The Shared Scarcity Agenda of Predatory Investors and Extreme Environmentalists

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In a long-planned rally at the California State Capitol last month, San Joaquin Valley farmers protested new laws that impose taxes on their irrigation wells. In Madera County, where most of these farmers came from, the new tax is as high as $246 per acre of farmland. If you’re trying to irrigate a few sections of land to grow almonds, that tax adds up fast.

It would be bad enough for these farmers merely to restrict their access to groundwater, particularly since new laws are also restricting their access to river water. But the timing of this tax couldn’t be worse. The cost for diesel fuel has doubled, fertilizer cost has tripled, and shipping bottlenecks prevented farmers from selling their produce to export markets, flooding the domestic market and driving the price down.

Less revenue. Higher costs. And now a per acre tax on wells. Speaking at the farmer protest, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado exposed the hidden agenda behind the ill-timed regulatory war on farmers. “Financial speculators are buying farmland for the water rights,” she said, “and then they turn around and sell your water right back to you.”

Hurtado is right. The immutable algebra of this predatory financial strategy goes like this: As regulatory oppression drives farmers out of business, investors move in and buy their land. Meanwhile, these investors support environmentalist restrictions on river withdrawals for irrigation and oppose water supply infrastructure projects (using environmentalist justifications), in order to create a shortage of available water. Next, they use water rights to sell water back to corporate farmers who move onto the acquired properties, as well as to other farmers and municipal customers. Then they blame the inflated prices on “climate change.”

The accelerating movement of speculative investment capital into American farmland is well documented. According to the USDA, foreign investors by 2019 had purchased over 35 million acres of U.S. farmland. To put this in perspective, there are nearly 900,000 square miles of agricultural land in the U.S. (the entire lower 48 is 1.9 billion acres), but the impact of these purchases aren’t evenly distributed. Foreign investors favor prime irrigated farmland, of which there are only about 58 million acres in the U.S. Ground zero for this is California, with 9.6 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Because of California’s politically contrived water scarcity, farmland investment gravitates to California and is motivated as much by the desire to secure the lucrative water rights as it is to grow food. And while foreign investors are part of the mix, most of the purchases are being made by American firms. For example, while Saudi investors are buying land for the water rights in the Imperial Valley, Harvard’s $32 billion endowment is buying land for the water rights in Central California. American hedge funds and investment firms including Trinitas Partners, LGS Holdings Group, Greenstone, and others are also buying out California’s financially stressed farmers. Their profit model relies on water scarcity.

One of the primary sources of water for the American Southwest is the Colorado River. With decades of runoff stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, water is released downstream to sustain the cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with countless smaller cities and large-scale agriculture, primarily in Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley. California alone imports more than four million acre feet per year from the Colorado River. And decades of reservoir overdrafts along with a prolonged drought are about to force a massive reduction in how much water can be taken from the Colorado.

Public investment in water supply projects could have prevented the looming water crisis. Big new off-stream reservoirs such as the proposed Sites Reservoir in Northern California, could capture and store flooding runoff from the Sacramento River. Raising the height of the Shasta Dam, along with several other existing dams, could cost-effectively increase California’s water storage capacity. Spreading basins—and a return to flood irrigation—could also capture runoff along the entire western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and store millions of acre feet each year in underground aquifers. Urban water recycling could reduce the amount of water required by California’s cities by several million acre feet per year. Desalination plants can offer a perpetual, drought-proof supply of water to California’s coastal cities.

Instead, the only solution proposed by California’s policy makers is water rationing against a backdrop of chronic water scarcity and high prices. But it’s important to know what’s behind this, because the operative ideologies often have little to do with the classic liberal vs. conservative, capitalist vs socialist schisms. The powerful special interests who profit from water scarcity are speculative investors who use environmentalists to stop water supply projects. And while leftist environmentalists rhetorically attack capitalists, they have a symbiotic alliance with these investors. Both want water scarcity.

The irony, and the broken stereotypes, run deep. Consider the typical libertarian reaction to public investment in water supply infrastructure. “Let the market decide,” they will decree. But in many ways, the market is broken. Like many libertarian pieties, “the market” only works perfectly in a perfect world. In California, public funding of water supply projects results in a permanent lower cost for water and allows a water market to function against the backdrop of water abundance. This, in turn, enables a more decentralized ecosystem of competing farmers, selling more diverse agricultural products at lower prices, while still making a profit. At the same time, water abundance takes away the incentive for predatory investors to exploit water scarcity and turn the farming industry into the latest victim of what some call rentier capitalism.

State Sen. Hurtado, a Democrat whose district embraces the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, sees this clearly. So does embattled farmer John Duarte, running as a Republican to represent California’s 13th Congressional District. Duarte coined the term “Lords of Scarcity” to explain the phenomenon. A partisan assessment of these two politicians would place them squarely in the opposing camps of liberal and conservative. But they both recognize this phenomenon when they see it, and are equally committed to fighting its parasitic impact.

The organizers of the farmers’ protest also exemplify the new, stereotype-breaking coalition that is forming to oppose the financialization of agriculture. The leadership came from the Punjabi American Growers Group, nearly all of them family farmers who arrived in California within the last 50 years. What they found, until the Lords of Scarcity began the great squeeze, was a land where with hard work you could buy land and grow food and earn generational wealth. That way of life is threatened today, and these Punjabi Americans, along with millions of Americans of all backgrounds and ideologies, are waking up.

Solving water scarcity and preserving a diverse, decentralized, competitive, and profitable agricultural industry in California will require new coalitions, willing to expose the scarcity agenda that is shared by speculative investors and fanatic environmentalists. That new coalition is forming, and it can’t happen a moment too soon.

In a long-planned rally at the State Capitol last month, San Joaquin Valley farmers protested new laws that impose taxes on their irrigation wells. In Madera County, where most of these farmers came from, the new tax is $246 per acre of farmland. If you’re trying to irrigate a few sections of land to grow almonds, that tax adds up fast.

It would be bad enough for these farmers merely to restrict their access to groundwater, particularly since new laws are also restricting their access to river water. But the timing of this tax couldn’t be worse. The cost for diesel fuel has doubled, fertilizer cost has tripled, and shipping bottlenecks prevented farmers from selling their produce to export markets, flooding the domestic market and driving the price down.

Less revenue. Higher costs. And now a per acre tax on wells. Speaking at the farmer protest, State Senator Melissa Hurtado exposed the hidden agenda behind the ill-timed regulatory war on farmers. “Financial speculators are buying farmland for the water rights,” she said, “and then they turn around and sell your water right back to you.”

Hurtado is right. The immutable algebra of this predatory financial strategy goes like this: As regulatory oppression drives farmers out of business, move in and buy their land. Meanwhile, support environmentalist restrictions on river withdrawals for irrigation, and oppose water supply infrastructure projects (using environmentalist justifications), in order to create a shortage of available water. Use water rights to sell water back to corporate farmers who move onto the acquired properties, as well as to other farmers and municipal customers. Blame the inflated prices on “climate change.”

The accelerating movement of speculative investment capital into American farmland is well documented. According to the USAD, foreign investors by 2019 had purchased over 35 million acres of U.S. farmland. To put this in perspective, there are nearly 900,000 square miles of agricultural land in the U.S. (the entire lower 48 is 1.9 billion acres), but the impact of these purchases aren’t even. Foreign investors favor prime irrigated farmland, of which there are only about 58 million acres in the U.S. Ground zero for this is California, with 9.6 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Because of California’s politically contrived water scarcity, farmland investment gravitates to California, and is motivated as much by desire to secure the lucrative water rights as it is to grow food. And while foreign investors are part of the mix, most of the purchases are being made by American firms. For example, while Saudi investors are buying land for the water rights in the Imperial Valley, Harvard’s $32 billion endowment is buying land for the water rights in Central California. American hedge funds and investment firms including Trinitas Partners, LGS Holdings Group, Greenstone, and others are also buying out California’s financially stressed farmers. Their profit model relies on water scarcity.

One of the primary sources of water for the American Southwest is the Colorado River. With decades of runoff stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, water is released downstream to sustain the cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego, along with countless smaller cities and large scale agriculture, primarily in Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley. California alone imports more than four million acre feet per year from the Colorado River. And decades of reservoir overdrafts along with a prolonged drought are about to force a massive reduction in how much water can be taken from the Colorado.

Public investment in water supply projects could have prevented the looming water crisis. Big new off-stream reservoirs such as the proposed Sites Reservoir in Northern California, could capture and store flooding runoff from the Sacramento River. Raising the height of the Shasta Dam, along with several other existing dams, could cost-effectively increase California’s water storage capacity. Spreading basins – and a return to flood irrigation – could also capture runoff along the entire western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and store millions of acre feet each year in underground aquifers. Urban water recycling could reduce the amount of water required by California’s cities by several million acre feet per year. Desalination plants can offer a perpetual, drought proof supply of water to California’s coastal cities.

Instead, the only solution proposed by California’s policy makers is water rationing against a backdrop of chronic water scarcity and high prices. But it’s important to know what’s behind this, because the operative ideologies have little to do with the classic, outdated, liberal vs. conservative, capitalist vs socialist schisms. The powerful special interests who profit from water scarcity are speculative investors who use environmentalists to stop water supply projects. And while leftist environmentalists rhetorically attack capitalists, they have a symbiotic alliance with these investors. Both want water scarcity.

The irony, and the broken stereotypes, run deep. Consider the typical libertarian reaction to public investment in water supply infrastructure. “Let the market decide,” they will decree. But the market is broken. Like many libertarian pieties, “the market” only works perfectly in a perfect world. In California, public funding of water supply projects results in a permanent lower cost for water, and allows a water market to function against the backdrop of water abundance. This, in turn, enables a more decentralized ecosystem of competing farmers, selling more diverse agricultural products at lower prices, while still making a profit. At the same time, water abundance takes away the incentive for predatory investors to exploit water scarcity to turn the farming industry into the latest victim of rentier capitalism.

California State Senator Hurtado, a Democrat whose district embraces the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, sees this clearly. So does embattled farmer John Duarte, running as a Republican to represent California’s 13th Congressional District. Duarte coined the term “Lords of Scarcity” to explain the phenomenon. A partisan assessment of these two politicians would place them squarely in the opposing camps of liberal and conservative. But they both recognize rentier capitalism when they see it, and are equally committed to fighting its parasitic impact.

