Tag Archive for: environmentalists

Green Bureaucrats Are Destroying California’s Ecosystems

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California’s political elite consider themselves, and the state they control, to be the most environmentally enlightened in the world. They’re not. Well intentioned but misguided policies, combined with hidden agenda from special interests using environmentalism as cover, have resulted in “environmentalism” often causing more harm than good to the environment.

Some environmentalist policies that might otherwise be obviously suspect are justified in the name of combatting climate change. The prime example of this is the hundreds of billions Californians are spending to convert the electricity grid to “renewable” energy. If it weren’t for their zero emissions claim, nobody would endorse carpeting the land with thousands of square miles of wind turbines, or hundreds of square miles of photovoltaic arrays.

But even if the climate emergency narrative is accepted, does it matter if the consequences to the environment from developing “renewables” is as bad, or worse, than any realistic climate crisis that we’re likely to confront in the next several decades? What is the long-term cost to the environment of doubling or tripling the amount of electricity generated in California, in order to convert the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors of the economy to use 100 percent electrical energy? What would the environmental cost be to accomplish this only using wind and solar energy technologies, meaning California’s existing wind and solar capacity would have to increase at least ten-fold?

The environmental cost of California’s determination to expand wind and solar capacity is already felt around the world, in poorly managed mining operations all over the world where desperately poor workers toil amid appalling toxicity. And the environmental price, even at one-tenth scale, has not begun to be paid in full.

How do Californians intend to recycle and replace these renewable energy assets, the solar panels and inverters, the turbine rotors and blades, the multiple gigawatt arrays of stationary storage batteries, along with millions of decommissioned electric vehicle batteries? Will they export disposal of these spent systems to further foul the rest of the world, as they have already exported the environmental consequences of producing them?

Exporting the consequences of environmentalist edicts doesn’t end with renewables. The supposedly forbidden energy technologies also leave their mark. Californians still derive 45 percent of their total raw energy inputs from petroleum, nearly all of it for transportation. But California imports 75 percent of this petroleum, despite sitting on some of the most plentiful reserves of gas and oil in the world. But rather than permit additional extraction of oil and gas, which would only be allowed under the most state-of-the-art environmental safeguards anywhere on earth, Californians are content to foul the Orinoco watershed in Venezuela, along with estuaries in Nigeria and rainforests in Ecuador, and other places on this fragile planet where virtually no environmental safeguards exist.

Right here inside California, environmentalist policies wreak environmental havoc. The destruction of California’s forests is the prime example. Thanks to environmentalists, the timber industry in California has been nearly driven completely out of business. California’s annual timber harvest today is less than one quarter what it was as recently as the 1990s. That wouldn’t be a catastrophe, if it weren’t for the fact that at the same time, Californians have become extremely adept at preventing and extinguishing wildfires, or, at the same time, environmental regulations have made it nearly impossible to do controlled burns, mechanical thinning of undergrowth, or graze livestock in the forests.

The infernos that have driven thousands of Californians from their homes and immolated thousands of square miles of forest in recent years are not primarily a consequence of “climate change.” Drought conditions and high summer temperatures are a factor, but the truly unprecedented hazard causing these superfires is the fact that, thanks to environmentalists, California’s forests are tinderboxes, with trees that are on average at least five times as dense as they’ve been for millennia, along with overgrown underbrush that small, natural fires used to keep in check. If superfires leave California’s forests obliterated beyond anything every thrown at them in the last 20 million years, don’t blame “climate change.” Blame environmentalism ran amok. Blame the litigators and legislators that created the tinderbox.

California’s rivers are another example of environmentalist stupidity, contagious by virtue of being emotionally compelling, and empowered by many green nonprofits whose entire business model depends on conflict to rally the small grassroots donors, and litigation to reap the big settlements. As humanity faces a global food crisis, the environmentalist lawsuit machine grinds on, stopping new water projects, and forcing existing reservoirs to reserve their water for summertime releases, even in drought years when historically, these rivers ran nearly dry.

If California’s politicians weren’t relying on biased studies, with their prearranged and paid-for conclusions, they would pay honest attention to many questions that as it is, only farmers and anglers are asking. Don’t many river ecosystems in California rely on summertime runoff to decline to a trickle, so the parasites in the river that kill fish will nearly die off instead of thrive and multiply? Aren’t there nonnative fish swimming in most of these rivers today, and aren’t they the primary source of endangerment to many of the native fish? Why are we protecting striped bass populations, when these nonnative fish prey on our cherished salmon?

Questions abound. Isn’t it possible to create new weirs, forebays and filters well upstream from the aqueduct intakes in order to minimize fish that get caught in the pumps and killed? Can’t we build more fish hatcheries to replenish the native fish populations? Why don’t we invest in better wastewater treatment, so it won’t be necessary to send additional millions of acre feet through the Sacramento Delta and into the San Francisco Bay every year, just to dilute and drive out nitrogen from inadequately treated outfall?

