Friday, March 27, 2015

Articles: Pareto Speaks to Us About Environmentalism

Pareto Speaks to Us About Environmentalism

March 27, 2015

Vilfredo Pareto,
who died in 1923, was an Italian economist and sociologist. In the
spirit of Machiavelli, he developed theories concerning human belief and
the rise and fall of elites. His insights can be applied to explain
much about contemporary America. (See: The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology by Vilfredo Pareto)

Pareto
believed that men form their beliefs from emotion or sentiment and that
rational justifications for beliefs are constructed after the belief
has been subscribed to. In other words, the rational justification is
window dressing. Pareto also thought that men deceive themselves about
the origin of their beliefs, not recognizing that their beliefs are the
consequence of sentiment. Men claim, and believe, that their beliefs are
the result of rational thought.

Because
belief is emotional at its root, it is extremely difficult to make
ideological conversions by logical argument. Logical arguments won’t
work because the believer will mount a logical defense to every argument
and will be impervious to rebuttals. Successful ideological conversions
are made by using emotional tactics, such as applying psychological
pressure.

The religious group, the Moonies,
has been successful in recruiting new members by the technique of “Love
Bombing,” a term they invented. The technique is to lavish flattery,
affection, and attention on the prospective recruit. This emotional
technique is highly successful. Love Bombing is far more promising than
explaining Moonie theology to the typically youthful recruit.

Charles Manson recruited middle class youths into his criminal "Family" through the use of powerful emotional stimuli involving psychotropic drugs, promiscuous sex, and shared illegal acts.

Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heir of a wealthy family, was converted to the revolutionary beliefs of the Symbionese Liberation Army after being locked in a closet for weeks at a time under threat of death.

If
we examine belief in global warming, the believers claim scientific
justification for their belief. This is window dressing. The real
motivation is emotional. The scientific basis for global warming is
incredibly weak and has been powerfully attacked by various skeptics.
The scientific attacks from skeptics may have swayed weak believers, but
strong believers, including the Obama administration, have responded
with attacks on the integrity of the skeptics. For example the skeptics
are accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies, even though
there is little evidence of that.

Oddly, many of the fossil fuel companies profess to be concerned
about global warming and declare that they, too, are working to reduce
CO2 emissions. The executives of the fossil fuel companies fit into
Pareto’s theory of declining elites who become effete and too timid to
defend their privileges. Incredibly, fossil fuel companies give money to
organizations, such as the American Geophysical Union, or even the Sierra Club,
that attack the very right to exist of the fossil fuel companies.
Groups skeptical of global warming get little or nothing from fossil
fuel companies that are apparently too busy trying to appease their
deadly enemies.

What
is the emotional core of belief in global warming and why is the
scientific justification mainly window dressing? It’s actually fairly
obvious. The emotional core of the belief is fear of modern technology.

Global
warming is only the latest of a string of, doomsday scenarios,
justified by dubious scientific claims, dating back as far as the
1940’s. In 1948 two influential books were independently published. Our Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osbourne and The Road to Survival
by William Vogt. These books are considered to mark the start of the
many periodic environmental scares. The scares generally have a theme
that modern technology is damaging the ability of the Earth to support
mankind and that it is polluting the environment, trends aggravated by
reckless population growth. Stanford professor, Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, was published in 1968 and has sold 2 million copies. The book Limits to Growth
published in 1972 predicted, based on computer models, disasters due to
exhaustion of resources, increasing pollution and population growth.
During the last 60 years there have been dozens of major environmental scares.
Examples include projected shortages of food, oil and even water.
Pollution scares include arsenic, mercury, radon, chlorine, pesticides,
acid rain, etc.

These
scares have in common the theme that modern technology is backfiring.
The scares play to and promote this emotional belief. To many people,
technology is an object of suspicion and fear. There is romantic
nostalgia for an idealized simpler time in the past. For example, the
organic food movement basically advocates growing food by restricting
technology to that used prior to about 1930. This is based on the idea
that pesticides and synthetic fertilizer is harmful, a belief that is
scientifically not supportable. Plants don’t care whether they get
nitrogen from synthetic fertilizer or chicken manure. Pesticides used to
kill insects are not passed into the food product except in
microscopic, harmless quantities. The advocates of organic farming don’t
mention that half the world population would starve if their less
productive farming schemes were universally adopted.

If
you are highly fearful and confused by modern technology, then the
succession of environmental scares supports and fortifies your
worldview. However you will not, of course, say, or even think, that you
are puzzled and scared by the modern world. No, you will say that
scientific research has shown that much of modern technology is
dangerous and must be stopped. Ironically, the environmental movement
turns science and technology against science and technology.

The
scientific weakness of global warming science, and other environmental
science, is demonstrated more than anything else by the reaction of the
scientist and lay advocates to those who dare to raise objections to the
doomsday theories. Rather than meeting the objections with scientific
arguments, the critics are attacked and marginalized. This behavior is
not scientific, it an attempt to defend a dogma by lashing out at those
who dare to question the dogma.