The organizers of the farmers protest also exemplify the new, stereotype breaking coalition that is forming to oppose the financialization of agriculture. The leadership came from the Punjabi American Growers Group, nearly all of them family farmers who arrived in California within the last 50 years. What they found, until the Lords of Scarcity began the great squeeze, was a land where with hard work you could buy land and grow food and earn generational wealth. That way of life is threatened today, and these Punjabi Americans, along with millions of Americans of all backgrounds and ideologies, are waking up.

Solving water scarcity and preserving a diverse, decentralized, competitive and profitable agricultural industry in California will require new coalitions, willing to expose the scarcity agenda that is shared by speculative investors and fanatic environmentalists. That new coalition is forming, and it can’t happen a moment too soon.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Solar Farms Should Not Displace Prime Farmland

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Successfully coping with severe droughts in California and the Southwest requires tough choices, all of them expensive and none of them perfect. But taking millions of acres out of cultivation and replacing them with solar farms is not the answer.

California produces over one-third of America’s vegetables and three quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts – more than half of which is grown in the San Joaquin Valley. According to the California Farmland Trust, the San Joaquin Basin contains the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, which is the best there is.

Putting solar farms in more than a small fraction of this rich land will not only displace farming, but have a heat island impact in the enclosed valley. That would be unhealthy for the farms and people that remain, and could even change atmospheric conditions over a wide area, worsening the drought.

If new solar farms are destined to carpet hundreds of square miles of land, they should be dispersed throughout the state and near already existing high voltage lines. Or, they should be concentrated in California’s abundant stretches of uninhabited land such as the Mojave Desert.

With food shortages worsening throughout the world, Californians should be focusing on how to preserve agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. Why, for example, are spreading basins being proposed to allow runoff from atmospheric rivers to percolate when flood irrigation used to replenish aquifers while also growing food? Why isn’t that practice being evaluated and supported wherever appropriate?

Much of the depletion of groundwater aquifers that led to passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was caused because farmers had their allocations from rivers reduced, which forced them to pump more groundwater to irrigate their crops. Drought was a factor, but cutbacks in surface water deliveries and the abandonment of flood irrigation is what made groundwater pumping unsustainable.

The motivation to protect ecosystems during a drought is commendable. But there are solutions that don’t have to destroy the agricultural economy on what is the richest farmland in the world. Some of the environmentalist goals, such as maintaining a year-round flow in the San Joaquin River, have no precedent in history.

When there were severe droughts, that river often dried up in the summer.

Recognizing this highlights a larger reality. The civilization we’ve built has permanently altered nature, and returning it to a pre-civilization state is not an option. For example, because we suppress natural wildfires, we have to log timber or the forests become overgrown tinderboxes. Searching for the optimal balance between a thriving civilization and healthy ecosystems requires accepting limits in both directions.

With this in mind, there’s an irony in the environmentalist-inspired regulations that require water, stored in reservoirs behind artificial dams, to be released downstream in order to maintain year-round flows in rivers that used to run dry in dry years.

The solution to meeting the water requirements of farms, cities and ecosystems is to build more water supply infrastructure, not fallow millions of acres of prime farmland during a world food crisis. Capturing storm runoff through a combination of more off-stream storage and aquifer recharge can increase available water to farms and cities.

With wastewater recycling, less water has to be imported to cities, and in the San Francisco Bay region, less water would have to flow through the Delta to flush out the nitrogen currently being discharged. Desalination can also deliver a drought-proof supply of new water.

Investing in water supply infrastructure creates options for Californians that do not require undermining an industry that helps feed the world. Build the solar farms in the hot Mojave, and save the valley farms.

This article originally appeared in Cal Matters.

Can’t Afford California? Thank an Environmentalist

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The world that we invented, from an environmental perspective, is now getting in the way of moving these projects forward.
– California Governor Gavin Newsom, August 11, 2022

This moment of candor, coming from a man who seems determined to be the most environmentally correct politician in the world, was with reference to water projects. But Newsom, and anyone else paying attention to California politics, knows that for every major project, of whatever type, environmental regulations and litigation are getting in the way of moving them forward.

That’s life in California, and when even Governor Newsom starts to complain, you can bet the problem is real. Environmentalism run amok isn’t just stopping infrastructure projects and destroying economic opportunities for millions, it’s even harming the environment.

That isn’t hard to miss, if you look around. Notice the dead or dying trees in front of homes, businesses, or in the traffic medians on the boulevards of major cities? Thank environmentalists, who for decades have successfully blocked any projects that might have drought proofed our water supply and eliminated the need to triage urban water use.

Are you sweltering in neighborhoods adjacent to fields turned into heat islands, where toxic plastic rugs have replaced natural turf, supposedly to save water and hence save the planet? Are your kids coming home with torn ligaments and synthetic particles embedded in their skin and clothes, because they competed on these fake lawns? Thank an environmentalist.

Have you been forced to burn LED lights, all of them equipped with cheap transformers, and noticed the unhealthy impact of spending half your life exposed to their oscillating flicker? Wouldn’t you prefer to have access to the newest warm, safe energy-efficient incandescent bulbs instead of having them banned? Thank an environmentalist.

Are you using battery powered blowers, mowers, pruners and weed whackers that are clearly not ready for prime time? Do you enjoy having to obsessively charge and discharge them and store them according to demanding specifications so they don’t burn out after six months? How’s that working out for you? Thank an environmentalist.

Have you been stranded in your EV, waiting for an hour or more to get to a charger and get recharged? What do you do when it rains so hard it’s hazardous to charge an EV, or when you can’t find a charging station, or you don’t have hours to wait to add range to your car?  Someday, EVs may be practical, safe and affordable. But why are they being forced upon the public today? Thank an environmentalist.

None of this stuff helps the planet. There ought to be plenty of water and energy to allow Californians to live with comfort and dignity, but instead of building enabling water and energy infrastructure, sue-happy environmentalists stop every project in its tracks, while their cronies profit from sales of marginal products that use far more resources and ultimately leave a bigger environmental footprint.

Does anyone really think astroturf, or LED lights, or lithium batteries, can be “sustainably” manufactured and recycled? What about thousands of square miles being smothered with photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, and battery farms? What about electric vehicles? In most cases, the manufacture, impact, and maintenance and replacement requirements of “renewables” consume orders of magnitude more resources than conventional energy.

In California, the entire economy is critically damaged thanks to extreme environmentalism, starting with housing. In the old days, homes were built with lumber that was logged and milled in California. Water heaters, cooktops and space heaters used natural gas extracted from California wells, and electricity came from an in-state mixture of hydroelectric, natural gas and nuclear sources. Water came from a system of reservoir storage and interbasin transfers via aqueducts and pumping stations that remains a marvel of the world. The new roads and freeways were constructed out of a combination of government operating budgets and bonds. The land homes were built on was rezoned without litigation or onerous delays and fees.

On this foundation of government funded enabling infrastructure and less regulations, homes were affordable. Back then, California worked for ordinary people. It became a magnet for people from all over America and the world. Those days are gone. Thank an environmentalist.

There’s a reason homes cost almost twice as much in California as they do in the rest of the nation. Getting land approved for development takes years if not decades, during which at any point the permit can be denied by any number of agencies or deterred by endless environmentalist litigation. On top of land scarcity is water scarcity, also politically contrived, which prevents many housing developments from even being proposed.

Then there is the cost of lumber and concrete, products that used to come from local sources that competed for customers. But with California’s lumber harvest down to a quarter of what it was only 30 years ago, and the virtual impossibility of opening new quarries, home builders have to import their materials from other states and nations, driving costs way up.

Adding to the cost of homes as well are the environmentally-correct appliances now required, that are energy and water efficient to a fault. Equipped with sensors, software that requires updates, and connected to the internet, these hyper-efficient machines cost twice as much as they otherwise would, don’t last very long, and do a poor job. And what about those “low flow” faucets and shower heads that barely release water, and turn off automatically before you’re done with them?

There’s nothing wrong with designing greater efficiency into appliances. But these appliances go well beyond the point of diminishing returns, and the only beneficiaries are crony manufacturers and tech companies. Thank an environmentalist.

The counterproductive impact of environmentalism defies reason. It’s not just the colossal, destructive footprint of supposedly renewable products or sources of energy. It’s land management. Thanks to environmentalists, in California’s forests and woodlands , in order to log, graze livestock, do controlled burns or mechanical thinning, property owners confront an obstacle course of regulations and permit requirements coming from several agencies at once. Many of the regulations are in conflict with others; it is an expensive and protracted process that very few can navigate. And so the overcrowded forests burn.

This is perhaps the most egregious example of counter-productive environmentalism. Bigger than their war on nuclear power and natural gas. Maybe even bigger than their success in making California unaffordable and inconvenient for all but the super rich. For the last 30 years, as CalFire snuffed out every small fire they possibly could, every practical means of thinning the forests to compensate for fire suppression was made nearly impossible. Thank an environmentalist.

California’s forests are approximately seven times as dense as they have historically been for millennia prior to these atrocious circumstances. In previous centuries, because they weren’t overcrowded, the forests survived droughts more prolonged than the ones we experience in this century. But today, the rain we get can’t even percolate into the ground. The crowded trees desperately absorb every drop, and it still isn’t enough, because where one tree used to grow, seven trees are competing for the same nutrients and moisture. This is why the trees are dying. This is why we have superfires.

When California’s forests have burnt down to the dirt, and ash laden silt is eroding into every stream and river in the state, thank an environmentalist.

It should go without saying that environmentalism is an important value to incorporate into public policy. We may thank environmentalists for getting the lead out of gasoline, and saving the majestic Condor, to name two noteworthy achievements that happened right here in California. But environmentalism becomes a negative value when its primary benefit is only to line the pockets of environmentalist litigants or pad government bureaucracies or enrich crony businessmen.

Today there is no balance. Environmentalism in California is out of control because it empowers a powerful coalition of special interests. The interests of the planet, as well as the interests of California’s striving humans, have become secondary. Newsom’s criticisms are helpful. Now they need to be followed up with action.

