Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop to Use

At this juncture our governments are just nominal. We all take our orders for legislation from the U.N. that sends out sheafs of "suggested" regulation for all ministries and departments large and small. If a legislator or bureaucrat decides, "Hell, no, I’m not going to do that," he or she is immediately assaulted by several of the NGO’s that operate in whichever concerned sphere of influence, first gently, then a bit more influence is brought. If he insists, the poodle media is unleashed by a “study” that “shows” that women and minorities are hardest hit, and the legislator or bureaucrat is tamed.

Where I live – an excellent case study for the hellscape of our meticulously planned future – people get elected promising reform, and within weeks surrender. Any change he tries to muscle through will invite lawsuits as far as the eye can see. It will cost millions. Since the legislation is boilerplate, there is no room for local considerations. This is walking insanity, and has created unimaginable unnecessary pain. It has foreshortened lives, prevented economic activity, and destroyed opportunity. It is straight-up stupid and cruel.

Let’s take a closer look at the bars of our prison. First you have U.N. treaties. Our governments have signed hundreds upon hundreds of them, committing to a new green future. The following is the PR:

With these new actions, President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious land and water conservation agenda in American history. These actions build on more than two years of the Biden-Harris Administration’s progress and historic investments to advance conservation, restoration, and stewardship nationwide. That record includes:

Protecting more lands and waters in his first year than any president since JFK

Setting the country’s first-ever national conservation goal to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030

Signing an Executive Order to better protect America’s forests

Securing the largest investment in climate, environmental justice, and conservation ever

Putting the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean off limits to new oil and gas development

Restoring and strengthening protections for cherished places, including Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments, as well as the Tongass National Forest

Designating the Camp Hale - Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado

FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Takes New Action to Conserve and Restore America’s Lands and Waters

Take a look at the list of things ‘saved’. Note that it locks away thousands of square miles of ocean from drilling or fishing. What it doesn’t say is that the Waters of the United States gives the government control of every run-off ditch and puddle. This massive taking, which will, by the end of it remove one billion acres from American use, locks up pretty much any and all natural resources, on the grounds of "scarcity." Every single order and legislative initiative hews to this one idea: humans are killing the earth and we are running out of everything except sun and wind, which is the future and you better get used to brownouts.

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NGO's proffer "proof" that set-asides create prosperity, but if you examine the "proof", it is boilerplate for every set-aside, the prosperity is in 'service' jobs, which they claim are doctors and engineers, but which are really summer waitress and checkout cashiers. Real jobs, the ones that build families, decline. The only increase is tourism and that would have come anyway.

This inversion of reality is creates the most astonishing clusterfuck of incompetence and cruelty. Last weekend the city of Philadelphia took three days to notify 14 million people that their water was tainted by a spill from a factory. California, which had been in a “drought” for the last 20 years until the recent spate of torrential rains (not "climate change" but part of the West's natural boom-or-bust water cycle), has meant that farmers and ranchers in California, literally a bread basket for the nation, have been deliberately starved of water.

For 150 years, the western states engaged in building what I consider to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, the water system that could feed, clothe and house the known universe. For the past 25 years, the environmental movement, guided by the U.N. and Rockefeller, Ford, and a half dozen other pernicious foundations, has been breaking that water system. More than one thousand significant dams have been taken out, and thousands upon thousands of little dams and weirs in the upland ranges and forests have been removed. The result this has been, and its purpose is, to starve human development, food production, and economic well-being.

In fact, California has plenty of water. It is hidden and masterfully. In my book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, one of my later chapters declares that the takings of the United Nations, in every single country, are primarily focused on locking up water. Without water, everything dies. Controlling water means you control everything. Water, of course, is a renewable resource. But the U.N. declares it is not. Because “global warming” means everything is going to dry out.

Green watershed management is crazy-expensive. A town of 4,000 will spend $500,000 just on the planning alone. Green watershed management sends water first to "wetlands" rather than to reservoirs and then seas or lakes. A lot of the sudden catastrophic flooding of cities in the past ten years has to do with the built-in incompetencies of green watershed management.

