keep filling up this landfill for 100 years, and if you assume that during this time the populations of the United States doubles, then the landfill will cover about 160,000 acres, or 250 or so square miles, with trash 400 feet deep. Here’s another way to think about it. The Great Pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it’s a huge thing — one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.”

That sounds like an awful lot of garbage, and an awful burden on the land and the people. But it isn’t. Compared to the size of the lower 48 states, compared to the size of America’s urban areas, compared to the area of America’s reservoirs, or mines, or the footprint of its freeways; compared to pretty much any other major category of American infrastructure, it is negligible. To counter the scope insensitivity of the average American journalist, here are some calculations:

A “trash pyramid” 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, rising three miles high, if it were to be poured into America’s roughly 2,000 active landfills, would require each of those landfills to accommodate 100 vertical feet of garbage, over a surface area of 341 acres. Altogether, these 2,000 landfills would consume about 1,066 square miles of land. Notwithstanding the fact that some landfills are designed to accommodate up to 500 vertical feet of trash, or the fact that parks and other amenities are often built on the top of landfills once they reach capacity, 1,066 miles is a trivial amount of land compared to other impacts of human civilization.

For example, America’s lower 48 states occupy 3.1 million square miles. This means that if by 2120, 650 million Americans were still producing the same per-capita quantities of garbage that they produce in today’s throw-away society, those 3,200 square miles of landfills would only occupy one-tenth of one percent of the available land. America’s urban areas consume just over 100,000 square miles; these hypothetical landfills only increase that by 3 percent.

Just America’s ten largest reservoirs occupy 2,670 square miles; the entirety of America’s reservoir inventory would occupy a far larger area. America’s open pit and surface mines occupy thousands of square miles as well, and if America is to innovate its way into the electric age, rare earth mining will increase that footprint. As for America’s 46,000 miles of interstate highways, even at a conservative estimated average width of 300 feet, taking into account all interchanges and not counting all the other national and local roads, these interstates consume 2,600 square miles.

Civilization Requires Tough Choices

The evidence supporting containment in landfills vs recycling is unambiguous. Earlier this month, writing for National Review, Kyle Smith pointed out not only the excessive cost of recycling, but reminded us that it’s a good time for a fundamental reassessment of our waste management policies. He writes, “it costs $300 more to recycle a ton of trash than it would to put it in a landfill. When the next budget crunch hits New York – and that’s due approximately ten seconds after the next stock-market crash – recycling would be an excellent program to cut.”

That budget crunch has arrived. And even if the markets and the economy come roaring back, New York City taxpayers have better ways to spend their money than supporting a parasitic industry that does nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the environment.

But the moral argument doesn’t end there. Americans who support environmentalist policies need to think about the example they’re setting for the rest of the world. The message that needs to go out to developing nations – along with “develop clean fossil fuel and quit poisoning your air with genuinely harmful pollutants” – is build landfills and sequester your solid waste. Americans need to show by example how modern landfills are built, not how to painstakingly “recycle” everything regardless of its utility or affordability.

Eventually, just as eventually American innovators will commercialize fusion power, someday American innovators will commercialize plasma waste converters, turning solid waste into valuable feedstock to generate energy and building materials. When that day comes, not only will waste management no longer leave an expanding footprint, however trivial it may be, but we can mine the landfills if we wish.

Back in 1996, in his essay for the New York Times about recycling, Tierney arrived at the ultimate reason for its persistence as policy despite its negative economic impact and despite being of dubious environmental benefit. He writes:

“The leaders of the recycling movement derive psychic and financial rewards from recycling. Environmental groups raise money and attract new members through their campaigns to outlaw ‘waste’ and prevent landfills from opening. They get financing from public and private sources (including the recycling industry) to research and promote recycling. By turning garbage into a political issue, environmentalists have created jobs for themselves as lawyers, lobbyists, researchers, educators and moral guardians.”

Doesn’t that sound familiar? It’s as true today as it was in 1996, and it applies to so many issues of public policy where environmentalists have formed an alliance with powerful financial special interests. It is wonderful when one may reward their psyche and their pocketbook at the same time, but when delusion and corruption is the prerequisite for such rewards, society loses.

Americans are correct to recognize the perils of reusable grocery “tote bags” during this time of heightened disease risk. May they also realize the entire concept of reusable grocery bags is flawed, along with most recycling programs, and adapt accordingly.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Venice Beach Locked Down Except for Homeless Encampments

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Apart from excursions to perform essential work or engage in essential activities, California’s 40 million residents have now been under house arrest for over a week. But in the homeless haven known as Venice Beach, the party hasn’t skipped a beat.

Law abiding residents have deserted the Los Angeles coast after a crackdown following a weekend of what mayor Eric Garcetti called people getting “too close together, too often,” Parking lots along the Los Angeles beaches are roped off. Along the boardwalk in Venice Beach, all the businesses are closed.

None of these new rules seem to apply to the homeless. Whatever minimal law enforcement still existed in Venice Beach prior to the COVID-19 outbreak has diminished further, and more tents than ever have appeared on the boardwalk and along the streets.

It’s important to recognize that some of California’s homeless are victims of circumstances beyond their control, who want to work, who have to care for young children, who stay sober, who obey the laws. But not sufficiently acknowledged by agenda driven politicians and compassionate care bureaucrats is the fact that most of these homeless find shelter.

The vast majority of homeless that remain unsheltered, especially in places like Venice Beach, are either drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, or criminals. None of these people belong on the streets, not now, and not ever. There is not a homeless crisis or housing crisis in Venice Beach so much as a drug crisis, an alcoholism crisis, a mental health crisis, and a breakdown of law and order.

Stories about what has been happening in Venice Beach are endless and chilling. A man swinging an ax in the middle of an ally who cannot be arrested because he isn’t breaking any laws. A gang of youths disassembling literally stacks of high-end bicycles in front of their tents, but this isn’t a chop-shop because there is no proof. Other youths who’ve clambered onto the roof of a church to engage in loud drunken revelry all night long, later willing to vandalize the homes of residents they suspect of calling the police. Women followed and harassed, human and canine feces everywhere, bottles of urine sitting on street curbs, discarded syringes, rats multiplying like, rats, getting fat on garbage and food scraps piling up around tents, men stoned on methamphetamine and frenetically prowling the streets, schizophrenics howling at the voices in their heads.