This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times.

The Globalist Climate Agenda is a Crime Against Humanity

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“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
– Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of Blackrock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which is allegedly causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western World are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the President was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lacks the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.

In a blistering editorial published on September 18, under “The Post’s View,” the editors wrote “The World’s Ice is Melting: Humanity Must Prepare for the Consequences.” For at least 30 years, and with increasing frequency and intensity, it is not the weather that has become extreme, but rather these proclamations. We have now reached the point where every major institution in the Western World is bent on spreading this panic. Yet very little of this panic is justified by the facts.

To verify the credibility of the globalist climate agenda, should it have any, several hurdles have to be overcome. If global warming and extreme weather is definitely happening, then how serious is the problem, what is the cause of the problem, and what are rational solutions to the problem? To all four of these questions, serious debate is mostly absent from mainstream discourse. Skeptics are pariahs.

But if a skeptical response to any one of these four questions is accepted, the entire edifice of climate alarm collapses. Consider each of them:

Melting ice is sort of a trump card in the hands of the climate alarm community. If every molecule of ice on top of Greenland were to melt into the ocean, sea level would rise by over 20 feet. If the entire 5 million square mile Antarctic continent were to lose its ice, sea level would rise by 200 feet. That much is indisputable. But is ice in retreat?

The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, where he noted that Antarctica has been ice-covered for over 30 million years, and is covered with over 26 million gigatons (a gigaton is a cubic kilometer) of ice. He points out that even at the current estimated rate of net loss, 250 gigatons per year, it would take a century for sea level to rise 3 inches. What Koonin ought to also point out is that 250/26,000,000 is a fraction so small, it is unlikely to exceed the margin for error using existing measurement technology.

In Greenland, as in Antarctica, summer ice melt is offset by snow that causes accumulation of ice in the interior. A recent paper authored by NOAA’s Michael Gallagher evaluates how snowfall affects ice mass in Greenland. Throughout the document, the author acknowledges large uncertainties that make it difficult to predict that climate change automatically signifies net losses in ice mass. It may be that a warmer climate would cause increased snowfall to more than offset increased melting in Greenland.

As for floating ice in the Arctic, which does not raise sea level when it melts, but does offer a cooling, reflective surface at the top of the world, inexplicably it is at a decade high. Vijay Jayaraj, writing for Principia Scientific, citing findings from both the Japanese Institute of Polar Research and the Danish Meteorological Institute, reported that “the extent of ice in the summer of 2022 has been greater than the 10-year average. On most days in July and August, sea-ice levels were above the 10-year average and significantly more than the previous few years.”

Digging further into arctic ice loss, over the past 40 years, the summertime retreat of ice has become more significant, while the wintertime maximum has dropped slightly. So let’s assume the planet is warming. How serious is the problem?

To answer this, you can go to the IPCC’s own reports, which are routinely misread by governments and media to hype the worst case scenarios. Michael Shellenberger, an environmental writer and activist, and author of the book Apocalypse Never, in a recent essay he published on Substack, referenced IPCC reports among others to refute the idea of a climate crisis. Here are excerpts:

“Since the end of the Cold War, policymakers, journalists, and activists have pointed to melting glaciers, dying coral, and deadly floods as signs of the apocalypse. But people misread the signs. Scientists in 2022 measured more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than at any point since they began monitoring them in 1986. And, not only have deaths and damages from flooding declined significantly worldwide, for the first time in 25 years, there were no Atlantic hurricanes in August.

Climate change is real and having real world impacts, to be sure. But none of those environmental changes are the end of the world. While warmer temperatures increase bleaching, corals can survive bleaching; scientists find that corals are adapting and evolving to warmer water; and people are breeding coral that can survive hotter temperatures. And the main factor preventing flood damage and death remains water management to channel stormwater through upgraded drain systems, not modestly higher rainfall. As for hurricanes, NOAA estimates that they will become 25% less frequent.

In truth, there is no scientific basis for any claim of climate apocalypse. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and others forecast that farmers in the world’s poorest regions, like sub-Saharan Africa, could see a 40% increase in crop yields if they gain access to fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, even at high levels of warming. There is no science supporting the alarmist claims of an imminent collapse of the North Atlantic Ocean currents, which bring warm water north, and cool water south, an oft-repeated ‘tipping points’ scenario. Indeed, it is hard to come up with any scenario where temperature changes of 4°C could be world-ending.”

So whether its mild or severe, what is causing climate change?

First of all, as climate skeptics are fond of pointing out, the earth’s climate has always been changing. Many of the variables at work today are identified as causing major climate shifts in previous epochs. For much of the last 2.5 million years, the earth has been a snowball. What we are living in today is known as the Holocene interglacial, a warm period that has lasted for 11,000 years. Based on geologic history, another ice age is past due.

Clearly it wasn’t anthropogenic CO2 that drove these profound episodes of climate change in Earth’s past. Other causes include how the shape of Earth’s orbit fluctuates on a 96,000 year cycle, how the tilt of the earths axis fluctuates on a 41,000 year cycle, and how the Earth’s axis wobbles on a 26,000 year cycle. The combinations in which these cycles converge impacts how much sun hits the polar latitudes, possibly triggering warming or cooling.

These orbital phenomena are not believed to be enough to trigger the beginning or the end of an ice age on their own, but instead start a feedback loop in the Earth’s climate system. In that regard, anthropogenic CO2 may actually be postponing the next ice age. From LiveScience.com, “Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany have shown that the onsets of past ice ages were triggered mainly by decreases in carbon dioxide and that the dramatic increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because of human-caused emissions, has likely suppressed the onset of the next ice age for up to 100,000 years.”

More immediate variables affecting climate include solar cycles, as well as major fluctuations in ocean currents such as the 20 to 30 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Climate is also affected by volcanic activity which releases CO2 and aerosols into the atmosphere. The climate may be affected by deforestation or desertification, urban heat islands, and other changes in land use. The climate is greatly affected by water vapor in ways that are still poorly understood.

The multi-disciplinary nature of climate science, the infinitely complex assortment of variables impacting climate, the uncertain and often conflicting measurements, the dichotomy between predictive modeling and actual events, combined with relentless pressure on scientists to always reinforce the “consensus,” ought to call into question all alarmist proclamations. But weather has always been capable of wreaking havoc on civilization. What should be done to mitigate its extremes?

This is where the doomsday coalition, with the globalist ESG lobby in the vanguard, are themselves the most dangerous people on Earth. Their solution, preposterous on its face, is to halt further development of fossil fuel resources and, within thirty years, eliminate use of fossil fuel entirely.

This is nihilistic, tyrannical oppression. It is horrendously unsustainable. It is an impossible goal to achieve. To even come close to accomplishing this objective in a matter of a few decades would cause famine, depression and war, impoverishing if not killing billions of people.

In his remarks at the Clinton Foundation, Unilever CEO Alan Jope also said this, “In 1939, George Orwell wrote that we have sunk to such depths that stating the obvious is the first responsibility of every person.” He went on to say “stating the obvious, that we are having a climate emergency, is becoming an unpopular thing to do.”

To state the obvious, however, is to state that we are not having a climate “emergency.” And while we have reason to hope that a tipping point is near, that remains the unpopular sentiment. Equally obvious is that the globalist climate agenda, among other things, aims to control and ration all energy in the world.

Alan Jope, and every other powerful person who is pushing this death wish on the world, are themselves the most dangerous people in the world. They may claim to be high-minded altruists, but if they get their way, the destruction they wreak will relegate Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to amateur status by comparison.

One must wonder how anyone can be so delusional in the face of overwhelming evidence. Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and an energy expert who is becoming a powerful voice for sanity on this topic, recently produced the following chart showing the resources required to produce renewable power.

Epstein’s revealing chart, using data taken from the U.S. Department of Energy, shows, per unit of energy produced, how much goes into building solar and wind generating plants compared to natural gas, nuclear and coal. It isn’t even close. This illustrates one of the biggest lies being told by the renewables lobby. Wind and solar energy provide less than 5 percent of all energy currently consumed worldwide. Imagine the footprint of this many solar farms and wind farms, if fossil fuel, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power were phased out. Renewable energy is not “sustainable.”

The architects of the globalist climate agenda are well aware these facts. They also know that for everyone on Earth, per capita, to consume half as much energy as Americans consume per capita, energy production worldwide will have to double. That should be the shared objective of all nations, and the idea that this can be accomplished without further development of fossil fuels is a blatant, outrageous lie.

What are these obscenely wealthy, inordinately powerful people thinking? How can they possibly believe they’re going to make the world a better place, if their plan is to force billions of people into starvation and poverty while carpeting literally millions of square miles with wind and solar farms? How is this a good thing?

If the world gets a little warmer, we can adapt, as will most species of wildlife. More CO2 means higher crop yields and faster growing forests. More energy means more prosperity, and history has proven that prosperity is the fastest way to induce people to have fewer children. Indeed in most industrialized nations we already face population decline. The footprint of civilization is not destined to expand forever. The situation is not dire. The biosphere will endure.

The globalist climate agenda more than a misguided but well-intentioned mistake. It is a monstrous crime against humanity, promulgated by some of the most dangerous people who have ever lived. It is a brazen lie for any of them to claim that we are dangerous if we do not think the world is coming to an end, are not promoting panic and fear, and wish to see citizens of all nations achieve prosperity.

We are not the dangerous ones, Alan Jope. You are.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Dam Removal in the American West

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The great cities of the American southwest would not exist if it weren’t for dams. Without the massive federal and state projects to build dams, pumping stations, and aqueducts (most of them completed 50 to 100 years ago), more than 60 million Americans would be living somewhere else. Without dams to capture and store millions of acre-feet of rainfall every year, and aqueducts to transport that water to thirsty metropolitan customers, the land these cities sit upon would be uninhabitable desert.

Such is the conundrum facing environmentalists that want to set these rivers free. Without dams, crops wither and people die of thirst. Without dams, devastating floods would tear through towns and cities every time there’s a big storm. Without hydroelectric power from dams, 18 percent of the in-state generated electricity Californians consume would be gone. You can’t just rip them all out. You would destroy a civilization.

