How Gov’t Unions and Crony Capitalists Exploit Global Warming Concerns

If anyone is looking for evidence that government unions use their immense influence to support the growth of an authoritarian state, look no further than their unequivocal support for global warming “mitigation,” and all attendant agencies and laws to support that goal.

In 2006 California’s union-controlled legislature passed AB32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” a measure that was touted as a trailblazing breakthrough in the dire challenge to avoid catastrophic climate change. The premise behind AB32 is that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, and that eliminating CO2 emissions is necessary to prevent the planet’s climate from overheating, with all the apocalyptic consequences; rising oceans inundating coastal regions, epic droughts cascading through the world’s fragile forests and killing them, extreme storms, acidic oceans, collapsing agriculture – the end of life as we know it.

Maybe that’s true – and maybe not – but how it’s being managed is a corrupt, misanthropic, epic scam.

If anyone is looking for evidence that government unions and crony capitalists work together – contrary to the conventional wisdom that presents the appearance that they are in conflict – again look no further than their shared support for global warming mitigation, expressed in the legislative mandate to reduce CO2 emissions. AB 32 implements this by forcing industrial entities to purchase permits to emit progressively smaller quantities of CO2, via an auction process that is expected to raise $20 billion per year to finance renewable energy investments.

Think about how government unions will benefit from all this money:

  • Transit workers will claim a share because they will be getting cars off the road.
  • Firefighters will claim more fires are because of global warming and demand more funds – when in reality most severe wildfires are the result of decades of forest mismanagement and unwarranted wildfire suppression.
  • Cities will qualify for proceeds when they zone extremely high density housing.
  • Code enforcement officers will declare that the percentage of their jobs oriented towards conservation and energy/water efficiency qualifies them for a share of the proceeds.
  • Teachers will declare that the percentage of their curricula oriented towards climate education qualifies them for a share of the proceeds.
  • More generally, municipalities will collect more property tax as restrictive zoning elevates the cost of housing.

Think about how crony corporations and corrupt financial special interests benefit from this money:

  • Wall Street traders will set up new subsidiaries to traffic in carbon emission auctions and take a cut.
  • “Green” entrepreneurs will manufacture devices calculated to save energy and water – despite the fact that the shortages are contrived.
  • Producers of energy and water will sell at higher prices since competitive development of these resources is restricted.
  • Utilities whose profits are “decoupled” from the quantity of energy and water they deliver will increase revenue and hence their profit margins which are pegged to revenue, without having to increase services.
  • Manufacturers of noncompetitive products with no natural demand – high speed rail is a perfect example – are enriched via hundreds of billions of investment for their supposedly greener and cleaner solutions.
  • More generally, artificial scarcity causes asset bubbles which benefits wealthy investors and pension funds, but impoverishes ordinary workers.

Even if CO2 is a threat to life on earth, there is an alternative that merits discussion:

Instead of investing in “green” energy infrastructure and embedded surveillance systems to micro-manage energy consumption, California should be investing in natural gas and 5th generation nuclear power stations, desalination plants along the coast, liquid natural gas terminals, efficiency upgrades to existing high-voltage transmission lines, run-off harvesting and aquifer storage systems, upgraded aqueducts, comprehensive waste-water treatment and aquifer recharge, offshore drilling for oil and gas, widened roads and freeways, more airport runways, and buses for mass transit. These steps will result in energy, water and transportation costing everyone in California less. This will benefit businesses and consumers, and make California a magnet for investors and entrepreneurs all over the world.

And even if CO2 is a threat to life on earth, vigorous debate on that topic should be encouraged, not outlawed.