Kevin Kiley, a young legislator in California, took this battle to the floor, showing California drought restrictions on the one hand, and a video of 20,000 cubic feet of water pouring into the ocean every second. If you are a rancher or a farmer anywhere west of the Mississippi, you have four meters on your well from each state and federal agency and any infraction means a fine of tens of thousands of dollars.

I live in a rainforest. On my land I have enough water for 80 families. When I sold my house at the top of the hill, a new owner spent $50,000 on a water catchment system. He had been told by authorities that he was going to run out of water. At the north end of my island, again, in a rainforest, green watershed management has meant that everyone pays ten thousand a year for water, their gardens are minimal and any excess use means a visit and fines. This year, the taxes on that water tripled.

How did this happen? It was subterfuge, the foolish were blandished, the media was bought, anyone objecting was silenced and cancelled, government at all levels was bullied, and every single resource we need to create an abundant world was stolen in the night. As the Bolsheviks famously put it: Who? Whom? It's them or us.

'Conservation' Programs No Substitute for More Energy

It astonishes me that the basics of human nature and the law of supply and demand seem to have escaped the ken of the West’s big thinkers—the politicians, think tanks, private do-good operators and media, but every now and then someone has to point these things out to them.

When it comes to energy conservation—the hat trick the left pulls to avoid facing the inability of renewable sources of energy to meet demonstrated and projected needs—every new brainstorm gets glowing endorsements in the press. When the stated objectives fail we rarely hear much of them. (It’s of a piece with the media magnifying the damage to the environment while ignoring for the most part the chopping of wild birds by windmills and the frying of them by solar fields, or the human and environmental tolls of lithium mining. )

Sudden death in the skies, to save the planet.

I remember in 2006 arguing that a government plan to have utility companies retrofit for free homes in order to make them more energy efficient would not result in substantial reductions in electric demand or free up energy for other users. The point to me seemed obvious. When the cost of home heating is high, people would be more conscious of turning off lights and appliances when not in use. But if—as this plan provided in effect—homeowners would not after retrofitting pay more for increased energy use, they might prefer a cozier, warmer house or a brighter one or even add on a lovely heated porch.

Such views were of course cast aside by the big thinkers and here and abroad, and governments got involved in subsidizing retrofitting for conservation. President Obama launched home energy retrofit programs (the Home Energy score pilot program in 2010) to assess homes and offer cost-effective recommendations and low-cost loans up to $25,000 would be made available for “energy-saving improvements.”

In 2016 the domestic home energy conservation program became even more ambitious when the administration announced a Clean Energy Savings for All Americans program. The largest part of the program was the installation of solar and wind “to create a more inclusive workforce,” the latter, of course, padding the treasuries of non-government organizations, ostensibly to take people off the streets to train and employ them to install insulation, new windows, doors and solar equipment in existing homes (a project which to my mind seriously underestimates the skills in such construction work and overestimates the interest in such arduous work by the unemployed).

How this has fared I am unaware, but a similar program in Great Britain seems to have validated my earlier concerns about the efficacy of such projects. The far-left newspaper, The Guardian recently described a University of Cambridge report on the long-term effect of attic and wall insulation, and the report was what I had anticipated years ago. After retrofitting, there is a “rebound effect” which cancels out reductions in gas use. Put simply, with the cost of gas heating of their homes down, homeowners turned up the heat, opened windows to air out stuffy rooms and even built on extensions to their homes.

Look out below!

Once again, it’s the law of supply and demand which makes hash of so many bright ideas. Twenty-one years ago John LaPlante, predicted this. “Government-mandated conservation efforts never work to alleviate shortages. In fact, they do the opposite." With increased energy efficiency we are likely to consume more energy—and the result is either no net savings or even a loss of available energy. In the process, government-enforced measures like automobile fuel efficiency standards “impose unnecessary costs on people—even deadly costs” because smaller cars are less safe cars.

It may be unpleasant for the renewable energy crowd to concede this, but the reality is that “conservation doesn’t reduce overall energy consumption.” Increased energy efficiency may provide lower costs, making product prices more competitive and affordable for more people when driven by market forces, but government policy makers must face the fact that, as the Cambridge study found, government programs are not a means of reducing energy consumption. You really have to increase energy production.