When
Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish climate scientist and meteorologist,
joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an
organization skeptical concerning global warming, he was forced to
resign a week later due to abuse he received from the climate science
community. He said:
“I had not expected such an enormous world-wide pressure put on me from
a community that I have been close to all my active life.”

When the Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist a book that questioned much of the environmentalist canon, he was vilified in 11 pages of the Scientific American by such people as John Holdren, now Obama’s science advisor. Lomborg’s opponents in Denmark accused him of scientific dishonesty. Lomborg effectively defended himself and the attacks backfired, making Lomborg famous.

Numerous other examples of attacks against persons skeptical of the environmental cannon could be cited. Characteristically the attacks
are attempts to discredit and smear, not to engage in an honest debate.
Honest public debate on environmental issues is rare. The claim, often
repeated, that the doomsday claims of global warming are settled
science, is a claim intended to shut down debate. People with honest
scientific questions or objections are depicted as idiots who probably
think the Earth is flat.

It
may seem odd that scientists are emotionally fearful of modern
technology. However, attacking modern science and technology is the
stock in trade of environmental scientists. That is how they get
attention and funding. The global warming scare has been a bonanza for
climate scientists. Indisputably there are brilliant climate
scientists, but scientists from harder sciences are likely to view
climate scientists as second-rate scientists who give an excessive
amount of credibility to computer models that don’t work very well. As
population bomb man Paul Ehrlich said, “to err is human but to really
foul things up you need a computer.” He does not take his own advice,
since he is a supporter of computerized global warming doomsday
predictions. Climate scientists are seen to be opportunists, profiting
from poorly supported doomsday predictions.

How
should he global warming scare be combatted? The scientific theories
promoted by the global warming advocates are soft targets. Their science is lousy.
But critical scientific arguments are highly technical and only of use
in getting authoritative scientists to join the skeptical side. To
influence the vast majority of citizens, including non-specialist
scientists, emotional arguments are necessary. My suggestion would be to
paint a picture of a future when global warming promoters get what they
want and everyone else loses money, mobility, jobs, etc. Combine this
with authoritative scientists saying that global warming dogma is
scientifically flawed and you have a winning formula.

Norman Rogers is a volunteer Senior Policy Advisor for the Heartland Institute. He writes often about global warming.

Monday, March 16, 2015

The Scorching of California by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Winter 2015

Victor Davis Hanson

The Scorching of California

How Green extremists made a bad drought worse

Winter 2015

MICAH ALBERT/REDUX

The drought has threatened to turn large tracts of farmland into dust.

In mid-December, the first large storms in
three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow
will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year
drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In the 1970s, coastal
elites squelched California’s near-century-long commitment to building
dams, reservoirs, and canals, even as the Golden State’s population
ballooned. Court-ordered drainage of man-made lakes, meant to restore
fish to the 1,100-square-mile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, partly
caused central California’s reservoir water to dry up. Not content with
preventing construction of new water infrastructure, environmentalists
reverse-engineered existing projects to divert precious water away from
agriculture, privileging the needs of fish over the needs of people.
Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies,
had caused the current crisis.

Even as a fourth year of drought threatens the state, canal water
from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park keeps Silicon
Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area a verdant oasis. This parched
coastal mountain range would have depopulated long ago without the
infrastructure that an earlier, wiser generation built and that
latter-day regulators and environmentalists so casually deprecated. (See
“California’s Promethean Past,”
Summer 2013.) Gardens and lawns remain green in Palo Alto, San Mateo,
Cupertino, and San Francisco, where residents continue to benefit from
past investments in huge water transfers from inland mountains to the
coast. They will be the last to go dry.

I grew up in the central San Joaquin Valley
during the 1950s. In those days, some old-timers remembered with
fondness when the undammed Kings River’s wild, white water would gush
down into the sparsely populated valley. But most Californians never had
such nostalgia. Past generations accepted that California was a growing
state (with some 20 million people by 1970), that agriculture was its
premier industry, and that the state fed not just its own people but
millions across America and overseas. All of that required
redistribution of water—and thus dams, reservoirs, and irrigation
canals.

For 50 years, the state transferred surface water from northern
California to the Central Valley through the California State Water
Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Given these vast and
ambitious initiatives, Californians didn’t worry much about the
occasional one- or two-year drought or the steady growth in population.
The postwar, can-do mentality resulted in a brilliantly engineered water
system, far ahead of its time, that brought canal water daily from the
30 percent of the state where rain and snow were plentiful—mostly north
of Sacramento as well as from the Sierra Nevada Mountains—to the lower,
western, and warmer 70 percent of the state, where people preferred to
work, farm, and live.

Everyone seemed to benefit. Floods in northern California became a
thing of the past. The more than 40 major mountain reservoirs generated
clean hydroelectric power. New lakes offered recreation for millions
living in a once-arid state. Gravity-fed snowmelt was channeled into
irrigation canals, opening millions of new acres to farming and ending
reliance on pumping the aquifer. To most Californians, the irrigated,
fertile Central Valley seemed a natural occurrence, not an environmental
anomaly made possible only through the foresight of a now-forgotten
generation of engineers and hydrologists.

Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased
traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with
the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned
additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But
in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent
environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam
construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the
Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a
section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance
Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic
Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s,
the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest
man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have
stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for
30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double
what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as
difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert
contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established
reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze
California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.

All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned
about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico
that would help double the state’s population in just four decades, to
40 million. Had population growth remained static, perhaps California
could have lived with partially finished water projects. The state might
also have been able to restore the flow of scenic rivers from the
mountains to the sea, maintained a robust agribusiness sector, and even
survived a four- or five-year drought. But if California continues to
block new construction of the State Water Project as well as additions
to local and federal water-storage infrastructure, officials must halve
California’s population, or shut down the 5 million acres of irrigated
crops on the Central Valley’s west side, or cut back municipal water
usage in a way never before done in the United States.

When the drought began in autumn 2011, the
average Californian barely noticed. Mountain reservoirs remained full
throughout 2011 and much of 2012, thanks to ample rainfall in previous
years. Though rain and snowfall plunged to as much as 40 percent below
average in most inland counties, shortages affected only large
agribusiness conglomerates on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley—a
small group of corporate grandees with plenty of land and little public
sympathy.

During that first year of drought, quarrels over water
were mostly confined to farmers and environmentalists. Confident that
stored surface water in mountain reservoirs would remain plentiful, the
Greens insisted that the state continue to divert reservoir water away
from agricultural usage—at roughly the same rate as during pre-drought
years—in order to replenish rivers. In practical terms, however, the
diversions meant that substantial amounts of stored snowmelt were
released from mountain dams and allowed to flow freely to the Pacific
Ocean. Farmers called that wasted water; environmentalists called it a
return to a natural, preindustrial California. The Green dream was not
simply river restoration and beautification, however. Bay Area
environmentalists also believed that vastly increased freshwater inflows
would help oxygenate the San Francisco Delta, thereby enabling the
survival of the Delta smelt, a three-inch baitfish, while ensuring that
salmon could be reintroduced into the San Joaquin River watershed.

Farmers mostly lost these early diversion battles. After all, the
state’s reservoirs stood at or near capacity, previous wet years had
recharged valley aquifers, and conventional wisdom held that the drought
would probably end soon, anyway. Nevertheless, hand-painted protest
signs began sprouting along Interstate 5, amid a few abandoned almond
orchards, proclaiming a new “dust bowl” and condemning liberal Bay Area
officials, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Barbara
Boxer, for supporting the river diversions. In Fresno County, the
Consolidated Irrigation District and others stopped almost all surface
deliveries to their agricultural water users from the Pine Flat dam on
the Kings River reservoir. The water masters of the Kings River had
enough stored water at Pine Flat to keep the reservoir at mostly normal
levels. By cutting off deliveries to farmers, authorities had the luxury
of releasing water to refurbish the lower Kings River for habitat
restoration.

I experienced the effects of these policies firsthand. My property
contains a 130-year-old abandoned well that my great-great-grandparents
dug by hand and lined with tin pipe. Throughout 2012, the water table in
my front yard remained about 40 feet below the surface, and all through
the drought, the well proved a reliable barometer of changing
groundwater levels. No one likes paying irrigation taxes for surface
water not delivered, but local farmers shrugged, turned on their standby
pumps, and drew from the shallow aquifer. We got by during the
drought’s first year with only moderately elevated electricity bills.
Fifty miles to the west, however, farmers and agribusinesses on the
Central Valley’s west side resorted to drilling deeper, sometimes in
excess of 1,500 feet. Pumping brackish water from great depths is an
unsustainable way to irrigate millions of acres of valuable croplands.
The entire 5 million-acre west-side agricultural project that arose from
desert scrub didn’t exist before the early 1960s—precisely because the
region had neither an aquifer nor a water project to deliver surface
irrigation water from northern and eastern California.

As the drought continued, the political debate heated up. Farmers
reminded Bay Area Greens that they had no proof that the Delta smelt was
suffering from a lack of fresh river water. Equally likely culprits for
the fish’s plight were the more than 30 Bay Area and Stockton-area
municipalities that dump oxygen-depleted wastewater into the baitfish’s
habitat. The farmers noted the irony of using artificial reservoirs to
ensure supposedly “natural” year-round river flows for salmon and smelt.
Before the construction of California’s modern dams, Sierra snowmelts
didn’t necessarily ensure continually rushing rivers. Nineteenth-century
spring floods into the valley usually were followed by a depleted
late-summer Sierra snowpack and dry August river trickles. How odd,
farmers thought, that environmentalists opposed new dams and reservoirs
as “unnatural,” and yet counted on existing reservoir water to maintain a
dependable habitat for newly introduced salmon. Before the dams, nature
simply didn’t operate that way.

