Tag Archive for: California environmentalists

Environmentalists Increase Influence on Local Governments

In less than a year, three Orange County cities will be in the utility business. Fullerton, Costa Mesa, and Irvine have created a joint powers authority to purchase and distribute electricity to households and businesses in those cities, under what’s known as “community choice aggregation.”

It’s difficult to imagine how this model will result in lower electricity bills, although that’s one of the ways this program was sold to local elected officials who approved the plan. Southern California Edison will still be the primary supplier of electricity and will still manage the distribution. Since SCE only generates 19 percent of the power it distributes to customers, and purchases the other 89 percent, the costs to customers will only go down if this new joint powers authority outperforms SCE in their procurement efforts enough to offset the cost of the new bureaucracy.

As reported by the Orange County Register, “Unbound by long-term contracts many utilities hold, they can adjust the mix to take advantage of lower costs or to favor renewable energy — or both. Additionally, they can be more aggressive than private utilities in encouraging and developing clean local power generation and battery storage.” But which is it? Saving money? Or going green?

The problem with newly formed independent, city owned utilities being “more aggressive than private utilities” in developing clean renewable sources of energy is the existing state mandates are already the most aggressive in the nation, if not the world. California has mandated that public utilities deliver 100 percent carbon-free power by 2045. And SCE’s well on its way. In their 2019 Annual Report they claim they already deliver 48 percent carbon-free power to their customers.

There is a cost for “carbon-free power.” According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California’s residential rates for electricity in October 2020 were 20.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to a national average of 13.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas, residents only pay 11.9 cents/KWh, in Utah, 10.3 cents/KWh. Even progressive Oregon manages to keep rates lower than the national average, at 11.37/KWh.

By now most rational observers realize that even if global warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, the U.S. is only responsible for 15 percent of that, and California’s share is less than 2 percent. Readers of the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy know that for everyone on earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans, global energy production would have to more than double, and that renewables in 2020 accounted for less than 4 percent of all global energy production. This is why China, India, and every other rising economy in the world is developing additional sources of gas, oil and coal as fast as they can, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

So why are California’s legislators hell-bent on developing renewables?

The most charitable answer to this question is their desire to make California an example of environmental sustainability for the world to follow, and a belief that innovations pioneered in California will be emulated worldwide, delivering fantastic profits to Californian entrepreneurs at the same time as the planet is saved.

The problem with this noble explanation is that to accomplish these high minded objectives, California has been turned into an expensive laboratory, with 40 million captive subjects. While policies that elevate costs for electricity benefit public utilities and tech entrepreneurs, millions of ordinary Californians are driven into poverty. And this ideal, to make California a green beacon for humanity, finds expensive expression in far more than just electricity.

The green lobby in California has not only made electricity barely affordable for low and middle income households, but they have declared war on natural gas. In a state where electricity is four times as expensive as natural gas on an energy-equivalent basis, and in a nation where natural gas has never been as cheap or abundant as it is today, the movement to ban natural gas quietly gathers momentum.

As of November 2020, thirty-nine California cities have already enacted new ordinances limiting natural gas in new construction. The California Energy Commission is considering enacting a statewide ban effective in 2022. With a mandate already in place that requires new vehicle sales to be all-electric by 2035, it is clear that policymakers are determined to turn California into an all-electric, carbon-free state before anyone else, no matter what the cost.

This goal of a carbon-free society in California is also evident in housing policies, based on the theory that the denser California’s urban areas become, the less need for energy to be spent on transportation. While this theory rests on dubious foundations, it is already the primary rationale for countless local and state restrictions on development, which in turn is the primary reason housing is unaffordable in California.

Open land along freeway corridors is plentiful in California, but when attempts to develop it are mired in prohibitively expensive regulations and endless litigation, the only logical place to increase housing stock is within existing cities. The efforts in Orange County by local activists to advocate for this are typical. One such activist organization, People for Housing, announces on their website “Cities that are now on a new path.” They claim recent victories for their city council candidates in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and Tustin.