And it still goes on and still goes on and still goes on. Virus? What virus?

Nothing that California’s state and local policymakers have done to-date have been effective in combating these crises, because their approach has been what they refer to as “housing first,” a policy that prioritizes providing housing prior to addressing behavioral issues. “Housing first” is a boondoggle, rewarding politically connected members of the Homeless Industrial Complex. It will never solve the problem, even if for no other reason, then because of the astronomical costs.

Venice Beach offers a perfect example of this failed approach, where a “temporary bridge housing” facility opened up in February.

Two blocks from the Pacific Ocean, this shelter, one of 26 either built or under construction in Los Angeles, holds 154 beds, supposedly to accommodate a homeless population in Venice Beach that exceeds 1,000. The shelter cost $8 million and has an estimated annual budget of about $8 million. This is a preposterous waste of money, especially when considering how it operates: The shelter, which officially opened on February 26, does not require its residents to submit to counseling for substance abuse, much less require sobriety. It is a “wet” shelter, meaning inebriated residents can enter the shelter with no restrictions. Even now, it has no curfew, meaning residents can roam the streets at any hour of the day or night and still return to the shelter. It carries out no background checks on any of the residents.

Worst of all, the shelter was marketed to residents as a way to compel homeless people to get off the streets and become “good neighbors.” Once “supportive housing” was available, the law would permit police to evict the homeless who have set up permanent encampments in front of residents and businesses. A deadline of March 7th to evict the homeless came and went, however, and more homeless than ever are living for free on some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

The uptick in crime since this shelter opened has neighbors feeling like prisoners in their own homes. How ironic. The COVID-19 pandemic merely made that status official.

Incredibly, the “permanent supportive housing” planned for Venice Beach includes destroying the last public beach parking so a monstrous apartment house can be built on the city owned property. Planned to have only 140 units, the construction costs and land values put the total project cost at over $200 million. By any sane definition, doing this is a crime against the hard working surrounding residents and against all taxpayers.

Meanwhile, today, the rent-paying, mortgage paying, business lease paying residences and business owners in Venice Beach are being quarantined into financial ruin. Small businesses that survive on small margins can’t stay open. Landlords who only own one or two properties can’t collect rent because their tenants are out of work. And nothing the city, state, or federal government has done is helping.

While politicians talk about interest free loans from the SBA, one has to wonder if any of these elected officials have ever tried to fast-track an SBA loan, or tried to get relief from a mortgage company. Retailers are small businesses, and these owners can’t just call the SBA and ask for a loan. There is the underwriting process, huge applications to fill out, a requirement for three years of financial statements. Getting credit approval for a loan is mind numbing. These are huge slow moving bureaucracies. Applicants have to go through all kinds of hoops to get funding and a 2-3 month turnaround is a very best case. Nothing is feasible within a month, so as small businesses fail up and down the state, where are the real time solutions?

In an open letter emailed to Mayor Garcetti on 3/26, with copies sent to the LA City Council and an assortment of media outlets, Venice Beach resident Soledad Ursua offered some practical suggestions to bring immediate relief to beleaguered small business owners and landlords. In particular:

“1) Suspend LA County Property Taxes due April 10th. The average homeowner and small business owner is facing a $2,000 to $10,000 property tax bill. Cash is king during an economic crisis. What we need now more than ever, is to hold the cash we would otherwise pay the County of LA, in order to navigate this economic storm. As our business partner, you must take a haircut in revenue, just as you expect all of us to do so. What is the point of the US Government sending out cash checks to individuals if we must only hand that over to LA City?

2) Suspend all Sales Taxes for the next 6 months- Why on earth are we paying 9.5% in LA City sales taxes on essential goods why we try to stay alive – groceries, prescriptions, toilet paper, gas, bottled water, etc. Perhaps you could lift sales taxes only on small businesses to incentivize Los Angeleños to shop local and keep our small businesses solvent during this crisis?”

These are reasonable suggestions. The chances they will be implemented are slim.

Anyone living in Venice Beach or communicating with Venice Beach residents has abundant video and photographic evidence that while residents hunker down inside their homes, right now, their streets remain occupied by a roving army of unaccountable homeless, and it’s getting worse.

For example, ever since COVID-19 came along, the weekly street cleaning has stopped. The consequences are predictable; what had been a string of tents is turning into semi-permanent structures. The shantytowns of Guatemala City have nothing on Rose Avenue in Venice Beach.

There is no doubt that the authorities at all levels of government are dead serious in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19. This national health emergency has preempted constitutional rights that allow ordinary Americans freedom of movement. It ought therefore to have enough teeth to preempt whatever misguided ordinances and court rulings have created the addiction, mental health, and crime crises we face, which masquerade as a homeless and housing crisis.

Mayor Garcetti: If and when COVID-19 spreads in a second wave, with unaccountable homeless populations as the vector, don’t blame the president. If a national health emergency doesn’t give you the legal tools and funds to clean up the streets of Los Angeles, nothing will.

California’s laws to-date have made it a rational choice for many individuals to live on the streets. They can live in one of the most beautiful places in the world – the California coast – with free food, free shelter, with almost no rules to regulate their conduct.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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How Much Water Went Into Growing the Food We Eat?

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The rains bypassed sunny California in January and February 2020, encouraging talk of another drought. California’s last drought was only declared over a year ago, after two wet winters in a row filled the states reservoirs. To cope with the last drought, instead of building more reservoirs and taking other measures to increase the supply of water, California’s policymakers imposed permanent rationing.

This predictable response ignores obvious solutions. Millions of acre feet of storm runoff can not only be stored in new reservoirs, but in underground aquifers with massive unused capacity. Additional millions of acre feet can be recovered by treating and reusing wastewater, and by joining the rest of the developed nations living in arid climates who have turned to large scale desalination.

All of this, however, would require a change in philosophy from one of micromanagement of demand to one that emphasizes increasing supply. To understand why a focus on increasing supply is vastly preferable to reducing demand, it helps to know just how much water California’s urban residents consume compared to other users.

As a matter of fact, the average California household purchases a relatively trivial amount of water from their utility, when compared to how much water they purchase in the form of the food they eat. For this reason, reducing residential water consumption will not make much of a difference when it comes to mitigating the effects of a prolonged drought.