In the winter of 2012, the drought entered
its second year, but record-high agricultural commodity prices tempered
the farmers’ acrimony. Newly affluent customers in China and India—in
addition to wealthy Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean
consumers—fueled demand for premium California dairy products, wine,
nuts and dried fruits, fresh fruits and vegetables, beef, and cotton.
Raisin prices jumped from $900 per ton to more than $1,900 per ton. Some
almond growers became millionaires overnight. When the per-pound price
of nuts tripled, and new varieties of trees and new farming practices
bolstered production to well over 3,000 pounds per acre, a
once-“inefficient” family farmer with 40 acres could suddenly net $5,000
an acre. Given that harvesting almonds is mostly mechanized and
requires little, if any, manual labor, growers embarked on planting
sprees up and down the drought-stricken valley. If 40 acres could net
$200,000, large conglomerates of 5,000 acres or more might see profits
of $25 million annually. Pistachios and walnuts proved even more
lucrative. For the first time in a quarter-century, Central Valley
farmers saw the kind of prosperity associated with the Silicon and Napa
Valleys.

By 2013, however, with snowfall scant, some northern California
reservoirs had fallen far below normal levels. Farms on the Central
Valley’s eastern side—the ones with prior privileged access to local
irrigation districts and shallow water tables—faced a second year
without surface-water deliveries. After 12 months of steady pumping,
their water tables weren’t so shallow any more. My old well dipped to 60
feet as the water table began dropping more than a foot per month. In
past years, I could count on access to canal water to replenish the
water table. Now, for the first time in the 140-year history of our
farm, nature and man had cut off the water. The well went dry.

Meanwhile, on the west side, state and local officials warned farmers
that they might receive far less than even the 10 percent of contracted
surface-water delivery that they’d been promised. Nevertheless,
environmentalists prevailed upon the courts to extend orders diverting
freshwater reserves from irrigation canals to rivers and the ocean. The
public remained indifferent: the state had survived two years of drought
before, and cities still got their water allotments from shrinking
northern and mountain reservoirs. In 2012 and 2013, man-made reservoirs
in San Francisco and Los Angeles brimmed while the northern and mountain
lakes that supplied them were just two-thirds full. Facing no threat of
rationing, coastal Californians didn’t worry if a few hundred thousand
acres of lucrative orchards simply shriveled up.

As 2013 wore on, climatologists, trying to project how long the
drought might persist, warned state officials that their records only
ran as far back as the late 1860s. California is a relatively new human
habitat, and scientists can say little with certainty about the eons of
natural history preceding the arrival of Spanish, Mexican, and American
explorers. Tree-ring evidence suggests that past droughts had lasted 50
or even 100 years. Historically, drought may be the norm rather
than the exception in California. This might explain why such a
naturally rich state could support only a small population of indigenous
people. Is coastal and central California, in its natural state, a
mostly unsustainable desert for large, settled agrarian populations?
Maybe modern Californians don’t fully appreciate the genius of their
forefathers, who were prescient enough to see that, if huge quantities
of water weren’t transferred from the wet northlands, the Sierras, and
the Colorado River, then the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles
would be little more than arid coastal villages, analogous to lightly
populated and perennially water-short Cayucos or Cambria, along Highway
1.

Californians heaved a sigh of relief after a few days of heavy rain
in November 2013, and some early snowfalls seemed to suggest that the
drought would end in 2014. But the relief was premature; the dry spells
returned. What rain and snow followed was too little and far too late.
Even the snowpack in the American River watershed—a northern river
system usually drawing on the greatest snowmelts—reached just 12 percent
of its average. Soon, the huge man-made reservoirs in both the
ordinarily wet north and the arid center of the state—Folsom, Millerton,
New Melones, Orville Pine Flat, San Luis, Shasta, Trinity—dipped below
half-full levels and, in some cases, plunged below 10 percent of
capacity. By July 2014, the average storage level of reservoirs
statewide was 13 percent. Across the state, surface-irrigation
deliveries to farms and orchards fell to near zero.

Farmers engaged in another vigorous round of groundwater pumping in
summer 2014. Water tables predictably plunged even further. Disaster
struck the west side, as large agribusiness concerns drilled new wells
to unheard-of depths of 2,000 feet and more, installing massive
300-horsepower electric pumps to bring up just enough brackish water to
trickle over their thirsty crops. Panic ensued even on the east side,
with its famous and once-shallow aquifer. Farmers complained about
six-month-long waiting lists to deepen their wells. Instead of the usual
150- or 200-foot wells, farmers drilled to depths of 300 or 400 feet,
and drew water from 150 feet. Pump installations were similarly
backlogged, and pump sizes increased from the standard 15-horsepower
models to 20- and 50-horsepower machines—all this to ensure that a
farmer’s particular straw had the best chance of siphoning every last
drop from an emptying common glass.