If you are an informed skeptic – something the axis of government unions and powerful financial special interests are trying to outlaw – it becomes tiresome to recite the litany of legitimate reasons that debate regarding the actual impact of anthropogenic CO2 is of critical importance. The primacy of solar cycles, the multi-decadal oscillations of ocean currents, the dubious role of water vapor as a positive feedback mechanism, the improbability of positive climate feedback in general, the uncertain role (and diversity) of aerosols, the poorly understood impact of land use changes, the failure of the ice caps to melt on schedule, the failure of climate models to account for an actual cooling of the troposphere, the fact that just the annual fluctuations in natural sources of CO2 emissions eclipse estimated human CO2 emissions by an order of magnitude. And let’s not forget – California only is responsible for 1.7% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Does any of this matter to the California Air Resources Board?

Apparently not. Nor does it matter to California’s legislature, which recently stopped just short of passing Senate Bill 1161, the Orwellian California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016. SB 1161 would have authorized prosecutors to sue fossil fuel companies, think tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.”

What California’s legislature ran up against, of course, was the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps they believe time is on their side. After all, even the Scalia court ruled in 2007 that CO2 is pollution, in one of the most frightening inversions of reality in U.S. history. Imagine what a court packed with Clinton appointees will come up with.

The failure to deploy clean fossil fuel solutions in the developing world, much less here in California, condemns billions of humans to further decades of poverty, misery, and unchecked population growth. Cheap energy equals prosperity equals population stabilization. Until a few years ago that hopeful process was inexorable. But in recent years, somewhere on the shores of Africa, cost-effective industrial development ran into global warming’s global mafia and was stopped in its tracks.

The consolidation of power inherent in government suppression of energy development and micromanagement of energy consumption is not only a recipe for a corporate union police state in America. It is a recipe for systemic oppression of emerging societies across the world. At the very least, the debate must continue.

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This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

The Alternative to Crony Capitalism and Phony Shortages

The modern history of the Silicon Valley arguably began in 1957, when eight young PhD graduates left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories to launch the first high-volume chip manufacturer, Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild and its spinoffs, including Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), were the early participants in what became the most fervid ecosystem of fiercely competitive innovators the world has ever seen. Inspired by the mantra “better, faster, cheaper,” and fueled by billions in venture capital, the Silicon Valley is now the epicenter of the information age that has transformed our lives.

With power, however, comes corruption. The Silicon Valley’s inspirational mantra has become challenged in recent years. High-tech products that used to sell because they were better are now sold because they are mandated by law. They sell not because they are faster, but because they are engineered to operate according to a social or environmentalist agenda. And they are most definitely not cheaper, but instead cost far more than they should. And across the product spectrum from high-tech to low-tech, Silicon Valley leadership increasingly uses their political clout to support this new agenda.

This is no longer competitive innovation. It is crony capitalism. Here are examples of these mandated products:

  • Light switches that don’t simply turn on (up) or off (down), but instead require prolonged pressing in exactly the right spots – not intuitive at all – and turn off again after a brief interval in order to save energy.
  • “Low flow” faucets that have 1/4″ feed pipes instead of 3/8″, which double the time required to fill a pot. Forever.
  • Public restroom faucets that require absurd – and often futile – hand waving in order to turn on. Then when they’re activated, they squirt tiny jets of water that bounce off the skin. Then they turn off almost immediately, requiring additional hand waving.
  • “Low flow” shower heads, also with reduced diameter feed pipes, which double the time required to rinse shampoo out of long hair.
  • Side loading washers that damage fabric and condemn users to bending ninety degrees every time they want to load or unload them.
  • “Low flow” toilets that require multiple flushes and often don’t send enough water into the sewers, requiring investment in additional pumping systems.
  • Public toilets that have an intelligent sensor that controls when to flush the excrement left by the previous user, but frequently fails to do so.
  • LED streetlights that turn night into glaring day and impart the ambiance of a prison compound to what once were peaceful suburban neighborhoods.
  • “Drought tolerant” landscaping – requiring expensive “smart” drip irrigation systems – that is ugly and robs families of a lawn where their children can play.
  • Reusable grocery bags that are expensive magnets for bacteria, require frequent, time-consuming and largely ineffective cleaning, and are thrown away at a frequency that actually makes them create more total waste than the lower-mass disposables.
  • “Smart” thermostats that have complicated programs and settings that nobody uses, when a $20 unit with a bimetallic strip used to be perfectly sufficient to activate cooling or heating whenever a hot or cold temperature threshold was reached.