But because of dams, fish habitat is lost, and aquatic species can become endangered or go extinct. Because of dams, precious sediment is prevented from running downstream to nurture estuaries and restore beaches. Because of dams, the natural cycle of rivers is disrupted: the cleansing pulse of spring that calls the migratory salmon to come back from the ocean, the dry trickles of summer when these anadromous species fight their way upstream to the cool and perennial headwaters to spawn, the next season’s rains that return newborn fingerlings to the ocean.

There’s often an aesthetic price to pay as well when dams are built. Perhaps the most notable among them is the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, inundating a deep, granite-walled valley once considered a rival in beauty to neighboring Yosemite, less than 20 miles away. Notwithstanding the dividends the ecosystems of this once pristine valley paid to wildlife, its breathtaking splendor inspired human visitors. In describing the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the great naturalist and writer John Muir said, “I have always called it the Tuolumne Yosemite, for it is a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite, not only in its crystal river and sublime rocks and waterfalls, but in the gardens, groves, and meadows of its flower park-like floor.”

When we attempt to assess the pros and cons of dams and dam removal in the western United States today, Hetch Hetchy is a good focal point. Situated at 3,900 feet above sea level and gathering runoff from the 492-square-mile watershed of the upper Tuolumne River, the 430-foot-tall O’Shaughnessy Dam can hold up to 360,000 acre-feet in what was once the Hetch Hetchy Valley. This water is transported 160 miles through pipes and tunnels, generating 385 constant megawatts of hydroelectricity along the way, finally dumping nearly 300,000 acre-feet per year into the Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is located 238 feet above sea level in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just south of San Francisco.

A sensible environmentalism is one that recognizes that environmentalism must involve trade-offs. If you’re going to get rid of dams because they are an abomination to nature — the environmentalist position — you ought to be starting with Hetch Hetchy. Because of that dam, residents of San Francisco and the upper peninsula cities clustered along the bay are recipients of the most reliable, purest water in California. It only takes five feet of snow in the High Sierra to guarantee San Franciscans their full allotment of water and electricity from Hetch Hetchy, a quantity that is achieved in all but the most severe drought years. Progressive environmentalists in San Francisco might talk a good game about removing dams in other areas, but they are curiously accepting of the massive one that benefits them.

The reality in the American west is that every source of water is imperiled. In an average year, California’s farmers rely on about 30 million acre-feet per year to irrigate not quite 10 million acres of crops (15,600 square miles), and urban water agencies require another 8 million acre-feet per year. Diversions to maintain ecosystem health require at least another 30 million acre-feet.

But groundwater aquifers, which have supplied over 18 million acre-feet per year, are overtapped and will require years of reduced pumping if they are to recover. The Colorado River aqueduct, delivering 5 million acre-feet per year to California, depends on water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, both of which are at historic lows. Eithr Californians are going to develop new sources of fresh water by investing in water-supply infrastructure, or they are going to have to take millions of acres of farmland out of production and subject their residents to unprecedented restrictions on water use. They face a deficit of at least 5 million acre-feet per year.

Which brings us back to California’s dams and reservoirs.

Most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, which means the reservoir is behind a dam blocking a river, controlling 100 percent of its runoff. In-stream reservoirs cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December 2021. If California’s in-stream reservoirs are filled early in the rainy season, should a late-season storm hit the state, no storage capacity would be left to control the runoff and prevent flooding. But during droughts, when an adequate Sierra snowpack fails to develop in order to deliver snowmelt well into the summer months, and no late-season rainstorms inundate the state, summer arrives and the reservoirs are empty.

All of this raises the question: If in-stream dams are to be removed to restore aquatic habitat, why shouldn’t development of new water sources, more than offsetting the lost water supply, be part of the project? Why consider these projects in isolation, instead of connecting them? Off-stream reservoirs, which are situated in arid valleys where water is pumped into them from adjacent rivers during storms, can store millions of acre-feet without disrupting important rivers. Wastewater treatment can reuse effluent that is imported into California’s coastal cities at great cost, only to be discharged into the Pacific Ocean after only one use. Ocean desalination finds an ideal venue on the California coast, yet its potential has barely been tapped. The answer, very often, is the refusal to consider realistic trade-offs.

One of the principal environmentalist groups working to facilitate dam removal is American Rivers, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with affiliates and partners all over the U.S. From a review of the organization’s map of dams removed through 2021, two striking facts emerge: A lot of dams have been removed, and almost all of them have been small dams.

When speaking with Serena McClain, the National Dam Removal Practice Lead for American Rivers, it was clear that her organization didn’t expect to remove any of the 240 very large dams that account for 60 percent of California’s total reservoir storage capacity, or, for that matter, many of the more than 1,200 remaining smaller storage dams. “We don’t have a hit list,” she said, “and we don’t want to remove all dams. We want to find the best solution that helps all parties. The majority of dams are small to midscale. Only 20 percent of the dams that have been removed are in the Army Corps of Engineers’ national inventory of dams, the rest are so small they don’t even qualify.”

“Small” is a relative concept, of course. While the political and financial cost, not to mention the loss of capacity, suggests that it is all but impossible to remove large dams with reservoirs that store hundreds of thousands of acre-feet, some medium-sized dams with reservoirs under 100,000 acre-feet of capacity are definitely targeted. Some of these dams are completely silted up, and their removal faces no opposition.

For example, Matilija Dam in Southern California, 168 feet tall and 620 feet long, built in 1947, originally created a reservoir with a storage capacity of 7,000 acre-feet, but now it is almost completely filled up with silt. Dredging to remove the silt is not cost-effective to recover only 7,000 acre-feet of storage. No longer viable for a reservoir, the dam blocks southern California steelhead-trout migration on the Ventura River, preventing passage to over 50 percent of the primary spawning, rearing, and forging habitat of the river system. The dam also prevents downstream transport of nearly 8 million cubic yards of sediment necessary to maintain the lower-river ecosystem, estuary, and beaches of southern California.

Also in southern California, Rindge Dam is a 100-feet-high concrete dam built in Malibu Creek in 1926. By 1940 the reservoir was filled with sediment, and attempts to remove the sediment were unsuccessful. Removal will allow steelhead trout to access 18 miles of high-quality spawning and rearing habitat in the Malibu Creek watershed.

In northern California, Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam, on the Eel River, are two dams that make up the Potter Valley Project. The Eel River is the third-largest watershed in California, and these dams block salmon and steelhead from reaching the Eel River’s headwaters. But this project is not entirely uncontroversial. Scott Dam, with Lake Pillsbury behind it, has a storage capacity of 74,000 acre-feet. Cape Horn Dam, while small, creates a forebay to divert 70,000 acre-feet per year down into the Potter Valley, to help feed the headwaters of the Russian River. A powerhouse, exploiting the 650-foot drop in elevation, generates 9.5 megawatts whenever water is being diverted into Potter Valley.

Jeffery Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, pointed out that the removal proposal includes retaining the capacity to divert water to consumers on the Russian River, which is of great concern to farmers and water agencies downstream. He told me the only people who may strenuously object to losing Scott Dam are the property owners that enjoy the amenities of Lake Pillsbury, which will no longer exist if the dam is removed.

Mount’s comment, and the Potter Valley Project’s legacy of providing water, power, and recreational amenities, points to a core controversy surrounding dam removal, which is how to define beneficial use. One hundred years earlier, during public debate over whether to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam, proponents pointed to these same public benefits of water, power, and recreation. More recently, the California Water Commission used the concept of public benefit, in which it emphasized benefits to ecosystems (a significantly narrower definition with little room, except indirectly, for the inclusion of human welfare in the equation) as a way to deny adequate funding for some of the dam projects approved by California’s voters in 2014.

The complexity of these issues, the unresolved scientific debate over many of them, and the necessarily subjective choice that has to be made over whether to prioritize human benefit or benefit to wildlife, guarantees that every dam-removal proposal will generate public controversy, but only in proportion to how big the dam facing removal is. A few landowners on the shores of a small and remote lake have almost no political clout.

Put another way, the weight and momentum of the institutional forces that favor removal, which focus on one dam after another, will always overcome local resistance if the dam and its reservoir isn’t very big. These institutional forces include federal and state bureaucrats with an ideological bias against dams, powerful environmental activist groups and the think tanks aligned with them, most sport fishing and hunting organizations, and Native American tribes as well as, in some cases, utilities that want to be rid of silted-up reservoirs with obsolete powerhouses.

Which brings us to four dams on the Klamath River: J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate dams. The reservoirs behind these small-to-medium-sized dams have a combined storage capacity of over 140,000 acre-feet. All are scheduled for removal, and demolition could begin as soon as next year.

One of the biggest rivers in the western United States, but known to relatively few, is the mighty Klamath, encompassing a massive 16,000-square-mile watershed that straddles southern Oregon and California’s far north. With headwaters in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, the Klamath bends its way west into California through deep canyons, finding the ocean in an estuary roughly 30 miles south of the Oregon border.

The Klamath is distinguished not only by its vast extent and unique topography, but by its importance to salmon populations. Until you reach the Columbia River over 400 miles to the north, the Klamath and its tributaries offer the largest spawning habitat for salmon in North America.

Meanwhile, the powerhouses on these four dams have the capacity to generate up to 160 megawatts, which goes a long way in the sparsely populated counties of northern California and southern Oregon. More controversial than the loss of hydroelectric capacity, however, is concern among farmers over what is going to happen upriver once these four dams are removed. Because there’s one more reservoir on the Klamath, upstream from the four targeted for removal.

When the Link River Dam was built at the southern end of Upper Klamath Lake in 1921, the intention was to provide water storage for irrigation to what is some of the richest farmland on earth. By the 1900s, over 200,000 acres were planted with alfalfa, barley, garlic, horseradish, onions, potatoes, sugar beets, and wheat. And then came the water wars.

In March 2020, federal water allocations from Upper Klamath Lake to farmers in Klamath County, Ore., were cut from the historical norm of 350,000 acre-feet down to 140,000 acre-feet, and then in May 2020, after the farmers had already invested in crops for that year, the allocation was cut further, to 50,000 acre-feet. After a 30-mile-long convoy of rural dissidents descended on Klamath Falls to protest the cutback, the 140,000-acre-foot allocation was restored. But then in 2021, for the first time in 120 years, the Bureau of Reclamation — which has the authority to manage water resources in the United States — said the farmers would get a zero allocation; after more protests the farmers ended up with 50,000 acre-feet. In 2022, after another initial zero allocation, the farmers got 80,000 acre-feet.

