This is the autopsy of the unreasonable, sometimes insane, Green policies killing California. And a warning of what’s next for America, a green old deal.
For 15,000 years, millions of human beings migrated to California. It was God’s Best Green Deal, a land of spectacular natural beauty and weather. California was also the American Dream of boundless resources and opportunity.
God’s Nature, including human nature, isn’t good enough for environmentalist utopians. Thanks to them, the best of times has become the worst of times. Millions of Californians go elsewhere to pursue life, liberty, property, and happiness.
From 1992 to 2018, California lost a net 4.2 million people to other American states. From 1990 to 2012, California lost nearly 1 million manufacturing jobs. That’s nearly half, 40 percent, of all manufacturing jobs.
Similarly, industrial employment plunged by 60 percent from 2005 to 2015. Two-thirds of the aerospace industry that sent the United States to the moon and won the Cold War has gone since 1990.
In short, costly environmental policies impoverished Californians and drove them out of jobs and out of state. California has one party, a very green Democratic Party, which creates poverty, homelessness, taxes, spending, and regulations.
California’s “imperfect” nature was always there. In geologic time, there were sun spots, magnetic fields, asteroids, volcanoes, earthquakes, glaciers, and floods that massively changed the planet without any help from humans.
For millennia, oil bubbled up off the coast of Santa Barbara. Burning chaparral blocked clear views of the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles. Long droughts and massive floods waxed and waned in the Central Valley. In wet years, the waters of the Sacramento River, greater than the mighty Colorado, turned the Central Valley into an inland sea. Plentiful northern redwood, oak, and pine forests survived the naturally recurring fires that cleaned out underbrush as well as dead and pest-infected trees.
Only a few got excited about such realities of nature. As both subduers and stewards of the Earth, Californians learned to live with nature and themselves. Native Americans set fires removing competing trees and brush, and giant sequoia redwoods flourished. Spaniards and Mexicans herded hundreds of thousands of cows. The cows brought high nutrition, tallow, hides, and bad smells. Just as atmospheric rivers scour the earth, so did gold miners, who flushed gold from rocks and sand. Loggers brought highly valued redwood to market.
For nearly a century, California visionaries followed the lead of the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Romans, and Nabataeans as well as the Aztecs before them. C.R. Rockwood, William Mulholland, Michael O’Shaughnessy, Gov. Pat Brown, and Gov. Ronald Reagan built dams and aqueducts to capture and store water to bring water to San Francisco and Los Angeles and to the Imperial and Central valleys. Dams also provided flood protection and generated hydroelectricity “too cheap to meter.” Californians built jets, rockets, and missiles that noisily broke sound barriers and kept the United States free.
The New Left leader Jerry Brown, 1.0 and 2.0, Gray Davis and Gavin Newsom, and compliant Republicans Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger decided they could do better than God and a free people. These eco-gods demanded that air, water, and land be made cleaner than God Himself made them. Human habitat—private property—had to give way to the needs of fish and wildlife. The politicos halted humans’ “taking” water, “diverting” it, from fish.
In pursuing eco-utopia, deep state environmentalists often appear rather silly, even stupid. Yet they are deadly serious. They have to be to destroy California, once the world’s happiest place.
Consider the California cow. For long years, vegetarians loudly deplored meat and those who ate it. Now the California Air Resources Board is at war with milk and meat. They say cow farts, gases, are appalling dangers to the atmosphere of planet Earth.
While members of the Air Board complain about gaseous odors, the Water Resources Control Board is taking action against the dreaded enemy—cattle manure. Their allies, the Center for Biodiversity and its comrades, have no problem with free-range buffalo, deer, and chickens. Free-range cattle belch, salivate, defecate, and stomp on the habitat of eco-sanctified species.
Turtles, fairy shrimp, and other wildlife have coexisted with cattle for 300 years or so. Nonetheless, eco-warriors have convicted grazing cattle of a genocidal holocaust. They blame cows for killing all manner of species and destroying their habitat: fairy shrimp, desert tortoises, willow flycatchers, salmon, and many others. Only the Gestapo, so few, desecrate so many. The cow is oblivious to the penalties for its sins, but the rancher is not.
Environmentalists demand an end to the lawful federal grazing allotments and historic land grants. Ending grazing threatens the lawful property and livelihoods of ranch families whose cows, one cow on one acre at a time, are blamed for destroying all manner of wildlife.
Then there’s California’s war on all things plastic—bottles, bags, and straws—which shows its Lilliputian desperation to save the planet. California environmentalists are desperate to save the “fragile” 187-quintillion-gallon Pacific Ocean from overflowing with plastic. And the 100-million-acre California must not run out of spaces to put trash in landfills.
California splurges tens of billions of dollars’ worth (at a conservative $100 an acre-foot) of precious fresh water to save handfuls of delta smelt. It “restores” or creates salmon runs where salmon never ran before. Farmers call it a manmade drought. California sends half of its precious fresh water to the Pacific Ocean in a normal year and 90 percent during atmospheric river storms.
The Deadly Serious
Environmental authorities act as police, prosecutors, juries, and judges. They do not yet conduct executions, but they do ruthlessly assassinate countless characters and livelihoods. They intimidate cows and silence critics. Environmental authorities defame business owners, accusing them of intentionally poisoning air, water, and land.Fines, jail time, and costly regulations have driven tens of thousands of the smallest mom-and-pop enterprises (dry cleaners, body shops, independent gas stations) out of business. Costing owners years and millions to decontaminate, regulators have closed down thousands of leaking underground gasoline storage tanks. Few family-owned, independent gasoline stations remain. They once competed with Big Oil on gasoline prices.