To illustrate this point, it is necessary to determine just how much water is available to Californians, and how much of that water is being consumed by residential households in California. When making this analysis, one must not only estimate how much water California’s households purchase from their utility, but how much water is embodied in the food they eat.

Total Annual Water Supply and Usage in California

Here’s a rough summary of California’s annual water use. In a dry year, around 150 million acre feet (MAF) fall onto California’s watersheds in the form of rain or snow, in a wet year, Californians get about twice that much. Most of that water either evaporates, percolates, or eventually runs into the ocean. In terms of net water withdrawals, each year around 31 MAF are diverted for the environment, such as to guarantee fresh water inflow into the delta, 27 MAF are diverted for agriculture, and 6.6 MAF are diverted for urban use. Of the 6.6 MAF that is diverted for urban use, 3.7 MAF is used by residential customers, and the rest is used by industrial, commercial and government customers.

Put another way, Californians divert 65 million acre feet of water each year for environmental, agricultural and urban uses, and the planned permanent 25% reduction in water usage by residential customers will only save 0.9 million acre feet per year – or 1.4% of total statewide water usage. One good storm easily dumps ten times as much water onto California’s watersheds as would be saved via a 25% reduction in annual residential water consumption.Armed with these facts, there’s a strong argument that cutting back on residential water consumption will not make a significant difference in California’s overall water use. There are additional facts that can put this argument into an even sharper context: How much water do California’s households consume in terms of the water that was required to grow the food they eat, and how does that amount compare to the water they purchase from their utility for indoor/outdoor use?

The “Water Footprint” of Food per Ounce and per Calorie

While the information to determine this is readily available, it isn’t typically compiled in this context, so here goes. The best source of comprehensive data on the “water footprint” for various types of food comes from the Water Footprint Network, a project initially funded by UNESCO. An excellent distillation of that information was produced in April 2015 by Kyle Kim, John Schleuss, and Priya Krishnakumar, writing for the Los Angeles Times. Information on calories per ounce was found on the website “fatsecret.com.” Information from these various sources is summarized on the following table.

As can be seen on the above chart, when evaluating the water efficiency of various food sources, it is misleading to rely only on gallons per ounce, since the number of calories per ounce are highly variable. But putting these two variables together to calculate a gallons per calorie measurement is quite useful. Clearly, meat products require a huge amount of water per calorie. The most efficient sources of meat protein are found in chicken, which at 0.37 gallons per calorie is around four times as water-efficient as red meat. Some sources of protein from vegetables are surprisingly efficient, including avocados at 0.20 gallons per calorie, and the almond – much maligned as a water waster – at 0.15 gallons per calorie. But we digress.

How much water does it take to feed the average household in California, and how does that compare to the amount of water they buy from the utility for indoor/outdoor use?

Total Annual Consumption of Water-in-Food per Household

The next table, below, provides this estimate based on a typical diet. The estimate of 2,000 calories necessary to sustain the average human (men, women, children) comes from WebMD. The breakout of food consumption by category, while somewhat arbitrary, relies on data on “the average American diet“c ompiled by researcher Mike Barrett, writing for the Natural Society website. In turn, Barrett relied on USDA and other government sources for most of his data, which is reflected here.To summarize, in one year, the average American consumes a quantity of food that required 1.3 acre feet of water to grow. In turn, at 2.91 people per household in California, the average household consumes a quantity of food per year that requires 3.9 acre feet of water to grow.

Average Annual Water Use per California Household

Putting all of this together yields a revealing table, below, that shows that the average California household purchases a relatively trivial amount of water from their utility, when compared to how much water they purchase in the form of the food they eat. By dividing the 3.7 million acre feet of water used by residences each year in California by the 12.8 million households in California, the average annual water consumption per household is 0.289 acre feet. By contrast, the amount of water that is eaten, so to speak, by the average California household is 3.9 acre feet, thirteen and a half times as much.

By the way, it is irresistible to point out that drinking water, that quantity each human requires for their daily hydration, based on the 0.5 gallon per day recommendation from the Mayo Clinic, comes out to a paltry 0.0016 acre feet per year per household – not even a rounding error when compared to the other uses. Think about that the next time you have to ask for your water at a California restaurant.There is no Reason Water Cannot be Abundant and Affordable

For decades, when it comes to water, California’s policymakers have prioritized demand restrictions instead of supply enhancements. This is consistent with their priorities in other critical areas, certainly including energy and transportation. “Induced demand,” the idea that if you build it, more will use it, is the nightmare axiom that governs this policy. It certainly would never have to do with the possibility they’d rather put all those operating funds into their pay and pensions instead of expanding public infrastructure.

The problem with this, however, is that eventually the conservation option begins to yield diminishing returns, and then all you have left is punitive rationing. And once via punitive rationing you have wrung all of the redundancy and surplus out of the system, you have no resiliency if any part of the system fails. That is where California is today. The abundance choice is the only viable option if Californians are to improve their quality of life. In no particular order, here are some reality checks that California’s voters and elected officials ought to consider:

(1)  Projects that increase water supply via sewage reuse, runoff storage via reservoirs or aquifers, and desalination, are options that benefit all users, urban and agricultural.

(2)  Increasing the supply of water from diverse sources creates system resiliency which can be of critical benefit not only in the face of persistent drought, but also against catastrophes that may, for example, disable a pumping station on a major aqueduct.

(3)  The energy costs to desalinate seawater, approximately 4.0 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter, are overstated. Desalination plants can be co-located with power plants, eliminating power loss through transmission lines, whereas far-flung pumping stations consume significant amounts of electricity. Depending on transmission loss and desalination plant efficiency, the amount of lift beyond which desalination consumes less power than pumping is only about 1,500 feet.

(4)  Public investment in water saving home appliances, for example via tax rebates to consumers to purchase them, by contrast, do not increase the overall supply of water.

(5)  It is nearly impossible to engage in excessive use of indoor water in a household, because 100% of the sewage is treated and released as clean outfall to the environment. Moreover, sewage is increasingly treated and reused as potable water, and eventually 100% of indoor water waste will be cycled immediately back for reuse by households.