Rural communities and farm interests throughout the American West view every dam removal as a growing and existential threat. Not necessarily because removal of the dams currently slated for removal are going to deprive them of irrigation for their crops, but because of the mentality of the agencies that control the water and concern for what new dam removals and other restrictions come next.

Is it even “science” that compels the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation to maintain that more water in the Klamath River, year round, improves the survivability of salmon? Don’t the parasites that attack salmon die when rivers naturally run nearly dry in the summer? Doesn’t science rely on testing various hypotheses, rather than adhering to one theory — more water in the river, all summer long — despite no evidence that it’s helping restore fish populations? And how could those summer flows ever be maintained, anyway, without dams?

In Idaho, environmentalists claim that four dams on the lower Snake River — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite — must be removed as part of any recovery plan for endangered salmon and steelhead. Plans are moving forward to remove them but are running into opposition. These are big dams; their four reservoirs have a combined storage capacity of over 1.6 million acre-feet. Replacing the irrigation infrastructure, offsetting the losses in waterway transportation, and replacing the more than 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity would cost an estimated $30 billion or more.

The biggest threat to water supply in the American West isn’t dam removal, which, despite what I have written above, is unlikely to spiral out of control, nor is it terribly objectionable to get rid of small and obsolete dams. The threat is everything that surrounds the dam-removal movement, which is a symptom of a far wider set of problems, such as that posed by powerful bureaucrats who believe that conservation, and nothing else, will resolve the challenge of water scarcity.

Then there are the experts who claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that maintaining strong year-round flows in rivers that historically used to run nearly dry in summer will somehow benefit fish. And let’s not forget the climate-change zealots who think hydropower, along with fossil fuels, can all be replaced with nothing more than wind, solar, and battery farms. Even the possible (partial) solution represented by nuclear power is rejected by many of the eco-activists involved in climate-change campaigning.

Perhaps most of all, the threat posed by the prospect of removing bigger dams, such as the ones on the Snake River, is the failure of proponents of removal to support major new water-supply infrastructure, including new off-stream reservoirs. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water.

There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics. Off-stream reservoirs, wastewater recycling, spreading basins to percolate floodwater into underground aquifers, desalination, and an all-of-the-above approach to energy development — more of these infrastructure investments become necessary when dams are removed from rivers. That environmental activists fail to understand the consequences of their actions will only mean disaster if they continue to get their way.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

Green Globalism is the Ultimate Expression of White Supremacy

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There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.

Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.

But are these white leaders on the Left supremacists? Yes, they are, because the American Left, and the globalist green agenda it is cramming down our throats, has only one logical ultimate goal: To conquer the world. It’s pretty hard to be more “supremacist” than that.

Recognizing this reality relies on fairly simple logic:

If life on Earth will come to an end unless all nations achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050, but so far the only nations attempting to achieve this goal are white Western nations, then to save the earth, those nations that are not complying must be forced to comply. In the short run, for example, this means preventing emerging nations from acquiring the investment and technical support to develop an energy economy based on fossil fuel. But within a decade or two, with another generation of Westerners reaching adulthood firmly convinced the world will come to an end if “net zero” is not achieved, the green agenda will be a marketable justification for world war.

It is possible to make this prediction without predicting the outcome. By 2040 or 2050, if not much sooner, the rest of the world will have had quite enough of Western meddling in their energy economy. Powerful nations like China and India will continue to develop whatever resources they wish, at the same time as they will invest in “environmentally incorrect” energy infrastructure in African nations and elsewhere, where the people are desperate to lift themselves into prosperity. This will be a source of increasing international tension, as the white Western globalists invoke the climate emergency and repeatedly attempt to thwart these efforts. At a time that may or may not be by choice, the West will have goaded the rest of the world into open conflict. How it may end is anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile, disparaging actual white supremacists, who represent a vanishingly small fraction of American and European far-right agitators, is a useful rallying cry for the Left. But to think this accusation has any strategic relevance is small thinking.

To paraphrase a memorable line from the movie “Forrest Gump,” supremacy is as supremacy does. And what the white-ruled regimes of the world (including the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the rest of the nations of Western Europe) are doing is using the “climate emergency” and its attendant green globalist agenda to control and eventually conquer the world.

Another example of small thinking is when right-of-center Americans decry how globalists are undermining American sovereignty. Because they’re right, but if that’s the entire scope of their criticism, they’re missing the bigger picture. White, Western globalists are undermining every nation’s sovereignty.

I remember a few years ago speaking with a liberal friend who, like me, had been critical of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But when I asked my friend, hypothetically, if he would support America invading Brazil to save the Amazon rainforest, he lit up with enthusiasm. Without hesitation he proclaimed wholehearted support for such an adventure.

This is the populist face of green white supremacy. Few ever consider what may be the real reasons for America’s bipartisan neocon imperialism, such as protecting the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and safeguarding the expansionist interests of Western multinational corporations. Say it’s for the earth, and onto the imperialist war wagon they will jump. By the millions. Just be sure to paint the wagon green.

The environmental movement has always been dominated by whites. With rare exceptions, every trailblazing leader was white, and the movement today is overwhelmingly white. In the early days, they did amazing work. Greenpeace used to have just one mission: Save whales. The Rainforest Action Network was formed to protect rainforests. Even the EPA in its early years was committed to getting genuine pollutants out of the environment. No reasonable person questions the importance of environmentalist values, so long as they are balanced against human priorities. But just as the environmentalist movement has now been co-opted by the Left, and incorporated the entire leftist agenda into what was once an undiluted and important focus, the Left itself has been co-opted by globalists.

These people are overwhelmingly white, from the environmentalist power brokers that lead that corrupted movement today, to the plutocrats that define and implement the globalist agenda. What a terrific new bludgeon the climate emergency provides them. White globalists now have a moral justification to control the world: All resource consumption must be monitored and managed, or life on earth will come to an end. A threat so existential and so certain—because “the science” is beyond debate—must be met and overcome using any means necessary up to and including a genocidal war. It is better to kill a few billion people than to let the planet burn up. That’s a regrettable yet easy choice.

It is in this context that the American Left, which is now synonymous with the globalist establishment, accuses their political opponents of being white supremacists, or “adjacent” to white supremacists. It is the greatest projection of them all.

Whites who oppose the green global agenda, along with everyone else who opposes it, must realize they are fighting together against what is possibly the most potent supremacist movement in world history. A movement driven by an ideological green polestar that brooks no compromise and will countenance anything to fulfill the mission. The answer is to expose this movement for what it is; overtly supremacist, proclaiming a planetary crisis to camouflage an agenda of conquest, and dominated by white Westerners.

There is nothing redeeming in the green globalist war on conventional energy. We’re not talking about coordinating fishing quotas so Asian trawlers don’t strip mine every shred of living protein out of the oceans. We’re not talking about restoring mangrove forests on tropical coasts around the world to again buffer tsunamis. There are plenty of legitimate avenues for international cooperation by sovereign nations. But using an alleged “climate emergency” to take over and ration the energy consumption of the entire world is illegitimate and immoral. To promote it while fully aware of its inevitable consequences is evil.

If affordable fuel were permitted worldwide, all nations would prosper, and in the process all nations would experience what we have already seen in the West and throughout much of Asia; voluntary urbanization and voluntary population stabilization. Our shared challenge would then become how to use our surplus wealth to nurture and adapt to the changing environment, and make sure we still have enough babies to assure the vitality of our civilization. Isn’t that a better choice than jumping on the green war wagon?

In the ideological civil war within Western nations, the current ruling class, for all its proclamations against “white supremacy,” is itself the faction that is attempting to impose an explicitly supremacist agenda on the world. Green imperialism is still imperialism. Their opponents, decried as MAGA, or worse, are today’s inheritors of the ideals that inspired America’s founders—competitive free enterprise, private property rights, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the sovereign right of the people to choose their government.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Latest Attack on Proposed Sites Reservoir – Not Enough Water

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When it comes to attacking anything that will make so much as a scratch in the earth, California’s environmentalists never run out of arguments, and their litigators never run out of money.

So it goes with the proposed Sites Reservoir, which is enduring a withering new bombardment from environmentalists in the wake of Governor Newsom’s recently announced Water Supply Strategy in which the governor endorsed the Sites Project and even had the temerity to suggest environmentalist obstruction is stopping as many good projects as bad ones.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week, and dutifully highlighted in Maven’s Notebook, “California’s largest reservoir in nearly 50 years may be derailed by water shortages.” Apparently there isn’t enough water flowing down the Sacramento River to fill the 1.5 million acre foot reservoir. But that entirely depends on who you ask.

Shown below, courtesy of the US Dept. of Geological Survey, is flow data for the Sacramento River, upstream at Colusa, which is near to where the planned diversions into the Sites Reservoir will be made. The data is expressed in “CFS,” which stands for cubic feet per second.

What is immediately evident from this chart is how it vividly depicts the volume of surplus water that hit Northern California even during what has been described as the driest winter in decades. If during the on-and-off wet months from October 1 to April 30 just 20 percent of the Sacramento River’s flow had been diverted into the Sites Reservoir, nearly 550,000 acre feet could have been stored, more than a third of its capacity. And since the pumps in one of the original designs for the Sites Reservoir had a capacity of 5,900 CFS, which is equivalent to 11,700 acre feet per day, during the peak runoff events from October through December, at least another 100,000 acre feet might have been stored.

Put another way, if one-fifth of the Sacramento River’s flow upstream at Colusa had been diverted, and only during the seven mostly dry months from October 2021 through April 2022, the massive 1.5 million acre foot Sites Reservoir could have been filled nearly half way to capacity. In just one season, during a drought.

And why not? Drawing 1.0 million acre feet or more from the Sacramento River to fill the Sites Reservoir during wet years, and over a half-million acre feet even in dry years, would not significantly reduce the flow of fresh water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Sacramento River at Colusa is upstream from the Feather River, which adds its powerful flow 40 miles further south, as well as the American River, which joins the Sacramento River another 20 miles south. In addition, flowing into the Delta from the South is the San Joaquin River with its many tributaries.