These policies, either debatable in the case of renewables and river flow, or clearly destructive in the case of forest management, are epochal in their impact. Decimating habitat to source raw materials for extremely resource inefficient renewables, which consume thousands of square miles. Incinerating entire forests beyond recovery, because fire suppression wasn’t balanced with other means of managing overgrowth.

Another consequence of environmentalism ran amok in California is the cost of living. It’s not news that California’s environmentalist bureaucrats have all but destroyed the state’s economy. In this huge and nearly empty state, only five percent urbanized, they’ve cordoned off the cities to protect open space, creating a shortage of land to build homes. And where’s the expert study correctly implicating the heat island impact of paved over urban infill, with rationed water and reduced trees and landscaping?

Environmentalists have blocked investment in new and upgraded energy, water, or transportation infrastructure, which further restricts the supply of new housing and makes all of those necessities more expensive. They’re squeezing out the energy industry despite California sitting on billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. They’ve nearly destroyed California’s once robust timber industry. All of this comes at tremendous economic cost, all of which is regressive.

It isn’t unreasonable to wonder why we can’t have spacious suburbs, which even if ten million new residents moved in, wouldn’t consume more than a fraction of the land currently earmarked for wind farms and solar farms. Exurban and low density suburban environments have ecosystems as well, as anyone observing the hawks and foxes, the vultures and coyotes, the racoons, rabbits, Canadian geese, seagulls, crows and possums, who own the night, own the skies, and own the vacant fields and riparian corridors in every neighborhood with undeveloped parcels. Let them be. We can expand out as well as up and in.

For decades, environmentalists have defined California’s policies affecting urban growth, housing, transportation, housing, forest management, water infrastructure and management, and energy development. But they’re not always right. All too often, they are the destroyers, instead of the protectors.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Libertarians and Public Infrastructure

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Shane Hazel is the most famous libertarian in America. Now known as “The man who cost Republicans the U.S. Senate,” Hazel achieved his instant national fame, or infamy, depending on who you ask, by running as a Libertarian last November against David Perdue and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. Hazel earned 2.3 percent of the vote, which threw into a runoff the race that Perdue had come within 0.3 percent of winning. Perdue lost the runoff, and the rest is history.

In defeat, Hazel scored a remarkable victory. He served notice to Republicans that if their congressional voting record is comparable to liberal democrats, and Perdue’s was, they’ll get knocked off by a third party candidate that promises to uphold the U.S. Constitution. That’s a tough lesson.

If your preference is to reform the Republican party from the inside, thus preserving its viability against an even more dangerous Democratic party, it’s hard to accept the decision by Libertarians to run candidates in close races. Hazel appeared to rub it in when Reason quoted him saying “Give me your tears. They are delicious.” In response, in several recent articles I referenced Hazel, in unflattering terms, as a prime example of how Libertarians are enabling Democrat victories.

These criticisms, directed at Libertarians in general, and Hazel in particular, earned me an invitation from Hazel to appear on his podcast. We spoke a few days later, on February 25. During an 81 minute back-and-forth, two things became clear to me. First, for all his apparent bombast, Hazel is a sincere man, whose political activism is inspired by deeply held beliefs. To make this observation has consequences. Hazel cannot be dismissed merely as a spoiler. He has serious intentions and a productive way forward is to have a serious conversation.

The second take-away from talking at length with Hazel was that although we shared something very fundamental in common – love for our country and respect for its constitution – on matters of policy there areas of agreement, such as 2nd amendment rights, but also areas where a lot of further discussion is warranted.

One of those areas, which in the online discussion with Hazel I described “as a flashpoint philosophically because what would it mean if we didn’t have them,” is the existence of public utilities. This is a good place to start an ongoing debate with Libertarians, because brings the issue of public and private space into sharp relief and offers concrete examples.

California’s water project, one of the biggest water infrastructure projects ever built, is a timely example. Built primarily back in the 1950s and 1960s at a cost, in 2021 dollars, that is unimaginably cheap, this complex of dams and aqueducts moves millions of acre feet from snow watered reservoirs in Northern California to cities and farms in Southern California. Without the California Water Project, the urban megapolises of the San Francisco Bay Area and all of coastal Southern California including Los Angeles and San Diego would not exist, nor would millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys.

Notwithstanding that many critics of California’s contemporary politics would be thrilled if the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles did not exist, the California Water Project is a massive public work, which, like America’s interstate highway system, and most major airports, was constructed with taxpayer funding and enables millions of people to fly, drive, and drink water. Are public works the best way for a society to sustain urban civilization?

To explore this question, set aside the notion that urban civilization is unsustainable. It’s here. While one model of the future might see a benefit in existing cities becoming less densely populated instead of even more densely populated, short of apocalyptic disaster scenarios, cities will remain, and the millions that live in them will require energy, water, and transportation conduits.