(6)  One preferred way to reuse household sewage is referred to as “indirect potable reuse,” where the treated water is percolated into aquifers where it is eventually pumped back for household reuse. This practice has the virtue of banking the water against supply disruptions, recharging the aquifer which is especially beneficial in coastal areas where there can be salt water intrusion, and even, as water is repeatedly cycled through the aquifer, causing an ongoing improvement to the quality of the water in the aquifer as treatment progressively reduces levels of undesirable residual toxins.

(7)  While achieving 100% reuse of sewage will render indoor water conservation pointless, the virtues of outdoor water use are understated. Healthy landscaping, consisting of abundant vegetation including lawns, reduce the incidence of dust-borne pathogens, reduce the incidence of asthma, and clean and moisturize the air. Replacing grass playing fields with artificial turf introduces toxins, causes more ACL and other sports injuries, and retains heat – often to the point of making these faux fields unplayable unless they are, ironically, watered.

(8)  Simply giving up consumption of red meat would reduce the average household’s water consumption by nearly 2.0 acre feet per year. By comparison, the average Californian household’s total water consumption from the utility averages 0.29 acre feet per year. That is, just replacing consumption of red meat with an equivalent caloric intake of chicken will save the average household seven times as much water as they buy from the utility for all uses, indoor and outdoor.

Policies designed to reduce household water use are a good idea, but must be kept in perspective. What has already been done is more than enough, and priorities now must shift towards investment in infrastructure to increase the supply of water. Nearly all water diversions in California, about 90%, are either to preserve ecosystem health or to supply agriculture. Indoor water overuse is becoming a myth, and will become entirely irrelevant as soon as 100% sewage reuse capacities are achieved. Outdoor water use should not be thoughtless, but allowing grass and perennials to die, or converting landscaping to “desert foliage,” is a cultural shift that is not necessary or desirable.

Along with investing in infrastructure to increase the supply of water, public education to help Californians adopt healthier diets would have the significant side benefit of being sound water policy. A trivial change in patterns of food consumption yields a major reduction in water required for food. For example, a public education campaign that caused a voluntary 10% reduction in red meat consumption (from 25.0% of all calories to 22.5% of all calories) would reduce California’s water consumption by 2.5 million acre feet per year. By comparison, total outdoor residential water consumption in California is estimated at only 1.8 million acre feet per year.

Perhaps, in lieu of renouncing escalating and entirely unnecessary mandates to reduce household water use, those of us who love our lawns might at least be granted a waiver if we were to present an annual affidavit to document our below-average consumption of red meat. Our smart refrigerators might actually submit the report to the utility, sparing us the paperwork.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Sustainable Megacities

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Modern urban centers around the world now have neighborhoods that house well over 100,000 people per square mile. The Choa Chu Kang district in Singapore, defined by boulevards lined with 10 to 12 story mid-rise residential buildings, has a population density of more than 125,000 people per square mile. The entire borough of Manhattan has an average population density of more than 70,000 people per square mile, with far higher densities in areas of midtown and lower Manhattan.

According to a 2018 report released by the United Nations, today 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is estimated to increase to 68 percent by 2050. At the same time, the United Nations projects the global population to increase from 7.8 billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050. These projections lead to a surprising calculation: the absolute number of people living in rural areas is expected to decline, from 3.5 billion today to only 3.1 billion in 2050.

What should not be surprising by now is that people around the world, voluntarily and inexorably, are migrating from rural areas to cities. But the corollary effect is relatively unheralded; that around the world, open land is slowly depopulating. For the most part, this is happening absent government coercion. It flies in the face of the conventional wisdom—heard endlessly in the United States—that we are running out of open space. We aren’t.

If we have a sustainability challenge, it is not to preserve open space—not only because the world’s population is already moving into cities faster than the world’s population is increasing, but because the absolute urban footprint on the planet is relatively insignificant.

This reality was explored at great depth in “The Density Delusion,” and can be distilled down to this: If 10 billion people were all to live in four-person households that were each on quarter-acre lots and everyone had an equivalent amount of space allotted for commercial and industrial use, that would equate to a population density of 5,210 people per square mile, and at that density would only consume 3.8 percent of all land area on earth. Actual estimates of worldwide urbanization as of 2018 are only 2.7 percent of global land area excluding Antarctica, and some analysts believe this estimate is grossly overstated.

But not everyone wants to live in a home with a yard that big. Most people would be content living on a smaller lot, and a large proportion of the population prefers to live in homes with no yard at all. Billions of people, for that matter, apparently prefer to live in high-rise apartments. It is not suburban sprawl that constitutes the prevailing sustainability challenge to humanity, it is building megacities that are resilient to environmental and economic threats, and constitute an inviting destination for migrants from rural areas.

Cheap Energy Is Vital 

The consequences of environmentalists making “climate change” their central focus instead of population growth are epic. Two factors, more than anything else, induce people to voluntarily limit the size of their families: prosperity and urbanization. Both of these require cheap and abundant energy.

It is estimated that as of 2020 there are 38 “megacities” on earth, defined as a metropolitan area with over 10 million inhabitants. Of these, only six—Tokyo, Seoul, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London—are located within high-income nations. Moreover, nearly all the forecast growth of megacities will be in developing nations, in places like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Lahore, Lagos, and Kinshasa.

So what innovations being pioneered today will enable megacities in the future to provide a high quality of life, and how will cities of such size and density reduce their vulnerability to economic or physical disruptions?

The biggest variable governing the success or failure of megacities is energy. Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy is not only a nonnegotiable prerequisite for prosperity around the world, but it is also the only way megacities are feasible. Environmentalists typically observe, correctly, that per capita energy consumption is lower in cities, but they ignore the converse—if you make energy too expensive by curtailing the use of fossil fuels, you prevent people from vacating rural areas where they can forage for energy—unsustainable, dirty, and free—by stripping the biosphere.

Global prosperity and peace, glorious destination megacities, abundant water and food, voluntary population stabilization, and plenty of open land for those who still want to live under a big sky—all of this could be just around the corner.

If the energy challenge is addressed realistically, meaning an “all of the above” energy strategy is adopted worldwide, all the other building blocks of megacities can be assembled. But this means that the legal and financial obstacles that are preventing developing nations from exploiting their oil and gas reserves and building nuclear power plants will have to be lifted.

With abundant energy, for example, the challenge of creating water abundance is manageable. This is because for nearly every type of water infrastructure, the biggest single operating cost is energy. Investing in 100 percent reuse of wastewater, augmented by desalination of seawater, offers nearly every megacity on earth the opportunity to never experience water scarcity. Closely related to this is the rapidly maturing technology for indoor agriculture, including high rise agriculture.