Eco-zealots first terrify math- and science-illiterate citizens (victims of California’s public schools) about environmental causes of cancer and birth defects. They pluck the heartstrings of animal lovers about endangered cuddly critters. And then the eco-politicos build authoritarian bureaucracies. There, public “servants” order all Californians, convicted without due process, to conform to their delusions of an eco-utopia.
California demands that all city and county peace officers not only lock up criminals but also always be on the lookout for carcinogenic materials. California’s Proposition 65 “has determined” there are a thousand or so chemicals causing cancer and deforming and killing babies. (Compare that with about 200,000 abortions in California per year.) California trains tens of thousands of cops and firefighters to respond rapidly to any remotely imaginable hazardous waste incident—sometimes merely spilled milk. Others demand to know what’s under your sink and in your bathroom.
The California Penal Code grants the same armed powers as police officers have to state public employees who police food, drugs, and chemicals. California authorizes them to surveil, investigate, and arrest violators of the pettiest to the most serious regulations. Often, environmental laws and regulations are impossible to understand, let alone obey. Nonetheless, the fines, penalties, and takings of liberty and property are endless.
The California Department of Justice under California law and regulations enforced by a succession of attorneys general—e.g., John Van de Kamp, Kamala Harris, Xavier Becerra, and Rob Bonta—has prosecuted thousands of violators out of likely millions of guilty Californians. The department’s Bureau of Environmental Justice pledges “to protect the most vulnerable, children, the elderly and pregnant women, and to advance environmental justice for communities shouldering the heaviest pollution burdens.” How godly is that?
California Environmental Law
For the residents of California, the most authoritarian elements of its Green Regime are the California Endangered Species Act, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65), and the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).These four and their multiplying offspring greatly enrich bureaucrats, environmental consultants, green industries, lawyers, and crony capitalists. This environmental-industrial complex does not create jobs and wealth as it claims. It destroys economic growth, wealth, and jobs.
The environmentalists have impoverished millions of Californians. Residents suffer under some of the nation’s highest environmentally driven costs of living for housing, electricity, gasoline, water, air, and land. Adult children live in their parents’ homes. Both flee when they can.
In 1970, California enacted the Endangered Species Act to protect all native species threatened with extinction and to preserve their habitats. Under eco-ethics, every deplorable human is commanded to care about nobler species such as the roadkill scavenger (the California condor) and the sacred salmon, delta smelt, kangaroo rat, elderberry beetle, Delhi Sands fly, spotted owl, desert tortoise, ad infinitum.
In time, the ESA zealots may recover the unicorn, lost in ancient fables, or more likely a murderous epidemic of the Black Plague, the 1918 flu, or smallpox.
The lawyer-friendly CEQA allows virtually anyone (NIMBY) to file endless, duplicative, extortionist lawsuits to stop or downsize projects. CEQA requires public agencies to analyze every imaginable environmental impact (aesthetic, agricultural, air, biological, cultural, geological, soil) of any proposed project. To gain approval, builders must mitigate those impacts.
CEQA routinely extorts outrageous concessions, green blackmail, “mitigations,” of cash as well as land and project modifications from property owners. Only the very wealthy or large corporations can afford the consultants and lawyers required to defend oneself. Governments routinely grant exemptions for crony capitalist friends and privileged projects, e.g., sports stadiums, solar and wind projects, “bullet” trains, and subways.
CEQA is insidious, opposing every new project. CEQA limits economic growth, and it stops or delays vital housing, roads, bridges, dams, canals, and refineries. CEQA delays efforts to clear away kindling, such as dead or dying trees and brush, to prevent catastrophic firestorms. In 2018 alone, policies such as these killed 88 people in Paradise, California, and statewide destroyed 10,000 homes, businesses, and cars.
Proposition 65 conducts a total war on all chemicals. California’s actual conditions of human health and safety have never been those of Bhopal’s toxic chemical disaster or Chernobyl’s uncontained nuclear meltdown. Unreal, but usefully scary.
Prop 65 requires warning labels and regulations on nearly 1,000 chemicals. All are presumed guilty for causing cancer or birth defects. The creators of Prop 65, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, hate capitalism more than they hate chemicals. They have said so.
National leftists, the pro-Soviet Institute for Policy Studies, the Institute for Food Development Policy, and the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) joined the campaign. A top PAN leader, Michael Picker, was a top aide to Gov. Jerry Brown and the president of the California Public Utilities Commission. The commission sought to close down California’s last nuclear power plant. The commission approves power blackouts to prevent wildfires.
Yet the American Cancer Society says California lacks a scientific basis for cancer warnings on every chemical on its list. Cancer clusters, associations, correlations, and complaints do not prove or disprove causes. There are different causes for 100 different cancers. California’s game is not science, it is targeting virtually every economic, i.e., capitalist, endeavor in California from peanut butter to nail polish.
Carbon is the prime target. Businesses buy and sell, trade, these emission allowances. Like Soviet five-year plans, “cap and trade” demands quotas. Emissions are ordered to decline every year. It is a phony market pretending to create a market for the supply and demand of greenhouse gases.