Such every-man-for-himself drilling came with its own attendant human
foibles—bribing drillers to cut in front of the waiting list; violating
decade-old pump-sharing easements; stealthily tapping into neighbors’
pipeline systems; or charging exorbitant rates to give dry farmers
access to working wells. Well-rig manufacturers had trouble keeping up
with demand. Some entrepreneurs, eager to gouge desperate farmers,
sought drilling machinery on the East Coast and overseas. Meanwhile,
farmers understood that, with the commodities boom, an investment in
permanent trees and vines might represent $15,000–$20,000 per acre and
annual profits of over $5,000 per year. By 2014, keeping the orchard or
vineyard alive, not just the current crop, became the aim. On the west
side, some orchard owners began bulldozing older or less productive nut
groves. Others tried to find just enough water to allow a final August
or September harvest at record prices, before the exhausted trees were
removed in the winter.

California’s huge urban reservoirs, however,
remained full. Municipalities demanded that they receive all the final
deliveries of state and federal surface water from the mountainous north
and east. The Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park still
supplies almost 90 percent of the San Francisco Bay area’s daily water
supplies. In a strange paradox, that water bypasses the San Joaquin
River, into which environmentalists had diverted millions of acre-feet
of irrigation water for fish. Even in 2014, as the state baked dry,
environmentalists insisted on diverting what little mountain reservoir
water remained to river-restoration efforts. Yet no environmentalist
group has suggested that California tap Hetch Hetchy for habitat
restoration in the same manner in which it has expropriated the water of
farmers.

By late 2014, Pyramid and Castaic Lakes in southern California—part
of the vast reserves controlled by the Southern California Metropolitan
Water District—remained well above 90 percent of their capacities. But
their sources in the distant north had almost no surface water left to
give. The cities had drained and banked virtually all the state’s
existing reservoirs. Indeed, so well banked are southern California’s
project reservoirs that they have enough water to keep millions of
customers well supplied through 2015, even as northern and central
California communities dry up.

In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of
drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion
water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of
the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s
and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state
bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling.
The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law
as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath
their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed
to grasp that farmers bear the huge costs of drilling and pumping, not
because they are greedy or insensitive to the environment but because
the state’s population has doubled and its water infrastructure has not
kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would
have been to increase vastly the amount of reservoir surface water for
agriculture so that farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps.
But legislators and policymakers let utopianism get in the way.

Last summer, my two agricultural pumps
worked from June to late August to keep 40 acres of grapevines alive
during 100-degree days. Electricity and pump maintenance are costly. So
are the annual irrigation district taxes I’ve paid the last three years
for contracted—though undelivered—surface water from the system that my
great-grandfather and other pioneers built themselves with horse-drawn
scrapers at the turn of the twentieth century. This winter, I added my
name to the waiting list to lower the pump bowls—the impellers deep in
the well that force the water up through the casing to the surface—in
anticipation of another year of drought.

If the drought does continue, vast tracts of west-side farmlands will
turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export
industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril.
Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley,
especially its Hispanic community. When the 5 million-acre west side
goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part
of the state where the average unemployment rate already hovers above
10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to deepen
their wells further and save what water they can. Everything they and
their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with
extinction.

Water is to California as coal is to Kentucky—yet its use is being
curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the
consequences of their advocacy. But environmentalists, who for 40 years
worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water
infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No
reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduction
of their pet salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to
claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what
was above it. Redistribution, not expansion of supplies, is the liberal
creed for water, just as it is for wealth.

As the Hetch Hetchy reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made storage lakes
will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even
southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When
Stanford professors and Cupertino tech lords cannot take a shower and
find themselves paving over their suburban lawns and gardens, perhaps
they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than
for fish. The new dust bowl may soon see a different generation of Joads
abandoning California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest.

Could California still save itself? New reservoirs to store millions
of acre-feet of snowmelt could be built relatively quickly for the price
of the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. Latino voters—the state’s
largest minority—might come around to the view that the liberal coastal
elite’s obsession with environmental regulations leads to higher
electricity rates, gasoline prices, and food costs, along with fewer
jobs and economic opportunities. Barring that, there may be only two
things left for California farmers to do: pray for the recent wet
weather to continue; and, if it does, pray further that
environmentalists do not send the precious manna from heaven out to sea.

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal
and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and
Military History at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Articles: America's False-Front, Movie-Set Economy

America's False-Front, Movie-Set Economy

By Jack Curtis

America’s
economy resembles the propped-up false fronts of an old Western movie
set; it seems unlikely to support a middle class anymore. The
existential issue is simple, though insufficiently discussed:
technology, demographics, and government policy are collaborating to
impose economic decline. The evaporating middle class
is taking the erstwhile American worker and his employer with it as it
fades. Folk whose worry ends with the deficits hollowing out Social
Security and health care are worried about poor passenger service in a
falling airplane.