Making Cities Self Sufficient Food Producers

Since a megacity, by definition, is an epicenter of human habitation, then by definition, it is also antithetical to the notion of being “off-grid.” But on the other hand, the megacity needs to be as self-sufficient as possible, since having 50,000 or even 100,000 people per square mile means that any resource that needs to be imported, stored, or removed is going to have to be handled in very high volumes.

Energy efficiency, waste management, as well as energy and water harvesting and treatment are technologies that are extremely important to the megacity—along with smart systems to interconnect all of them. Fortunately, water supply and treatment can be synergistic with indoor agriculture.

Indoor urban agriculture makes a lot of sense. It is possible that using hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, industrial agriculture operations sited within urban areas can produce enough food to feed the inhabitants, reducing the need to import food from farming regions. These facilities would also be able process wastewater from elsewhere on the utility grid—using it to water the plants and to reuse as drinking water.

Here’s how: The grey water extracted from sewage would be subjected to biological and mechanical filtration, then it would be used to water the plants. The plants, in turn, would transpirate heavily in the indoor environment, and dehumidifiers would harvest this water as pristine drinking water, able to be pumped back upstairs or into the utility grid for reuse.

This concept of using transpiration from plants in a commercial high-rise agricultural operation to provide the last mile of greywater purification in the urban environment is revolutionary. Along with the surprisingly low—and dropping—cost of desalination and advances being made in primary sewage treatment, this innovation could help solve the issues of potential water scarcity in the urban environment.

The quantity of food that a high-rise farm might produce is also surprising. Because the plants are grown in optimal conditions—optimized light and water, and no pests—they can yield three to four crops per year instead of one, and each crop may require only a few vertical feet of space. This means each story of high-rise space occupying an area of one acre, for example, could produce several times as much food per year as an acre of ordinary farmland.

This multiple order-of-magnitude increase in potential productivity per unit of land, combined with the proximity to market, means high-rise farming is merely waiting for economic and political conditions to align in its favor. The technology for high-rise farming continues to commercialize and it will be available when we need it to feed the burgeoning megacities of this world.

Building Up, Out, and Down

It is common for the smart growth crowd to say “build up, not out,” but this ignores the fact that building out as well as up increases the overall supply of dwellings, making them more affordable, and reduces the pressure to increase density in suburban areas where the people living there want to preserve their way of life. But what about building down as well?

It isn’t as if building down hasn’t been tried with success already. The New York City subway system. The London Underground. The Paris Metro. What about Boston’s “Big Dig?” Mistakes were made, to put it mildly. But today, anyone who tries to get to Logan Airport from downtown Boston during rush hour will have nothing but good things to say about the much-maligned project. It’s too bad we don’t have more big digs—in the heart of urban centers we could put freeways and rail underground, our cities could reach for the sky, and there would never be traffic jams.

Tunneling on a grand scale may seem mundane, but the industry is rapidly innovating—incorporating new technology across multiple disciplines as fast as it becomes available. From GPS systems that allow a tunneling machine always to know precisely where it is beneath the earth, to better cutting bits, to debris removal conveyances, to mechanical conveyances that simultaneously bring forward shoring material, to worker shelter and control rooms, modern tunneling machines can exceed a mile in length and cost billions to acquire and operate. The global leader in tunneling systems is Herrenknecht AG. An emerging and very disruptive new competitor is Elon Musk’s The Boring Company.

Tunneling, like blasting payloads into low earth orbit, is extremely expensive. But The Boring Company claims tunneling costs can be dramatically reduced. The Boring Company proposes five innovations on its FAQ page: 1) Triple the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit; 2) Continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls; 3) Automate the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators; 4) Go electric; 5) Engage in tunneling research and development, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

Skeptics may consider the fact that Musk’s Space X brought the price of delivering cargo into orbit down from $26,000 per kilogram in 1995 to $1,800 per kilogram by 2017, courtesy of the 100 percent reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon Heavy promises to drop that cost by another 50 percent within the next few years.

As the megacities of the future are built, tunneling machines will play an integral part in endowing these cities with efficient transportation systems. Tunneling underground to create upgraded, higher capacity, and smarter utility conduits to transport water and energy will also be necessary in cities of ultra-high density. Using the volume of underground space to host much of the physical plant of megacities will make the surface areas less congested and more pleasant.

The implications of building upwards and downwards as well as employing novel technologies ranging from enhanced geothermal systems to high-rise farming hold forth not only the oft wished-for promise of attracting humanity’s billions off the land and into densely populated megacities, but also the promise of cities that live nearly off the grid—cities that may, despite their magnitude, require very little from the rest of the world.

This is the optimistic scenario that is altogether feasible. A planet of megacities that might actually export power and food, along with culture and technology, in exchange for raw materials. There are many paths from here to there, but none of them are easy even with abundant and clean fossil fuel remaining an unhindered and major part of global energy supply until replacement energy technologies are fully competitive at scale.

Global prosperity and peace, glorious destination megacities, abundant water and food, voluntary population stabilization, asteroid mining, restored wilderness, and plenty of open land for those who still want to live under a big sky—all of this could be just around the corner.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Carbon Fundamentalists and War With China

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Throughout America and Europe, there are now fanatical millions who believe CO2 emissions are an existential crisis of planetary proportions. This terrifies them. What is frightening to the rest of us is how easily they are manipulated.

Witness the ease with which opportunists direct the passions of this mob. Examples are endless and span the political spectrum, from corporate and financial special interests reaping obscene profits via mandated “green” products and “carbon emissions trading markets,” to stone cold communists riding through the gates of Western Democracies inside the Trojan Horse of environmentalism.

Could climate fanatics be motivated to support World War Three in the name of saving the planet? Why not? Wouldn’t you do whatever it takes to stop the people who are causing the end of the world? These climate crusaders already consider people who question the “climate emergency” to be “deniers,” and tens of thousands of them are already militants, willing to move beyond rhetoric. Meanwhile, filthy rich establishment grandees (example: Al Gore) nod and wink, and cash in on the madness.