One of the goals of these local housing advocates, echoed in pending state legislation such as Assembly Bill 68, passed in 2019, is to stimulate a “backyard building boom,” whereby homeowners can build new smaller homes in their backyards. Additional state legislation abounds, all of it designed to densify neighborhoods, and absolutely none of it designed to facilitate construction of new single family neighborhoods on open land. Meanwhile, residents who relied on zoning laws to preserve the spacious ambience of their suburbs are stigmatized as NIMBYs, racists, and “deniers.”

There is no effective opposition to California’s drive to confine its residents to existing cities, nor to challenge the move to a carbon-free, all-electric society. Both goals are impractical and extremely expensive. Shorn of the supposedly enlightened motivations behind these goals, their impact is explicitly misanthropic, and it hurts everyone.

The influence of environmental activists is the reason for California’s unaffordable cost-of-living. It is a form of economic oppression, justified on environmental grounds, but also a convenient cover for opportunistic special interests. Along with the high tech industry, the clean power industry, public utilities, real estate investors, and subsidized housing developers, California’s powerful public sector unions are big winners.

With every new regulation, and every time a private enterprise is coopted by a new government agency, more jobs are created in the public sector. This translates into more dues paying union members which results in more political spending by union leadership on the candidates of their choice. At the same time, whenever environmentalist activists block public spending on new infrastructure that might enable more suburban development, that money is redirected to pay and benefit increases for public sector workers.

There is a tremendous symbiosis between California’s economic elite, its environmentalist activists and their allies in the social justice movement, and the unionized public sector. But despite all the rhetoric about helping the disadvantaged, the biggest victims are those Californians who can least afford to fund the bleeding edge.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

What happened among California’s tall stands of Redwood and Ponderosa Pine also happened in its extensive chaparral. Fire suppression along with too many environmentalist-inspired bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.

In 2009, after huge blazes wiped out homes and forced thousands to evacuate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich observed: “The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today.”

In 2014, Republican members of Congress tried again to reduce the bureaucracy associated with “hazardous fuel projects” that thin out overgrown forests. True to form, the bill got nowhere thanks to environmental lobbyists who worried it would undermine the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires thorough impact assessments ahead of government decisions on public lands.

In a blistering report published in the California Globe on how environmentalists have destroyed California’s forests, investigative journalist Katy Grimes interviewed Representative Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents communities in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. McClintock has worked for years to reform NEPA and other barriers to responsible forest management.

“The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency,” McClintock told Grimes. “Up until the mid-1970s, we managed our national forests according to well-established and time-tested forest management practices. But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect. Ponderous, Byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to save the environment. The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”

But these zealots have not protected the forests. They have destroyed them. The consequences are far-reaching.

Decimating the Timber Industry, Disrupting the Ecosystem

Few people, including the experts, bother to point out how overgrown forests reduce the water supply. But when watersheds are choked with dense underbrush competing for moisture, precipitation and runoff cannot replenish groundwater aquifers or fill up reservoirs. Instead, it’s immediately soaked up by the trees and brush. Without clearing and controlled burns, the overgrown foliage dies anyway.

A new activist organization in California, the “California Water for Food and People Movement,” created a Facebook group for people living in the hellscape created by misguided environmentalist zealotry. Comments and posts from long-time residents of the Sierra foothills, where fires have exploded in recent years, yield eyewitness testimony to how environmentalist restrictions on forest management have gone horribly wrong. Examples:

“I’m 70, and I remember controlled burns, logging, and open grazing.”

“With the rainy season just ahead, the aftermath of the Creek Fire will challenge our water systems for years to come. Erosion will send toxic debris and sediment cascading into streams, rivers, and reservoirs, reducing their capacity to carry and hold water. Dirty air, dirty water, and the opposite of environmentalism are on full display right now, brought to us by the environmental posers who will no doubt use this crisis to unleash a barrage of ‘climate change did it’ articles.”