First,
consider the U.S. workforce. Contrary to some folk, the government
isn’t going to support everybody; the government has only the money it
takes from citizens. Unemployed and minimum-wage Americans offer little
to take, and the Labor Force Participation Rate
is declining. Those growing numbers of non-working people have to be
housed, fed, and watered by those still working. Government SNAP (food
stamps), disability, and/or other benefits are presently paid to 49% of Americans. That is a wobbly crutch resting upon deficits from a government burdened with debt. Most of the money is taken from workers whose incomes have just halted a six-year decline. Our grandparents spoke of “trying to get blood from a turnip.”

That
should illuminate the hollowness of the “recovery” claims, and there is
more. While the work participation is going down, the population is going up. And those newbies need support, too. A significant number of them need support until they are 25 years old, per the unemployment tables. However, the young are becoming fewer; the U.S. fertility rate
is declining for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with the latter two
declining less. When these babies reach 25 and more of them find work,
they represent a long decline in high school graduation rates, though there was an uptick recently. Unfortunately, the uptick may reflect declining standards. It is noteworthy that the lowest graduation rates reflect the blacks and Hispanics, who retain the highest birth rates.

In world rankings, U.S. education has declined among advanced countries from first rank to the middle of the pile
in math and science. So we have a proportionately smaller workforce
with more people to support that is not keeping up with world education
standards.

The size of that growing dependent population is significant. With the U.S. Population By Age,
it seems that the unemployed kids under 25 plus the presumed mostly
retired folk over 65 are almost as many as the labor force that supports
them. With the rapidly retiring baby boomers meeting the declining
birth rates of new workers, this is discouraging enough, but the seniors
are now living longer. A declining workforce must face an increasing burden.

How
will workers do that? The difficulties are manifest: much of U.S.
manufacturing has moved offshore, much work has been assumed by
machines, and government provides both educated and less qualified
foreigners to compete with citizens. The H-1B visa program provides educated foreigners to work in America, particularly in high-tech positions. Currently, over 500,000 jobs are listed for these applicants. So. Calif. Edison has laid off its IT department, replacing it with H-1B foreigners.

The government combines foreign-born workers legally and illegally present in reports.
Foreign-born U.S. workers of all types amount to 15.3% of the labor
force, a percentage that has risen. One of every six jobs, then, is
held by someone born in another country. One of every thirteen is held
by a Hispanic. Is it the “jobs that Americans won’t do,” or the low
wages? Some say that economics is simply equalizing world wage
levels…with a little help from the politicians.

All the workers face both the emigration of work and the replacement of human labor. Labor costs have been sending manufacturers to China, India, and other places for decades, as most know by now; G.M. sells more cars in China than in the U.S. By 2010, U.S. factory work had fallen to 1941 levels. Such employment has risen a bit since, but nothing that justifies hopes for a recovery; the situation is largely stagnant. U.S. productivity is declining, and labor costs are rising.

Less attention has been paid to the increasing emigration from the U.S. tax structure; that seems myopic. Too many of such emigrants are wealthy investors taking needed capital with them, in numbers never seen before. U.S. corporations
face a similar situation: corporate tax rates top the international
list. Economic prosperity requires capital as much as labor.

Manufacturing is the past, we’re told now; services are the future. But what sort of future, when a burger joint may buy a machine
that takes your order and makes custom hamburgers faster than three
McDonald’s burger-flippers? True, that’s only one sort of service;
software consulting, say, is another. Ordinary personal computers come
with audible screen readers for the blind, and Windows 8.1 incorporates
voice recognition. You can ask Siri, Google Plus, and Cortana to do
things for you on your mobiles. Will software continue to be written
exclusively by people? Some, no doubt, but how much?

The machine impact of the moment is 3D printing. With an increasingly inexpensive and simply operated machine, one can make all sorts of things on short notice. Things that used to need factories. Your dentist
may now 3D print new crowns and such in his office by himself, if he
wishes, while you wait; dental labs seem set to follow buggy whip
manufacturers. Educated people were needed to design the machines, but a
lot of workers are no longer needed on account of them. Mid-last
century, when computers were added to machine tooling, low-paid machine
operators replaced a lot of highly skilled, expensive machinists. Then
those machine operators became Indian and Chinese. Now, we’re seeing
the next step.

Let’s
add this up. Fewer, less prepared workers with more people to support
face foreigners and machines competing for proportionately fewer jobs.
North America and Europe remain high-cost producers in an increasingly
competitive world; we’re told that Google’s next smartphone
may, for the first time, be made by a Chinese tech company. Basic
economics predicts the future, though no American or European politician
dares say it.

Government policy is the capstone: government regulation
of labor, business, and markets has driven costs well above natural
market levels and opened the door to foreign competition. Government
holds the borders open, encouraging illegal and H-1B immigrants. A 2014 study by the Center for Immigration Studies said that all the new jobs since 2000 have gone to immigrants.

In addition, government discourages work: some New Jersey teens planning to shovel snow were stopped by the cops because they weren’t a registered business. Some states’ laws and pending federal regulation
put babysitters, caretakers for the elderly, and similar activities
under minimum wage, overtime, and vacation mandates, pricing such work
out of much of its market.