The origins of “carbon fundamentalism” can be traced back to the end of the Cold War. In 1995, writing for International Affairs, Deepak Lai may have been the first to coin the term “Eco-fundamentalism.” Lai characterizes this “secular religious movement” as attempting to “impose constraints upon non-Western countries’ economic development in the name of environmental protection,” and claims this could eventually lead to a bloody conflict between the West and the rest of the world’s nations.

In 2006, The Globalist published a very brief critique entitled “The New Religion of Eco-Fundamentalism,” identifying three dangers of passionate environmentalism: First, the rhetoric had become extreme – even back then! Second, the movement is “hostile to capitalism and the market economy.” Third, and most profound, this is “the worst time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of eco-fundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy.”

It wasn’t until 2008 that “carbon fundamentalism” was specifically called out as a dangerous new form of extremism. Appearing in Greenbiz and entitled “The Dangerous Rise of Carbon Fundamentalism,” the author expressed reservations about the reframing of climate change debate, wherein “academics who disagree about interpretation of data are [now] compared to Hitler or to Holocaust deniers.” As he put it, “one does not debate Hitler.”

Nor, moving to the present, can anyone who questions “climate change” be allowed public debate. For example, in September 2018, the BBC announced their intention to censor any reports by climate skeptics. Similarly, search Google under the term “climate skeptics.” Instead of finding “climate skeptics,” all you’ll find are websites “debunking” climate skepticism. These conscious attempts to stifle debate are terrible mistakes. More than ever, now should be the time for people to look for hidden agendas and ignored evidence on both sides of this debate over climate change; the scope, the causes, and the proposed policies we support as a result.

Carbon Fundamentalists and Chinese Expansion

By now the tactics of the carbon fundamentalists and the eclectic gang of political and corporate puppeteers who manipulate them are well established. Massive indoctrination in school, persistent attempts at fomenting panic in the media, protests and “direct action” around the world. We could be one big weather event away from seeing violent physical attacks on outspoken “deniers.” But what about the biggest offender of all, the entire nation of China?

China’s total CO2 emissions overtook the U.S. in 2007. By 2018, China’s total CO2 emissions became greater than the U.S. and Europe’s combined. The American press has taken notice. In between their alarmist coverage of hurricanes and tornadoes and their obsession with the Trump administration’s inadequate response to the climate crisis, they cover China. Sometimes the coverage is only obliquely holding the Chinese responsible, but other reports are becoming more critical.

In August 2019, Reuters circulated an article entitled “China CO2 emission targets at risk from U.S. trade war,” with the implication being that China is trying to cut their emissions, but we’re making that difficult because we’re finally challenging their corrupt trade practices. In February 2020, Bloomberg Green published an article entitled “China’s Virus Clampdown Is Cutting Emissions, But Not for Long,” focusing primarily on the virus, but making ominous reference to China’s rising CO2 emissions.

And then there’s the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s effort to build infrastructure around the globe, while simultaneously sinking financial and military hooks into the nations that participate. Notwithstanding the fact that America’s half-trillion dollar per year trade deficit with China is paying for this, there has been a flurry of articles bemoaning the impact all this infrastructure may have on the climate. From the Yale Press, February 2020, “The potential climate consequences of China’s Belt and Roads Initiative.” From Eco-Business, September 2019, “China’s Belt and Road Initiative could lead to 3°C global warming, report warns.” From Brookings, April 2019, “The critical frontier: Reducing emissions from China’s Belt and Road.”

As tensions with China rise, these articles will make their way from academic journals and green trade publications into the New York Times and ABC Nightly “News.” And when that happens, will it really be about the climate? Or will it merely be the next turn of the ratchet, as two civilizations prepare to collide?

You can believe, as many informed skeptics do, that more atmospheric CO2 is actually a net benefit to both planetary ecosystems and human civilization. But even so, this doesn’t excuse China’s shameful failure to regulate all the rest of the filth pouring out of their smokestacks and polluting the world around them – CO2 may be good, it may be bad, but atmospheric SO2, NO2, CO and O3 are all bad.

A geopolitical reckoning with China is inevitable. China’s regime isn’t smiley face fascism, or soft fascism. Hiding behind deception and a blizzard of money to buy positive press, China today has a full blown fascist regime of the German Nazi variety; racist, nationalist, militaristic, expansionist.

The litany of repressive evil and high-tech enslavement practiced by the Chinese regime is well documented. None of the nations surrounding China welcome its growing influence. The people who support China, or apologize for China – from universities in America to political forums in the Philippines  – are almost invariably getting paid by China.

There is a great irony at work here. On one hand, America’s embrace of carbon fundamentalism undermines everything that makes America great – economic freedom, economic growth, land development, energy development, expansion and upgrades of critical infrastructure, and even freedom of speech and tolerance for diverse opinions. This benefits China, since none of these concerns slow them down. But on the other hand, it might eventually be carbon fundamentalism that drives Americans to support a blockade of China, rationing its access to fossil fuel. Needless to say, this would not benefit China.

How fascinating that carbon fundamentalism might actually be the latest expression of Western imperialism, relentlessly thwarting the aspirations of non-Western nations, allegedly to save the planet. But when it comes to relations with China, carbon fundamentalism merely adds additional moral vigor – misplaced or not – to the case for Western Imperialism to counter Eastern Imperialism. With China, the options are containment, capitulation, or war.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Rescuing the GOP’s “Climate Policy” from the Theater of the Absurd

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For the fanatics on the far Left, and perhaps even for those deranged millions in the middle of the Democratic pack, there is nothing a Republican can say about “climate” that will impress them. Along with racism, xenophobia, and all the other assorted isms and phobias that allegedly afflict Republicans, acting like they care about the health of the planet has no credibility.

The Republicans, led by Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif), are trying anyway. As reported in The Hill and elsewhere, but without much fanfare, the GOP has released their own “climate plan” that is “meant to show voters the party cares about climate change.”

Predictable criticism came from the Left. As Vox reported “New conservative climate plans are neither conservative nor climate plans; they are mainly designed to protect fossil fuels.” But it also drew withering criticism from the Right. As reported in The Hill, “the conservative Club for Growth has pegged it as ‘stifling liberal environmental taxes, regulations, and subsidies’ while threatening to withhold support from any lawmaker who backs it.”