An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water.” The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

When the average “uncaptured” water flowing through the Delta, “above and beyond those required by regulations for system and ecosystem water,” is 11.3 million acre-feet per year, suggesting there won’t be enough water to fill the Sites Reservoir is an argument resting on thin foundations.

Environmentalists can’t have it both ways. Either we’re going to have massive atmospheric storms that will require massive systems to capture storm runoff, or we’re going to enter a period of chronic droughts where there isn’t enough water no matter what we do. Even the New York Times, just last month, in an article entitled “Why the ‘Big One’ Could Be Something Other Than an Earthquake,” admonished Californians to prepare for a “monthlong superstorm” of rainfall. What better way to prepare than to build off-stream reservoirs? If anything, Sites is too small.

In the February 2021 document “Sites Reservoir Project – Preliminary Project Description,” the introductory section describes how back in 1995 the CALFED Bay-Delta Program “identified 52 potential surface storage locations and retained 12 reservoir locations statewide for further study.” All twelve were off-stream reservoirs. They then narrowed the candidates to four: “Red Bank (Dippingvat and Schoenfield Reservoirs), Newville Reservoir, Colusa Reservoir, and Sites Reservoir.” Sites was chosen as the most feasible project. But why isn’t this study being dusted off and revisited? What about these other potential locations for more surface storage?

Governor Newsom, when he introduced his California Water Supply Strategy on August 11, also said this: “We did some analysis of those big flows that came in November and December of last year, and if we had the conveyance and the tools to capture that storm water, it’s the equivalent of those seven projects that I just noted that take decades to build in terms of stored capacity… Mother Nature is still bountiful, but she’s not operating like she did 50 years ago, heck, she’s not operating the way she did 10 years ago, and we have to reconcile that. We had a vision in the 50s and 60s to do just that, and we want to reinvigorate that capacity in California.”

“Reinvigorating that capacity,” governor, means you are going to have to start firing some of the people staffing the commissions and agencies that have been complicit in the environmentalist assault that has stopped every major water project in its tracks for the last 50 years.

If you want to be taken seriously in California, so the conventional wisdom goes, you have to play nice with environmentalists. To be welcome in polite company, to retain professional credibility, one must ignore the sad fact that much of environmentalism today has morphed into a nihilistic, anti-human, extremist movement. But to ensure that California’s dazzling civilization, 40 million strong, survives and thrives into the next century, maybe it’s time to stop being quite so nice with environmentalists. At the very least, begin to challenge the notion that every scientific argument must invariably tilt in favor of their agenda. Scientific assessments of infinitely complex aquatic ecosystems are rarely beyond scientific debate.

To restore a more humanitarian and progressive balance to California politics, it’s time to tell our state’s all-powerful environmentalist lobby that they cannot always get their way.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Green Fascists Are Destroying the World

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Earlier this summer, the CO2 Coalition was banished from LinkedIn. The CO2 Coalition, with only three full-time employees and an annual budget of under $1 million, had committed the unpardonable sin of sharing contrarian perspectives on climate science. Its work, produced by a network of volunteers that includes dozens of distinguished scientists, offers indispensable balance on a topic that requires honest debate now more than ever.

Among the many comments that followed LinkedIn’s decision, the mentality of the climate crisis mob came through loud and clear. If “the science is settled,” then any contrary perspective is dangerous and must be silenced. A typical comment: “Why does LinkedIn allow so much Climate Disinformation to persist throughout its platform?” Brigades of these content wardens continuously log complaints with LinkedIn against climate skeptics. The impeccable work of Bjorn Lomborg is one of their next targets.

This is not the environmentalism of previous generations, and this new zealotry does not negate or diminish the common sense concern for the environment that most reasonable people share. But this new breed of intolerant, fanatical environmentalism, manifested in the movement to avert a “climate crisis,” is perhaps the most virulent and dangerous expression of fascism in America today. If left unchecked, this fascistic climate change movement will destroy freedom and prosperity while it destroys the planet it purportedly wants to save.

Ideological and Economic Fascism Combined

This is not a frivolous accusation because, in this case, the shoe fits. There are two types of fascism. One is based on ideology and manipulates popular emotions, and the other is based on economics and appeals to elitist greed. The climate crisis movement has found a way to combine both.

Ideological fascism requires a tribal, us versus them mentality, and the climate crisis movement provides this. The climate warriors are the good guys, and the “deniers” are dangerous heretics who must be crushed. They portray the “climate emergency” as a crisis of existential dimensions, which must be resolved by any means necessary.

As with any fascistic movement, green propaganda is hyperbolic, primal, and terrifying: rising seas, flooding, super fires, extreme weather, burning heat—and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy. The time for discussion has passed. And with every big storm or super fire, the potential for more militancy grows.

Economic fascism is variously defined, but the climate movement in the United States fits every credible definition, as it affects big business and big government. Some call it socialism with a capitalist veneer. That would certainly apply, as the industrialized Western nations are suddenly required to atone for causing the climate crisis by transferring wealth to the developing world, and the privileged American middle class must similarly atone by giving up their homes for apartments, their automobiles for buses and trains, their meat for insects, and submit to rationing of energy and water.

Economic fascism is also defined as “planned capitalism,” or corporatism. America has been drifting in this direction for at least the last few decades, greatly accelerated by the climate crisis. Small businesses and small farms expire under green regulations they can’t afford, as oligarchs and multinational corporations gobble up the broken pieces. Environmentalist-enabled corporatism is the reason the American middle class is dying.

Environmentalist-inspired regulations have imposed curbs on home building, resource extraction, and infrastructure investment. These artificial limits create scarcity and exploding prices for every essential good, which diminishes the prospects of all but the very wealthy. Government and big business, working together, are using the climate crisis to destroy the economic independence of American households to empower and enrich themselves. This economic model is explicitly fascist.

But as the United States transitions from a constitutional republic populated mostly by a prosperous middle class to a fascist police state populated by a destitute and broken people ruled by an oligarchy professing fealty to an environmentalist ideology, are the policies they’ve implemented in the name of saving the planet even working? That is, even if they’re right about the dangers, and there really is a climate crisis, is all of this upheaval they advocate doing any good?

No.

A disinterested examination of the schemes that constitute clean technology and renewable energy reveals a landscape of fads and scams that have cost trillions of dollars and accomplished absolutely nothing. Worse still, if these schemes are allowed to continue, the consequences for both humanity and the earth’s ecosystems will be more catastrophic than all but the most apocalyptic climate crisis scenarios.

Biofuel Ecocide

Biofuel is an obvious example. Contributing barely one-half of one percent of all global energy, there are now an estimated 300,000 square miles of biofuel plantations on earth. From the jungles of Borneo and throughout the Pacific Islands, palm oil is extracted to produce biodiesel, while from the rainforests of the Amazon to the American Midwest, sugar cane and corn is grown to produce bioethanol. Every year, more jungle is burned and wildlife incinerated to create new biofuel monocultures, with a pall of smoke that drifts thousands of miles.

The environmental catastrophe that large-scale biofuel production represents is easily demonstrated. If you replaced 100 percent of the oil consumed worldwide with biofuel, it would require 25 million square miles. To put this in perspective, the total farmland worldwide is only 12 million square miles. Yet, in a barefaced and epic charade, every time these jungles burn, another European commodities broker gets to collect a commission on a “carbon credit.”

Imagine if not just oil, but all energy produced on earth today came from biofuel. To accomplish that would require 43 million square miles, which is 70 percent of the entire land surface on Earth including Antarctica.

Proponents of biofuel claim it will be possible eventually to extract ethanol cost-effectively from cellulose—the fiber that constitutes most of the mass of any plant. But notwithstanding the need either to leave harvest slash in the ground to maintain soil health, or inject massive quantities of petroleum-derived fertilizer, cellulosic ethanol extraction remains an extremely costly endeavor. Extracting biofuel from algae in a factory environment has promise in theory but remains far from a commercial reality.

Meanwhile, rainforests burn, supposedly so we can use less fossil fuel.

Land-Hogging Species Exterminators

Wind energy is equally disastrous to the environment. In 2021, wind turbines only contributed 1.1 percent of total global energy production, delivering electricity at a rate of only 26 percent of their installed capacity. Wind energy is an unreliable intermittent form of energy that ultimately will require additional trillions of dollars to be spent on new high voltage lines and battery farms to balance the power grid. But these “wind farms” already consume hundreds of thousands of square miles, with their land footprint set to increase as purveyors are discovering they cannot operate at maximum efficiency unless the turbines are spaced further apart.

An analysis published last year in the trade publication Energy Follower challenged the conventional spacing guidelines, which call for wind turbines to be spaced apart by a distance equal to seven times the rotor diameter. That alone calls for a stupendous amount of land, since that spacing would permit a maximum of four wind turbines per square mile. Citing work by Charles Meneveau, a mechanical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, however, the analysis went on to report that based on Meneveau’s analysis of the performance of utility-scale wind farms, for maximum efficiency, “the suggested recommended separation of each turbine being 15 times the rotor diameter away from its nearest neighbors.” That equates to one wind turbine consuming 1.2 square miles.

Based on this data, using wind turbines to generate the 28,466 terawatt-hours of electricity produced in 2021 from all sources worldwide would require 3 million square miles of wind farms. That’s more area than the combined footprint of every urban region on Earth. And this land would be uninhabitable—anyone who disagrees is invited to live on a wind farm. There will not be many takers.

Wind turbines not only consume unimaginable quantities of resources and land area. They already kill tens of thousands of raptors and bats every year. Potentially worse still, the blades are killing billions of insects at a time when total global insect mass—an essential part of nature’s food chain—is in alarming decline. Wind turbines are also ugly as hell, despite all the slick marketing photography showing them presiding beneficently over green hills and clear skies.