Such
an economy seems unlikely to support a middle class. America and
Europe, too, are replacing their middles with new proletarians in
reversion to the historic economic pattern. This should not be
unexpected; we watched the Soviets, and we can see Venezuela, Greece,
and others now. Politicians can’t keep their hands from an economy, but
political decisions are economic poison.

The
world’s once most productive economies have hollowed to old Western
movie sets, propped up by welfare, cheap money, media, and politicians
hoping that few citizens will enter the swinging doors of the fake
saloon for a real drink…or a real job.

America
and Europe are pursuing one fork in the economic road; another, though
unlikely, exists. President Warren Harding’s deep 1921 depression moved
his secretary of commerce to urge strong government intervention.
Harding refused; he let the economy readjust on its own. Recovery
required two years. Later, that secretary of commerce was president
during his own depression and, contrary to much we are told, intervened
heavily. He was Herbert Hoover; we know how that turned out. Now we’re
seeing the sequel.

The Gallup CEO
recently pointed out that as a percentage of the population, America’s
full-time jobs stand at a historic low. A cruise ship is testing robot bartenders. American Millennials lag
behind foreigners’ work skills. Behind distracting technical goodies,
the U.S. living standard has been fading since the housewives had to go
to work in the 1970s. And the trend continues.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Articles: The Green Left's Fascist Roots

The Green Left's Fascist Roots

By Mark Musser

The current presidential administration and State Department have been long touting
that global warming/climate change are just as dangerous as Russian
bears and Islamic terrorists. In February 2014, Secretary of State John
Kerry addressed Asian leaders
in Jakarta by informing them, “Climate change can now be considered
another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome
weapon of mass destruction.” With such attitudes, is it any wonder the
east-west divide all the way from the Middle East to Ukraine in the
north is literally on fire with no promising solution or relief to be
found anywhere on the horizon? While common sense cries out that the
world is entering into very serious times not seen since perhaps World
War II, America has a presidential administration and a State Department
seemingly far more concerned about global warming/climate change than
the cauldron that has erupted in the Middle East, and the seething
geopolitical dangers that could easily blow up all of Europe itself.

Worse, leftist pressure has made the U.S. military go green over the last decade. The U.S. armed forces are now buying more and more energy from expensive renewable technology contractors. Presumably by 2025,
the U.S. Army will become a virtual green model of sustainability for
the entire country. In other words, the Left is using the Defense
Department to keep renewable energy boondoggles afloat by wasting
taxpayer dollars on green pipe dreams. It would be far better to hook
up the U.S. military to the Keystone Pipeline and base it squarely upon Frack Nation principles and practices so that the army will not be dependent upon foreign oil.

Such
common sense, of course, would be an intellectual affront to Leftist
elites who have imbibed deeply from modern environmentalism since the
1960’s. All too many of them believe primeval nature represents some
kind of lost natural purity that requires the destruction of capitalism.
Even worse, they also believe Nature itself knows best when it comes to
public policy. Both presumptions are myths of the modern leftist
imagination that have perverted science and politics to the point where
politicians can now trumpet climate change as a very serious national
security threat without blushing. Only the mindlessness of Nature can
explain such credulity.

What
many on the Left do not appreciate is that when they started to jump on
the bandwagon of Nature and environmentalism, they began to drift more
and more toward fascism and away from their original humanistic
workingman class-warfare Marxian values. Fascism essentially means holism, which denies the otherness of the human being from nature. In fact, it was the father of German Social Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who coined the term “ecology” in 1866.

In
the early 1900s, Haeckel established the German Monist League, which
was one of the first politically-active groups in both racial science
and environmentalism. Monism means “one” and many Germans at the time
believed that Darwinism established racism as a scientific fact. As
such, eugenics became the scientific methodology
that was to be used in order to restore humanity’s racial evolution
that had been compromised by the Judeo-Christian worldview and her
unnatural beliefs and practices. Allegedly promoted by Jews and
Christians, humanism had led the modern world astray away from the
scientific natural laws of evolutionary monism, i.e., racism, which
needed to be recovered in order to save Aryan Europe from weakness,
overpopulation, and inevitable decline. In those days, German Social
Darwinism was called Monism, and many of Germany’s early greens were environmental racists and nationalists.

While there were some nuances that distinguished the Monist League
from National Socialism, the Nazis drank deeply from Haeckel’s Social
Darwinism. More than a few Nazis were very attracted to what has to be
understood as an early form of environmentalism as well. With the
exception of Martin Bormann, all the leading Nazis, including the Führer himself,
had their fingers in a piece of the green pie that National Socialism
offered to Germany -- everything from animal rights to green hunting
laws, to environmental preservation and planning, to green building and a
back-to-the-land farming campaign, organic farming, recycling,
sustainable forestry, and even sustainable development. As early as
1935, Nazi Germany was far and above the greenest regime on the planet.
Eco-fascism is thus no metaphor, but a historical fact.