More in-depth analysis of what the Republicans are up to came from articles in Axios and Politico, and emphasized the party is trying to come up with a way to be recognized as concerned about the environment without going off the deep end. Of the four bills discussed, three were focused on carbon capture technology and infrastructure, mostly funded via tax credits, and one was designed to back up President Trump’s stated goal of supporting the “Trillion Trees” initiative.

The message the Republicans discussed trying to emphasize was to support a “clean environment” instead of focusing so much on “climate change.” It’s about time.

Returning to the Core Values of Environmentalism

There’s a lot to be praised about the GOP seizing some of the initiative with respect to environmental issues, but there is also a lot that can go wrong. For nearly twenty years, and with increasing intensity, the entire focus of the environmental movement has been on “climate change.” For anyone with a shred of scientific skepticism, or journalistic skepticism, or a love of freedom, or a basic sense of proportion, or common sense, or just a good bullshit detector, this has cost the environmentalist movement priceless credibility.

Does anyone who hasn’t already drank the Cool-Aid take seriously a movement that has to prop up a pampered teenage truant as oracle to the world’s elites, or organizes “die off” performative protests on the streets of European capitals, or, with straight faces, claims the world is going to come to an end in 12 years? Does anyone with a sense of history miss the connection between the “climate emergency,” complete with “dangerous,” “denier” scapegoats, propelled by literally billions of dollars being spent on corporate and government propaganda efforts, and not be reminded of how other nations and cultures have been down this authoritarian road before?

Environmentalism’s core values are sacred, and they have been profaned by corporations and governments channeling that calling into a climate crusade, with traditional environmentalists turned into willing accomplices. The professions of journalism and science have been corrupted, as has the nonprofit sector, and collectivists and capitalists alike are drinking at the trough. Meanwhile, the trajectory of progress on actual environmental challenges, from overpopulation to overfishing the oceans to wildlife poaching and wilderness preservation, have all been diminished.

This is why the trillion trees initiative is meaningful. It returns to the root benefits of environmentalism, and does so in a way that also gives a nod to the climate change zealots. The benefits of afforestation are undeniable, regardless of whether or not anyone believes in the dangers of anthropogenic CO2. Afforestation has been proven to restore water tables, reviving springs and rivers. It has been proven to bring back regular rainfall to regions that were becoming arid. Forests harbor wildlife and timber provides a cash crop. If it happens to sequester CO2, so much the better.

Find Projects and Policies That Are Good Anyway

This principle, to do environmentally sound projects that make sense anyway, regardless of the “carbon accounting,” is a pathway to credibility for the GOP, and even might point the way towards more of a national consensus on environmental policy. This is why it is such a good idea for the GOP to propose new research into developing biodegradable, nontoxic new types of plastic, and to research how to clean up the millions of tons of plastic that even now continues to pour out of Asian and African rivers into the world’s oceans.

Conversely, the GOP proposal to fund pilot plants designed to sequester CO2 gas in underground caverns is only slightly less ridiculous than California’s near miss regulation whereby they were going to require dairy cows to wear plastic bags attached to their anuses in order to capture the methane. California’s preposterous scheme, hatched by fanatics and glommed onto by “researchers” looking for a quick buck, at least had the virtue of only wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Carbon sequestration schemes are on track to waste billions, to do, what? Pressurize every cave in America and remove how much many PPM of CO2 from the earth’s atmosphere? At what cost per PPM?

This is theater of the absurd. Maybe, maybe, sponsor research aimed at discovering how to convert CO2 directly into a fuel that maintains a solid or liquid form at room temperature. After all, trees do it. Otherwise, save the caves, and keep the bags off the dairy cows. It is, like so much “climate policy,” cronyism pretending to be part of a sacred mission. Some cronyism is inevitable. But at least get something out of cronyism that benefits society.

The GOP needs to aggressively promote climate change related proposals that make sense even if anthropogenic CO2 induced climate change really is the biggest hoax in human history. Because at the end of it all, we can then simply view “climate policy” as a means of capital formation to build things we needed anyway: seawalls, levees, reservoirs, desalination plants, nuclear power and other forms of clean energy; reforestation, sustainable fisheries, biodegradable plastic.

We can view these “good to do anyway” proposals as a way to fund scrubbers that will take the last bits of particulate matter out of the fossil fuel based energy economy, recognizing that even if CO2 isn’t harmful to humans, it is unhealthy to breathe carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide, especially in cities across Asia and Africa that have barely begun to get that under control and are looking for solutions.

This is the clean technology revolution that makes sense. The GOP needs to boldly proclaim support for ways to help humanity complete the journey to a pollution free civilization, at the same time as they refuse to dismantle the capitalist system that gave us the wealth to pursue clean innovations; at the same time as they demand cost/benefit analysis on all “climate change” schemes; at the same time as they patiently remind anyone who will listen that fossil fuel use cannot possibly be precipitously eliminated; at the same time as they demand an end to the silencing and demonizing of rational contrarians who – imagine this – do not believe the world is about to come to an end.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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California’s Progressive War on Suburbia

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For three years in a row, California’s progressive lawmakers have attempted to legislate higher density housing by taking away the ability of cities and counties to enforce local zoning laws. And for the third year in a row, the proposed law, Senate Bill 50, was narrowly defeated. But eventually, inevitably, something like SB 50 is going to passed into law.

In opposition were homeowners who understandably don’t want their single family home neighborhoods subjected to random demolitions in order to replace single family homes with construction subsidized fourplexes to be filled with rent subsidized tenants. These homeowners, and the local elected officials who represent them, were joined by “housing justice advocates” who claimed the law didn’t adequately address the gentrification effect, whereby higher density developments often displace existing residents to construct luxury condominiums that only the wealthy can afford.

There’s a lot going on here, and it seems that very little in the way of analysis can support a dogmatic ideological perspective. For example, from a property rights perspective, you can argue that people who purchase homes have a right to expect the zoning density of the neighborhood to be respected, since that’s what they relied on when they invested their life savings and lifetime earnings. But a property rights perspective might also have one argue that each individual home owner has the right to do whatever they wish with their property, even if that means demolishing the home to construct a multi-story apartment building. These unresolved and conflicting interpretations of property rights prevent consensus and delay action.