“Many thanks to Sierra Club and other environmental groups. You shut down logging/brush removal and had a ‘don’t touch’ approach to our forests. You shut down access roads and let them get overgrown, so now they can’t be used for fire suppression and emergency equipment. You fought ranchers for grazing, which helped keep the forest floors clean. You made fun of Trump when he said we need to rake the forest. Trust me these forest rakes and logging would have prevented the devastating fires we see now.”

The economics of responsible forest management, given the immensity of America’s western forests, requires profitable timber harvesting to play a role. But California has no commercial timber operations on state-owned land. And since 1990, when the environmentalist assault on California’s timber industry began in earnest, its timber industry has shrunk to half its former size. Reviving California’s timber industry, so the collective rate of harvest equals the collective rate of growth, would go a long way towards solving the problem of catastrophic fires.

Instead, California’s environmentalists only redouble their nonsense arguments. Expect these fires to justify even more “climate change” legislation that does nothing to clear the forests of overgrown tinder, and everything to clear the forests, and the chaparral, of people and towns.

Expect these fires to fuel a new round of legislation containing urban growth while mandating suburban densification, with increased rationing of energy and water.

Expect the “climate emergency” to accelerate in synergistic lockstep with the pandemic emergency and the anti-racism emergency. Expect all three of these emergencies to become issues of public health, thereby eliminating inconvenient constitutional roadblocks to swift action.

Misdirected Union Priorities

Meanwhile, tragically, expect California’s politically powerful firefighters’ union to do little or nothing to support the timber industry or rural inhabitants who don’t want to move into urban condos.

As Steve Greenhut explained in a recent column in the Orange County Register: “Frankly, union power drives state and local firefighting policies. The median compensation package for firefighters has topped $240,000 a year in some locales. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighters earn less, but their packages still total nearly $150,000 a year. The number of California firefighters who receive compensation packages above $500,000 a year is mind-blowing.”

No wonder firefighters are overwhelmed during California’s wildfire season. The state can’t afford to hire enough of them.

And when these firefighter unions could have been pushing for legislation to clear the forests back in 2019, where instead did their leftist leadership direct their activist efforts? They marched in solidarity with the striking United Teachers of Los Angeles. The teachers’ unions have done to California’s public schools what environmentalists have done to California’s forests.

If an honest history of California in the early 21st century is ever written, the verdict will be unequivocal. Forests that thrived in California for over 20 million years were allowed to become overgrown tinderboxes. And then, with stupefying ferocity, within the span of a few decades, they burned to the ground. Many of them never recovered.

This epic tragedy was the direct result of policies put in place by misguided environmentalist zealots, misinformed suckers who sent them money, and the litigators and lobbyists they hired, who laughed all the way to the bank.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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How California Can Do Its Part to Stop Sea Level Rise

California is a global leader in fighting climate change. California’s citizens consistently have supported cutting edge technologies to wean their state off fossil fuel and nuclear power, and are on track to be using 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. But is this enough? How else can Californians do their part? What more can they do to set a fine example to the rest of the world?

Clearly, more can be done. So why not flood California’s Great Central Valley, sequestering billions of gallons of ocean water that might otherwise be endangering coastlines around the world?

The feasibility of such an endeavor is hardly a pipe dream. One great dam, extending south from the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate, plumb into the mountainous ramparts of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco, would easily permit the establishment of a gigantic lake, over 1,000 feet deep, to extend from majestic Mt. Shasta in the north to the red rock Tehachapi Mountains far to the south. For nearly 500 miles from north to south, and 150 miles or more from east to west, this gigantic reservoir could absorb 100 percent of California’s precipitation and storm runoff for decades, slowing the rise of our expanding oceans.