In California, attempts to expand water infrastructure, or even maintain what we’ve got, are met with opposition from two sources: powerful environmentalist pressure groups, and anti-tax activists, many of them libertarians.

The Battle for Desalination

Taking water from the ocean and turning it into fresh water is a proven way to guarantee an uninterruptible supply of water in an arid region. From Saudi Arabia and Israel to Singapore and Australia, desalination plants around the world are already producing billions of tons of fresh water every year. California’s southern coastal cities, situated in drought prone areas, could benefit from desalination plants.

In a rare display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.

Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed ecosystems upstream.

Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.

Water supply resiliency is not merely dependent on weather. Even if a Sierra snowpack reliably forms winter after winter for the next several decades, residents of the Los Angeles Basin still depend on three aging canals, precarious ribbons that each stretch for hundreds of miles. Earthquakes, terrorism, or other disasters could shut them down indefinitely. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in California’s Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct.

A Libertarian Makes the Case for Desalination

In a recent book “Winning the Water Wars,” published in 2020 by the Pacific Research Institute, author Steven Greenhut concludes the solution to California’s water challenges is to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that embraces abundance, or as he puts it “feeding more water into the plumbing.” He writes: “In addition to building more surface and groundwater storage facilities, California can deal with its water problems by building ocean desalination plants and increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.” If Greenhut, who talked with countless experts while researching his book, and who is a confirmed libertarian, can support the economics of public and private investment in desalination, anyone can.

A series of California Policy Center reports in 2018 expand on the concept of water abundance. Part two of the report, “How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion,” surveys existing investments in desalination and wastewater reuse and comes up with the following capital budget: $7.5 billion to build the treatment plants to annually recover and perpetually reuse the 1.0 million acre feet of wastewater that currently is still treated and released into the Pacific Ocean. Another $15 billion to build desalination plants with a combined capacity of another 1.0 million acre feet per year. And $7.5 billion to upgrade and optimize the capacity to capture runoff, mitigate the capacious aquifers beneath the City of Los Angeles, and use them all for water storage.

This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians. There are 5.1 million households in the three counties that would benefit from this scheme – Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. A $30 billion capital improvement bond would cost each household $384 per year. If revenue bonds were to pass half the cost to ratepayers – a reasonable burden that would bring even desalinated water down to an affordable consumer price – the general obligation bonds would only add new taxes of $192 to each household. Debt like this is referred to as “good debt,” because it yields tangible and lasting benefits to taxpayers. “Bad debt,” by contrast, is the $100 billion or so that would be necessary to complete California’s proposed “bullet train,” a nearly useless make-work project that will be obsolete before it’s even done.

Is There a Practical Alternative to Public Utilities and Public Works?

Opponents to public works correctly point out that the use of eminent domain to acquire the right-of-way for power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors is a violation of property rights. But these objections, to be constructive, have to answer the inevitable question they raise: How are we going to build power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors, if we don’t authorize the government to implement eminent domain to compel recalcitrant property owners to sell?

Principled opposition to eminent domain, and principled opposition to using public funds, makes sense if it the process is abused. Somewhere between an aqueduct that must exist to prevent millions of people from dying of thirst, and a clear abuse of power taking the form of acquiring and demolishing an established residential neighborhood to enable private, subsidized developers to come in and build high rises, a line is crossed. But the challenge should be finding that line, not condemning any form of eminent domain, or any publicly funded infrastructure.

Establishing adequate infrastructure to support urban civilization should rely on private interests when possible, although it is important to recognize that corruption and waste can also infect a private corporation. Instead of fighting public matching funds on principle, since these funds are necessary in order to make infrastructure investments financially viable for private civil engineering firms, why not fight the regulatory burdens, the environmentalist pressure groups, and the litigators, who are a big reason why these projects cost so much?

The biggest impediment to Californians achieving water abundance, along with energy abundance and abundant, affordable housing, are “environmentalist” pressure groups that purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment. These groups have tied infrastructure development and housing development in California up in knots for decades. They should be getting no help from libertarian tax-fighting groups, but they are.

There are 40 million Californians now living in a state with public infrastructure sufficient for a state of 20 million people. They are living off assets that were constructed two generations ago, and attempts to expand or upgrade the conveyances that make urban life possible are met with blistering opposition from environmentalists, abetted by libertarian tax fighters. Resilience is gone from the system, and the only solution policymakers can offer is rationing of everything, monitored by big tech. That is the toxic byproduct of this ideological purity. The cure is worse than the disease.

What Californians have been living with for decades is coming to America.  It is accurate to say that most Republicans have been complicit in the rollout of endless new regulations and unsustainable public boondoggles. The solution, however, cannot simply be neglect. A policy agenda that walks away from public works because they violate libertarian principles must offer a viable alternative. Shane Hazel, as his political aspirations migrate from U.S. Senator to Governor of Georgia, is invited to present alternatives. Specificity is encouraged.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests

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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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