In theory at least, even the dreaded ‘local only’ Four Year economic war plan (1936-40),
was to be carried out under the auspices of sustainable development,
something which the Nazi brass called “spatial planning”. After the fall
of Stalingrad, in his infamous “Total War Speech” delivered in 1943, even Nazi propaganda Chief Dr. Josef Goebbels
(1897-1945) complained, “The war of mechanized robots against Germany
and Europe has reached its high point.” He went on to say, “The German
nation is fighting for everything it has. We know that the German people
are defending their holiest possessions: their families, women and
children, the beautiful and untouched countryside, their cities and
villages, their two thousand year old culture, everything indeed that
makes life worth living.” In other words, in the Nazi mind, defending
the fatherland included defending its environmental treasures.

The
fact of the matter is, the modern green movement did not spring into
worldwide action out of nowhere in the 1960s with Rachel Carson and the
hippie movement. Modern environmentalism is largely rooted in Germany
like a giant oak tree that tapped into German Romanticism, Existentialism,
and Social Darwinism that flowered in the European continent throughout
the 1800s -- all three of which valued Nature over people and laid the
foundation of what is otherwise known as the green movement today.
While Nazi racism is now in the rear-view mirror, it has been replaced
with an anti-humanist agenda, but environmental tribalism can still be
seen in its veritable worship of all things indigenous hiding behind the
doctrine of multiculturalism. In other words, multiculturalism is
better understood as a form of multitribalism as it celebrates the
differences and attacks the classic universal American melting pot
ideals where such ethnic considerations are reduced to a lower level of
importance. In short, the evolution from the early German green movement
steeped in racism of the 1800s to the multicultural indigenous
environmentalism of the 1900s is not much of an improvement.

Closely
related, one of the original gurus who championed the cause of
environmentalism over national security concerns was German green
activist Dr. Erich Hornsmann (1909-1999). In postwar West Germany, Hornsmann often complained
that the destruction of Mother Nature was “Enemy Number One.” In 1947,
Hornsmann became a founding member of the Protection of German Forests.
In 1955, he wrote The Forest: The Foundation of our Existence. He
warned of spreading desertification problems associated with the
cutting down of trees and expanding ski resorts on mountain slopes. Dr.
Hornsmann even led the postwar charge on promoting radical water
conservation measures. Hornsmann also belonged to the Alliance for the
Protection of German Waters and wrote extensively on how water was
becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. Hornsmann applied Malthusian
math to the waters of Germany as he was convinced water consumption
would outstrip water supplies as personal usage of it skyrocketed with
ever-increasing showers and baths. Industry itself wasted more water
than entire cities combined.

Hornsmann also wrote an apocalyptic environmental book entitled, Otherwise Collapse: The Answer of the Earth to the Abuse of Her Laws. To
counteract the green catastrophe looming just around the corner,
Hornsmann was convinced that environmental land use planning was
absolutely required to avoid doomsday. Much of the apocalyptic
environmentalism so rampant in today’s political world goes back to
Germany and rabid environmentalists like Dr. Hornsmann. After the war,
the German greens became extremely vitriolic, since Germany had been
bombed into oblivion with an industrial destruction never seen before in
the history of the world. That the capitalistic Americans wound up with
the nuclear bomb only made Germans more apocalyptic in fervor.

Dr.
Hornsmann’s ahistorical environmental record from the 1930s and 40s is
highly suspicious. Not much is known about his actions during the heyday
of the green Nazi movement of the 1930s, but it is highly likely he was
deeply involved in one way or another. Eco-fascist greens like Martin Heidegger, Guenther Schwab, and Alfred Toepfer have
been already been caught in a web of lies, deceit, and denial. Whatever
the exact case may be on how much of a Nazi was green Dr. Hornsmann,
what is known is that he sent a postcard to a relative in Bloomington,
New Jersey on Hitler’s 50th birthday stating, “We think of you sincerely
on a great Day! We must pity, however, ‘God’s own country’ as long as
it is ruled and exploited by Jews and their servants.”

Even the father of deep ecology, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) complained of America’s ‘Abrahamic’ use of the land in his famous book called The Sand County Almanac written
in 1947. Unbeknownst to many, Nazi Germany gave Leopold an
all-expense-paid trip to the fatherland in 1935 so he that could observe
the new environmental direction the Third Reich was implementing.
Leopold was generally impressed with what the Nazis were doing. Not only did Leopold drag home the “Never Cry Wolf”
cult from Nazi Germany, he also wrote the Germans, unlike the
Americans, were actually doing something about environmental problems,
not just talking about them. Nazi Germany was the first country in the
world to protect wolves. The Führer fancied himself as “Uncle Wolf."

Mark Musser is a contributing writer for the Cornwall Alliance,
which is a coalition of clergy, theologians, religious leaders,
scientists, academics, and policy experts committed to bringing a
balanced biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of
environment and development. Mark is the author of Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust and Wrath or Rest: Saints in the Hands of an Angry God.

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