And we haven’t seen anything yet! The “internet of things” is coming. And when it does, nanny robots will abet the nanny state, ensuring the green corporate vision of utopia monitors and manages us all.

The problem with all of these socially engineered, mandated products, apart from the fact they are, collectively, massive annoyances, is that they are based on convenient myths. The idea, for example, that anyone can overuse indoor water is a myth. Instead of using water bond proceeds to give rebates to consumers to buy these contrivances, policymakers should be completing infrastructure upgrades so that 100% of sewage is treated and injected into aquifers to be retrieved again as potable water. How can you overuse indoor water if 100% of it is recycled?

The idea that urban water cutbacks in general can have a significant impact on California’s total water diversions is another convenient myth. During this recent drought, California’s households were asked to cut back their water consumption by 25%. Best case, this would have given back about 900,000 acre feet for farmers or environmental uses. But according to the California Dept. of Water Resources, farmers currently consume 27 million acre feet each year, and environmental diversions consume another 31 million acre feet per year. All of that household saving equates to a reduction in total use of only 1.5%. Meanwhile, public funds are spent urging people to put a brick in their toilet tank, or a bucket in their shower. This is infantile propaganda, imparting dangerous levels of scope insensitivity to the impressionable.

When you examine the alternatives to forcing citizens to buy expensive, annoying gadgets to address a phony shortage, it becomes quite clear what’s going on. Crony capitalist lobbyists, who want their high-tech companies to be OEMs to major manufacturers of durable goods, are warping policy decisions so they can pocket the public money that ought to be used to upgrade our sewage treatment plants, construct reservoirs (Temperance Flat and Sites come to mind), and build percolation systems to harvest storm runoff from the Los Angeles river and other rivers.

The same holds true for energy. There’s nothing wrong with mandating common sense solutions to avoid profligate waste of water and energy. But it is oppressive to mandate sealing up homes and buildings so fresh air can’t circulate, subjecting people to the blinding industrial glare of first generation LED light, or making them install switches and thermostats that are puzzles to operate. Back in the 1990’s, reputable environmentalist magazines like WorldWatch promoted natural gas as the “transition” fuel to adopt while we moved methodically towards the electric age. Now that we’re awash in natural gas, the environmentalists, abetted by the crony capitalists, have raised the stakes.

For those of us in the developed world, these policy biases translate into annoyances. For those billions who reside in the developing world, the oppressive consequences are tragic. The preconditions for population stabilization are universal literacy, reduced infant mortality, and female emancipation. And the biggest single precondition for those three laudable goals? Prosperity enabled by cheap and abundant energy. But while we fiddle with battery technologies and smart electrical grids, inexpensive clean fossil fuel investment in the developing world is scuttled.

Here is the moral choice that the phony shortage crony capitalist crowd doesn’t want you to hear: We can develop clean fossil fuel to quickly create global prosperity, and world population will peak at 8.0 billion. Or we can develop “green” energy with windmills, batteries, and solar farms, deferring global prosperity due to the incredible cost of these bleeding edge technologies, and world population will peak at 10.0 billion. What is the impact of another two billion people on the ecological carrying capacity of planet earth? Al Gore and Tom Steyer are invited to answer this question.

Back here in California, the choice is equally clear. We can pretend there are shortages of water, energy and land, which will enrich the crony capitalists, but make the rest of us poorer. Or we can develop our natural gas and invest in our water supply and storage infrastructure, which will encourage the Silicon Valley to reaffirm their inspiring legacy of competitive innovation, while providing tremendous opportunities for the rest of us.

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This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.