At the same time, Californians can quickly harvest the “low-hanging fruit” of seawater sequestration, by flooding the Imperial Valley. Since much of the Imperial Valley is below sea level, all it would take would be a pipeline, siphoning water out of the ocean off the coastal enclave of La Jolla, crossing the mountains to dump it into the Salton Sea.

Side benefit! The shrinking Salton Sea would be revitalized. Additional side benefit! A trunk pipeline could, also with no energy input required, drain additional ocean water into Death Valley, which is also below sea level.

Sequestration, after all, is hardly a foreign concept to awakened scientists, especially in California, who, year after year, spend billions in taxpayers money to study ways to stop the rising seas. But instead of sequestering carbon dioxide in caves, why not sequester seawater in California’s Central Valley?

It shouldn’t cost that much, after all, since all that is needed is a single dam, four miles long and less than a half-mile high, sealing off the Golden Gate. It shouldn’t take that long, either. Opening back in 1937, the famed Golden Gate Bridge was built in three years. If Mt. Tamalpais is scraped off, along with most of the rest of the Marin Headlands, and bulldozed into the bay, surely this great work can also be completed within three, four years tops.

As for the cost, everyone knows that no cost is too great to stop the rising seas. Californians have experience spending vast amounts of money to fight climate change. They drive on pitted, dangerous, negligently inadequate roads in order to pay for “light rail” and a “bullet train.” They pay staggering rates for electricity and water in order to pay for “wind power,” and to “save the Delta Smelt.” Californians, apparently, have hundreds of billions to spend on such projects, because no cost is too great when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. It’s time to think big.

To assist with the cost, California’s many outspoken billionaires, nearly all of whom favor saving the planet by any means necessary, should also pay their “fair share” for the great sequestration. A statewide “climate emergency billionaire” tax could be assessed on 100 percent of their liquid assets (their fixed assets will be underwater), raising additional hundreds of billions of dollars.

The social justice element of this ambitious project might be troubling, since millions of “people of color” reside in California’s Central Valley. But not to worry, because the western portions of San Francisco and Marin County, along with the entire Silicon Valley, will also be inundated. This great migration will be a fantastic opportunity for California’s affluent coastal elites, many of them white “allies,” to link their fates with their disadvantaged counterparts, and to share in their hardships. Nobody will have “privilege,” and everyone will be heroes of the environment.

What about California’s agricultural industry? After all, California grows nearly all of America’s fruits and nuts, and even exports rice to China! But whatever agricultural bounty is lost can be offset by the biggest aquaculture experiment in the world. What Californians lose in fruits and nuts, they’ll gain in catfish and tilapia.

A true skeptic, perhaps even a “denier,” might correctly point out that filling California’s Central Valley with 1,000 feet of water would only cause the world’s oceans to drop by 1.5 inches. Filling the Imperial Valley and Death Valley might buy another inch. This sort of debate, however, should be silenced. We all have to do our part. We have to start somewhere. And since even now, the oceans are only rising by about one inch per decade, California’s brave sacrifice buys the planet about 20 years!

But where will all these Californians go, if nearly half the state’s population is displaced? Some of them could move to Los Angeles, a welcoming city that is, after all, already a magnet for the displaced of the world. What’s another 20 million newly arrived people for a “woke” population of wealthy liberals to support? Construct high rises in Brentwood and Beverly Hills in the backyards of the movie star mansions. Let’s embrace our density!

There’s an even bigger upside to the diaspora that California’s great new lake will cause. California’s displaced millions can also move to Nevada, where they will tip the political balance forever in that state as they vote for Democrats. These newly minted, fabulously enlightened policymakers can use their mega majority in Nevada to support yet another monumental step forward in the battle against rising seas—they can flood the Great Basin, allowing the people of America’s Intermountain West to also signal their illustrious virtue.

It is time for the spectacularly woke liberal voters of California to step up to save the planet from rising seas. Sequestration is an idea that’s time has come, because no price is too great, when the planet itself is in peril.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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