Intermittent, Toxic, Nonrenewable Solar Power

Solar power is perhaps the least problematic of the so-called renewables, but it’s still intermittent power. This intermittency is not only a daily challenge, which can only be addressed with massive investments in batteries. It’s also a seasonal problem. In temperate latitudes, the hours of daylight during summer are twice that of winter, and the further north you go the greater this seasonal challenge becomes. Solar power simply doesn’t work during northern winters, or if it does, it has to be grossly overbuilt to compensate for fewer hours of daylight.

Solar power is also not terribly renewable. The basic material for photovoltaic panels is “solar-grade” polysilicon, which is most efficiently refined using sand. But the world is running out of sand. Extracting silicon from other sources such as obsidian, granite, quartzite, mica, talc, and sandstone is possible, but it is much more expensive and comes with a greater environmental impact. All of the raw materials necessary to manufacture photovoltaic panels are nonrenewable, including aluminum, steel, glass, copper, and silver. If mining these raw materials is so sustainable, why have environmentalists declared war on America’s domestic mining industry?

And then there’s the challenge of what to do with photovoltaic panels once they’re spent. With a useful life of only around 25 years, and even at today’s relatively minute scale, an unrelenting deluge of toxic solar panel “e-waste” is about to descend on humanity. A 2016 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency predicted that by 2050 the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. To date, recycling solar panels is an expensive, energy-intensive business.

If panels were manufactured in America, using raw materials mined in America, and could be produced cost-effectively and mounted on roofs, solar might make sense as just one part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy. But intermittent power is not practical without massive concurrent investments in grid upgrades and large-scale energy storage systems. These costs, and the environmental impact of these additional infrastructure investments, mean as the percentage of power derived from intermittent sources increases, the economic and environmental case for them decreases.

Blood Batteries

If everyone were to go electric, minus nuclear power, hydroelectric power, or fossil fuels, that would require roughly 500 exajoules of power (nearly 140,000 terawatt-hours of electricity) to come primarily from the intermittent sources of wind and solar. To balance this on-again-off-again power, has anyone thought through how much raw materials will be required to build a global fleet of batteries, all of which must be decommissioned and recycled roughly every 10 years, to perpetually collect, store and discharge tens of thousands of gigawatt-hours, day after day, through all seasons, decade after decade?

Turns out, someone has. The redoubtable Alex Epstein has performed the algebra that environmentalists either ignore or lack the basic math skills to comprehend. He concluded that 1,330 terawatt-hours, at $300 per kilowatt-hour of battery storage, would cost $400 trillion—or nearly five times the GDP of the entire global economy. These 1,330 terawatt-hours only represent one percent of 2020’s global energy consumption of 140,000 terawatt-hours, which therefore represents only three days of storage capacity. And even at that price tag, it is probably not enough storage to compensate for seasonal doldrums that periodically cripple solar and wind generation.

As it is, the raw materials for these batteries are sourced from overseas mines, devastating the local environment. West African cobalt miners, many of them children, endure appalling conditions. Naturally, environmentalists would never permit cobalt or lithium mining in the United States. Have you ever heard of blood diamonds? Call these blood batteries.

For everyone on earth to have access to half as much per capita energy as Americans use, global energy production has to double. That’s 1,000 exajoules, twice what we produce today, and to do this, we need to develop all sources of energy. It is the minimum goal we must set in order to achieve universal global prosperity. To try to accomplish this with “renewables,” via the supposedly benign footprint of biofuel, wind turbines, solar power, and batteries, would devastate the planet, consume all available raw materials, and fail to do the job.

Meanwhile, what is green fascism doing to ordinary people?

The Green Fascist Crimes Against Humanity

The green fascists have declared war on energy, water, and housing. They claim that conventional energy creates deadly CO2 emissions and attempt to forbid all debate about the validity of that theory. They claim water supply infrastructure destroys ecosystems and consumes unsustainable quantities of energy. They claim suburbs with single-family homes cause unacceptable increases in automotive pollution. Now they’ve also declared war on livestock, which they claim produce the allegedly deadly gas methane, and on farming itself, which relies on petroleum-based fertilizer. This is no joke. Look no further than the ongoing protests in the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, and across the globe. They’re coming for our farms.

Where does this end? Without energy, water, housing, meat, and farm produce, civilization dies. Before that happens, though, billions of people who had either achieved a middle-class lifestyle, or were about to, will be wiped out. And as this reset runs its course, the green fascists will acquire more political power, and their corporatist allies will acquire more economic power.

If you have a problem with this, and speak up, you will be marginalized and smeared if not silenced. Just ask the CO2 Coalition. The rather staid mission statement of this network of expert volunteers, motivated by sincere concern for the future of humanity and the health of the planet, includes this excerpt: “The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans’ role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions.”

LinkedIn needs to reinstate the CO2 Coalition immediately. And the green fascists’ agenda needs to become the topic of open, honest, balanced, and very public debate.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Desalination on the Sea of Cortez

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Proponents of desalination tout its potential to quench the thirst of a water-deprived civilization. The logic is compelling. If fresh water is in short supply, why not remove the salt from the vast oceans? With an estimated volume of 1.1 million billion acre feet (an acre foot is the amount of water volume that would cover one acre, one foot deep) of seawater, there will always be enough ocean.

For all its potential, desalination has yet to be a game changer. Worldwide freshwater consumption is estimated at 7.5 billion acre feet per year. Of that total, roughly 20,000 desalination plants worldwide produce an estimated 30 million acre feet of fresh water per year. That’s an awful lot of water, but it’s less than 1 percent of global water consumption.

Nonetheless, desalination plays an outsized role in arid coastal regions around the world. In Israel, for example, five massive desalination plants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea produce nearly a half-million acre feet of fresh water per year, an amount the nation plans to double by 2030. Israel’s Sorek Desalination Plant, located a few miles south of Tel Aviv, produces 185,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, from a highly automated operation that occupies only about 25 acres. Approximately 80 percent of Israel’s municipal water comes from desalination, and this nation of 9 million people is now exporting surplus water to Jordan.

Just over one year ago, desalination as a way to solve water problems was proposed in an unlikely place. A July 2021 report submitted to the Pima County, Ariz., board of supervisors explored the feasibility of desalinating seawater from the Sea of Cortez, the body of water that lies between the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican mainland, and piping it over the mountains and across the border with Mexico to Tucson. The challenges posed by this scheme — political, financial, technical, and environmental — exemplify the difficulties of desalination as a means of resetting the supply vs. demand equilibrium to yield abundant water in parts of the world desperately in need of it.

As described by the Arizona Daily Star, shortly after the proposal was submitted by engineers at the Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department, critics pounced, decrying the project as grandiose, impractical, costly, and an environmental disaster. Their first line of attack was the cost to ratepayers. It was estimated that the project could add $60 to $90 per month to the typical Tucson-area homeowner’s water bill.

The critics are not wrong. Because Tucson is so far from the Sea of Cortez, this project would be costly, even in comparison to other desalination projects. The cost of a 200-mile pipeline would be an estimated $3 billion, compared with an estimated construction cost for the desalination plant itself of $1.1 billion. Getting 90 million gallons of water per day (just over 100,000 acre feet per year) pumped from sea level to a peak elevation of over 3,800 feet and then back down into Tucson at an elevation of 2,300 feet is a massive undertaking.

The pipeline’s projected operating cost, estimated at $98 million per year, would be primarily for electricity for the pipeline pumps. They would require just under 100 megawatts of continuous power, which at $.10 per kilowatt-hour would total $85 million per year. Building desalination plants in locations far removed from the customer does not come cheaply. The cost to run the desalination plant, by comparison, was estimated at $73 million per year, with $45 million of that to pay for electricity to pump ocean water through the filtration membranes to remove the salt.

The projected cost for this plant to deliver 100,000 acre feet per year from the Sea of Cortez to Tucson also includes the cost to pay off the construction loans and the overall operating cost. Altogether, the report calculated the water would cost consumers $3,761 per acre foot. That’s expensive water. But these financial obstacles are not insurmountable.

A scenario put forth by the report’s authors proposed that 50 percent of the $4 billion price tag for construction take the form of a federal grant. If so, the retail price per acre foot would drop to $2,732. That’s still costly, but it moves into the range of other expensive solutions. If water sourced from desalination is part of an agency’s portfolio of various water-supply solutions, taking its place alongside treated wastewater, naturally recharged groundwater, and whatever supplies are still available from, for example, the Central Arizona Project that moves water from the Colorado River to Tucson, then the blended price can remain affordable to consumers.

Another challenge facing any proponent of desalination is the energy cost to desalinate the water. Here, however, critics of desalination may be overstating their case. Using existing, fully commercialized technology, seawater desalination requires — ocean salinity varies, so this is an average — about 3.5 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of fresh water produced. Using the number the Tucson engineers relied on, 3.6 kilowatt-hours, and applying that worldwide, it would take 257 gigawatt years to desalinate 500 million acre feet of seawater per year, which is nearly 17 times current worldwide desalination output.

Supplying half a billion acre feet per year of new and perpetually available fresh water could eliminate water scarcity in every major coastal city on earth. Simultaneously investing in total reuse of interior urban wastewater and exploiting new indoor agriculture technologies would multiply this benefit. The total energy to desalinate this stupendous quantity of water, 257 gigawatt-years, is equivalent to 8.1 exajoules (the mega energy unit currently favored by economists). That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but according to the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, it would be only 1.4 percent of the total energy produced worldwide in 2020.

Which brings us to the brine, the seawater that doesn’t make it through the filters, and is returned to the ocean. For every gallon of desalinated water, another gallon of brine, twice as salty as before, has to be processed. In practice, this usually means returning it to the ocean. Passionate debate rages as to just how harmful brine discharge is to maritime ecosystems, and here again, the Sea of Cortez does not align favorably. Compared, for example, with a site on the California coast, past which the robust California Current moves 250 trillion gallons per day, a desalination plant on the Sea of Cortez would discharge waste into a stagnant pond. If the dose makes the poison, and it always does, then the challenge of disbursing brine in the Sea of Cortez is magnified by its placidity.

When it comes to delivering an adequate supply of water, Pima County faces a quadruple threat: County authorities have already squeezed about as much rationing as they’re going to get out of their residents; the level of groundwater pumping they can sustain has been halved as the average precipitation has dropped from twelve inches per year historically to only six inches per year during the ongoing drought; the Colorado River allocations via the Central Arizona Project are threatened as never before, as Lake Powell and Lake Mead drop to historic lows; and the population is projected to increase from 1 million to 1.5 million water-consuming residents between now and 2050.