And if some ideological dogmas lend themselves to contradictory interpretations, others simply defy reality entirely. Some of the housing justice advocates believe that providing shelter is a human right. For them, mandating taxpayer subsidized “affordable housing” construction, and taxpayer subsidized rent, is the only solution to California’s housing shortage and affordability crisis, and the sooner we get busy, the better. This unrealistic extension of human rights attracts opposition, if not ridicule, and in any case is impossibly expensive.

But perhaps the worst of the ideological dogmas that prevents rapid solutions to the housing challenges facing Californians is environmentalist values taken to extremes. The practical impact of regulations attendant to environmentalist values – from CEQA reporting requirements and CEQA lawsuits to burdensome and expensive building codes – is to make housing construction unprofitable for anything that might be considered affordable to the average Californian.

Environmentalist ideology hasn’t just made construction costs unaffordable, it has made land costs unaffordable as well, by passage of environmentalist inspired laws that strictly limit the amount of raw land that can get approved for new home construction. Around every city in California, with varying degrees of enforcement, “urban containment” boundaries have been established. Sometimes these boundaries serve important goals; to protect prime farmland, or to preserve important ecosystems such as wetlands for migratory birds. But it seems that almost all open land, everywhere within California’s vastness, is off limits to developers because of environmentalists.

California’s Regulations Destroyed Affordability

The problem with SB 50, or any eventual legislation that mandates higher housing density, is that without reforms to the laws that have made construction of affordable housing unprofitable, the only housing that will ever get built will be high-end homes by private investors, or housing that will require government subsidies both to construct and for the renters to be able to afford to live in them. This is not sustainable. It costs too much, and it takes too long. And it sets up a dangerous bifurcated society, where forcibly integrated into residential single family neighborhoods, randomly situated pretty much anywhere, are apartment buildings populated by residents receiving taxpayer funded rent subsidies.

There’s no doubt that some legislation may have to occur to selectively increase housing density. When a bill like SB 50 returns, which could be any day, certain modifications could help. In particular, SB 50 specified where state law could preempt local zoning, and included in “job-rich, good schools areas.” This is “inclusionary zoning” at its ostensibly high-minded, vindictive worst. The bill’s authors made this provision without any reference to whether or not “job-rich, good schools areas” are in parts of town that ought to naturally convert to higher density. Instead, the message seems to be “you’ve managed to maintain a prosperous and stable community with good schools and jobs, so into that community, we’re going to subsidize the entrance of predatory investors, who will purchase and demolish homes that come onto the market, replace them with apartments, and fill those apartments with people who never had to face down the astronomical mortgages that all you residents shouldered in order to have the right to live here.”

This is wrong. It destroys the incentive for anyone to ever want to pay extra to live in a decent neighborhood. Equally important, it destroys the incentive for low income individuals to work hard and aspire to move to a better neighborhood. And to be clear: this provision would never impact truly wealthy neighborhoods. Those people can afford attorneys to tie development proposals up in knots for years, SB 50 or not. This provision attacks California’s middle class. As usual. Delete it.

On the other hand, within the urban core and on properties with frontage along major boulevards, it is an unfortunate reality for anyone still living there in single family homes that their property is doomed to transition. In the past, that would be accomplished because the value of a few of these properties, consolidated and rezoned for a large multi-family building, would make it a lucrative deal for the sellers. Now, however, the business model is broken. Not only has the impact of CEQA and overdone building codes raised costs, but the resultant entrance of public financing into the equation has made project labor agreements elevate the total project cost still further. The relatively recent entrance of powerful “nonprofit” corporations into the subsidized housing market has padded total project budgets and increased costs even more.

For these reasons, mandating densification, however better tuned the rules eventually turn out, is not enough. The entire economic landscape requires revision.

Rewriting SB 50 to Recognize Economic Reality

It is possible to increase the supply of affordable market rate housing without involving the government and taxpayers in the actual construction funding. It is possible as well to increase the supply of housing in a manner that allows the developers and landlords to earn a decent return on investment without involving the government and taxpayers in funding rent subsidies. Therefore, the next version of SB 50 might recognize and account for the following factors:

  • Abandon “inclusive zoning” aimed at integrating subsidized low income residents into middle class neighborhoods via massive taxpayer expenditures.
  • Restrict mandated higher density zoning to the core urban areas in California and along major traffic arteries. One absolute set of governing criteria should apply everywhere.
  • Treat every county and city exactly the same, instead of allowing select counties and cities to take longer to come up with their own plans.
  • Repeal or significantly reform the California Environmental Quality Act.
  • Repeal energy neutral mandates and assorted other unwarranted environmentalist inspired building code regulations that add costs to home construction.
  • Set a maximum period of time within which building permits can be granted, and set a maximum building fee at $10,000 per home/unit (or less).
  • Streamline the building permit process to make it easier, not harder, for developers to acquire permits. Look to Texas for guidance.
  • Ban project labor agreements and require open bidding processes for public works projects.
  • Restore public funding to streets and connector roads instead of charging developer fees which are then reflected in much higher home prices.
  • Repeal laws designed to prevent reasonable expansion of the urban footprint. Allow housing developments again on open land.

These and other changes would make it possible again for private homebuilders to profitably construct affordable housing. Redirecting public money into constructing enabling infrastructure would take additional financial pressure off of home builders as well as home buyers. That worked in the 1960s and 1970s in California, and it still works in other states. The overall cost of increased public investment in infrastructure is less, perhaps far less, than the cost of taxpayers subsidizing the construction, and then subsidizing the rent in perpetuity, for literally millions of units of housing.

There is a war on suburbia being waged in California. This ideological battle, where suburbanites are stigmatized as classist, privileged, and environmentally destructive, is utterly unfounded. Suburbs are where a majority of Americans prefer to raise their families. And not these new suburbs with a dozen “single family dwellings” per acre. Spacious, beautiful suburbs where homes sit on lots of at least 6,000 square feet; suburbs where the homes themselves might actually be smaller and more affordable, once the economic hindrances to building them are removed via legislative reforms.

The arrogance of environmentalists who believe suburbs to be a planetary abomination must be called out for what it is – extremism completely unjustified by reality. Everything, from cars to energy to building materials, are becoming clean and sustainable. And there’s plenty of open land in California to spare a few thousand more square miles for new human settlement. At the least, if environmentalists are serious about saving California’s ecosystems, they might stop making common cause with the open borders lobby, and they might endorse nuclear power. Until then, they are transparently hypocritical.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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