In the report on the feasibility of desalination as a solution for Tucson, one of the authors told me they “strategically bypassed the question of brine management,” based on the confidence that by the time a project of this magnitude completed its multi-decade planning process, innovative solutions to brine disposal would have been discovered. This is certainly possible. And since desalination is, ultimately, just another form of evaporation, a sufficiently distributed dispersal of brine into the Sea of Cortez ought to satisfy reasonable concerns about environmental impact.

A study prepared for the U.S./Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission in 2020 examined desalination opportunities in the Sea of Cortez. The study included a detailed assessment of emerging technologies. Conventional brine management solutions include ocean discharge and dispersion, which certainly ought to work in locations (unlike the Sea of Cortez) where there is a strong ocean current, along with evaporation ponds, which at scale would consume literally hundreds of square miles, and deep-well injection. But other solutions may be on the way.

For example, the so-called zero-liquid discharge solution to brine management involves extracting all the fresh water, leaving mineral solids that may have beneficial uses. Unfortunately, existing technology to accomplish this requires extreme amounts of energy, and innovative uses of the solid byproducts — such as turning sodium chloride into cement — are still in the concept phase of development.

Other innovations in desalination show more immediate promise. The energy required for reverse osmosis, which is the technology that modern large-scale desalination plants currently use, is 3.5 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter. Commercial desalination plants are pushing that limit. New mobile plants in Saudi Arabia have reduced the energy consumption to 2.3 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter. Just ahead, new filtration technologies and new ways to manage the filtration process promise to further lower the energy required to desalinate. The theoretical minimum amount of energy to desalinate seawater is just 1 kilowatt-hour per cubic meter. It is likely that 20 years from now, the energy required to commercially desalinate water from the ocean will be half what it is today.

In the meantime, maybe desalination is not yet a viable solution, however imaginative (and credit should be given to those investigating creative solutions for the region’s water problem), for landlocked Tucson, located 200 miles away and 2,000 feet above Pima County’s source of saltwater, a sea with minimal current to disburse the brine. But despite relentless litigation and lobbying by environmentalists to block desalination, no such excuse can be made in Southern California, where a water-hungry megapolis squats on the edge of a coast that boasts one of the strongest ocean currents in the world. Desalination at scale does work. It just depends on where you look.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

How Much Fossil Fuel is Left?

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Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse engulfs the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies, and in 2020 fossil fuel continued to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide.

This basic fact, that maintaining a reliable supply of affordable fossil fuel is a nonnegotiable precondition for the survival of civilization, currently eludes far too many American politicians, including the president. Quoting from energy expert and two-time candidate for Governor of California Michael Shellenberger, “One month ago, the Biden administration killed a one million acre oil and gas lease sale in Alaska, and seven days ago killed new on-shore oil and gas leases in the continental U.S. In fact, at this very moment, the Biden administration is considering a total ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling.”

Another basic fact, easily confirmed by consulting the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, is that if every person living on planet earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would have to nearly double. Instead of producing 547 exajoules (the mega unit of energy currently favored by economists) per year, energy producers worldwide would have to come up with just over 1,000 exajoules. How exactly will “renewables,” currently delivering 32 exajoules per year, or 6 percent of global energy, expand by a factor of 30x to deliver 1,000 exajoules?

The short answer is it can’t. Despite the fanatical, powerful group-think that calls for abolition of not only fossil fuels, but also most hydroelectric power and all nuclear power, the reality is that most nations of the world are going to continue to develop every source of energy they can, and they’re going to do it as fast as they can. Renewables may have a growing role in that expansion, but renewables are decades away from providing more than a fraction of total global energy production.

How much fossil fuel reserves are there?

The argument against fossil fuel rests on two premises. The first is that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel is causing a climate emergency. Without (for now) arguing against the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is going to destroy the planet, suffice to say that we’d better adapt to whatever climate change is coming, because the only nations even semi-serious about eliminating use of fossil fuel are Western nations. Once again, recent events have demonstrated that fossil fuel isn’t going anywhere, and nations that renounce its use condemn themselves to deindustrialization and eventual irrelevance.

The other premise underlying the drive to eliminate fossil fuel is more pragmatic. We are reaching “peak oil,” and there simply isn’t enough of it to last much longer. Oil, natural gas, and coal are all nonrenewable resources, with finite reserves. This argument is worth examining in depth.

The next chart shows how much fossil fuel is left in the world in the form of proven reserves (the blue bars), as well as how much, by fuel, was used up in 2020 (red bars, which are so short you can hardly see them). As shown on the chart, in 2020 174 exajoules of oil was burned, with 10,596 exajoules remaining – a 61 year supply. Also shown on the chart, as of 2020, and at current rates of consumption, there is a 208 year supply of worldwide coal reserves, and a 50 year supply of natural gas.

These proven reserves, also reported in the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, don’t tell the whole story. There are “unproven” reserves, which would very likely double the amount of fossil fuel energy available for extraction, and possibly much more.

To understand this, first note that predictions of “peak oil” have been consistently wrong. In a well known early example, back in 1956 economist M. King Hubbert presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute where “he noted that the rate of consumption of these fuels was greater than the rate at which new reserves were being discovered.” Hubbert predicted U.S. oil production would peak in the 1970s, and indeed there was a peak in 1971, at just over 10 million barrels per day. By 2008, total U.S. production had fallen to as little as 4 million barrels per day. But thanks to the introduction of fracking and deregulation, by 2019 domestic oil production had risen to a new peak of over 12 million barrels per day. New technologies and new exploration resulted in a major expansion of proven reserves.

Another indication of how much energy may remain out there in unproven reserves that are waiting to be tapped is in this 2022 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It estimates America’s total proven natural gas reserves at 473 trillion cubic feet, but estimates additional unproven reserves of natural gas to total another 2,867 trillion cubic feet – six times as much.

Finally, consider this map of the Sub Saharan portion of the African continent. Consider the scale of this map; this continent is over 4,600 miles across at its widest point, compared to the lower 48 of the United States at only 2,800 miles wide. As depicted on the map, promising regions for onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration amount to hundreds of thousands of square miles. Africa is a massive continent, with massive reserves of oil and gas. Now consider this report on “Natural Gas Reserves By Country.” Despite its vast potential, the first Sub Saharan nation on the list is Angola, at number 40, with proven gas reserves equal to 0.14 percent of total global reserves. That’s probably a minute fraction of what Africa’s got.

Africa isn’t the only place where fossil fuel reserves have been barely tapped. Expect deposits to be found as needed pretty much everywhere, from the polar regions to countless offshore sites on the continental shelf, and elsewhere.

The current energy crisis is going to harm nations in Africa, and in other developing regions, far more than it will harm Western nations, and that’s saying a lot, considering how cold it’s going to get in places like Berlin and Copenhagen if Russian gas is turned off this winter. But in African nations, the primary source of affordable energy is “biomass.” Put less euphemistically, and to this day, hundreds of millions of Africans still desperately strip the forests in order to gather fuel to cook food, because Western nations and Western dominated banks have prevented them from developing clean natural gas.

This humanitarian folly is multi-faceted. In 1950, there were 227 million people living in Africa. Today, there are 1.4 billion Africans, and by 2050 Africa’s population is projected to be 2.5 billion. On what had been a stable population for centuries, this population explosion was facilitated by Western aid which reduced infant mortality and, overall, provided food aid and healthcare. But now, Western nations are denying Africans the prosperity and self-sufficiency that comes with affordable energy, supposedly to avert climate disaster.

This absurdity ignores the catastrophic impact of a burgeoning population denied access to fertilizer, industrial agriculture, and a reliable power grid, because these are byproducts of fossil fuel. Deliberately denying Africans the fundamental prerequisite for prosperity means their population will continue to explode at the same time as millions of them, desperate for food and fuel, will continue to strip the forests of wood and wildlife. On the flipside, as has been proven worldwide without a single exception, when prosperity is introduced to a culture, the population stabilizes and begins to decline.

There is plenty of fossil fuel

According to the most authoritative source on energy in the world, as noted, total proven reserves of fossil fuel currently total 49,023 exajoules. This means that just with proven reserves, and if only fossil fuel were used, and if global energy consumption were doubled to 1,000 exajoules per year, there would still be a 50 year supply of energy. How much more fossil fuel can be extracted from unproven reserves is anybody’s guess, but it is a safe bet that twice as much more is available, meaning there’s at least another century worth of fossil fuel even if we used nothing else to power civilization.

The benefits of abundant cheap energy are obvious: prosperity and voluntary population stabilization. In the decades to come, other forms of energy will also be further developed. If hydroelectric power doubles, while nuclear power and renewables both go up by an order of magnitude, the three together would provide 636 exajoules of power per year. Under that scenario, fossil fuel use could remain near current levels, and total global energy production would still double to 1,000 exajoules.

What is impossible, however, is for renewables alone to achieve this level of growth. To begin with, more than half of renewable energy today comes from biofuel and biomass, which – and this is yet another irony alert – is already wreaking havoc across the tropics as hundreds of thousands square miles of rainforest are incinerated to make room for cane ethanol and palm oil plantations. And then there are the minerals required for the wind turbine towers, the silicon photovoltaics, and the billions of megawatt-hours of battery farm capacity. Where are the Malthusians when you need them?

Humanity can adapt to climate change, if there is sufficient prosperity and political will. We are already on the brink of commercializing innovations to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. Should atmospheric CO2 be the horrific pollutant that so many claim it to be, it can be removed from the atmosphere and converted into fuel to drive our trucks around.

Until that time, fossil fuel isn’t going anywhere.

References on CO2 conversion:

How to turn carbon dioxide into fuel | Carbon Engineering

Artificial photosynthesis turns CO2 into sustainable fuel | Freethink

Recycling CO2 into fuels – Dimensional Energy

Solar Powered Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Conversion

Turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Stanford engineers create a catalyst that can turn carbon dioxide into gasoline 1,000 times more efficiently

Breakthrough in converting carbon dioxide into fuel using solar energy

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.