Death by Ecology: Killing California … God’s Best Green Deal

[An excerpt from a forthcoming book]

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So you think the Green New Deal isn’t going to happen? Well, California is leading the way — good[?] intentions on the road to hell? Here’s an autopsy of the Green policies killing California and identifying the killers. For 15,000 years, millions of human beings migrated to California. It was the American Dream.

Millions of Californians go elsewhere to pursue life, liberty, property and happiness. From 1992-2018, California lost a net 4.2 million people to other American states. From 1990 to 2012, California lost nearly a million manufacturing jobs. That’s nearly half, 40%, of all manufacturing jobs. Similarly, industrial employment plunged 60% from 2005-2015. Two-thirds of the aerospace industry that sent America to the moon and won the Cold War has gone since 1990.

In short, costly environmental drove them out of jobs and out of state.

The New Left leader Jerry Brown, 1.0 and 2.0, and compliant Republicans Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger decided they could do better than God and a free people. These eco-gods demanded air, water and land made cleaner than God Himself made them. Human habitat, private property, had to give way to the needs of fish and wildlife.

In pursuing eco-utopia, deep state environmentalists often appear rather silly, even stupid. Yet they are deadly serious. They destroyed what was once the world’s happiest place.

Consider the California Crow. 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. The Water Resources Control Board is taking action against the dreaded enemy — cattle manure. 

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 Tortoise, salmon etc. One cow on one acre at a time, are blamed for destroying all manner of wildlife.

Of Straws and Smelt. California’s war on all things plastic — bottles, bags and straws — shows its Lilliputian desperation to save the planet. California environmentalists are desperate to save the “fragile” 187 quintillion gallon Pacific Ocean from overflowing plastic. And the 100 million-acre California must not run out of spaces to put trash in landfills.

California sends half of its abundant fresh water to the Pacific Ocean. Water police order city folk to drink recycled toilet water and to live on 55 gallons a day. Ten percent of all water is too much for the serfs who may bathe every other Saturday whether they need it or not. Desalinated seawater at ten times the cost of reservoir water is also recommended. California demands its residents take a water conservation pledge … and to the utopia for which it stands.

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The Deadly Serious.

Environmental authorities act as police, prosecutors, juries, and judges. They, do not yet conduct executions, but they do ruthlessly prosecute and assassinate the characters and livelihoods of resisters. They defame greedy businessmen for 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. Few family-owned, independent gasoline stations remain. They once competed with Big Oil on gasoline prices.  

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Tyranny of the Clerks–Eco-Police Powers.

Eco-zealots build authoritarian bureaucracies ordering all Californians, convicted without due processes, to conform to their delusions of an eco-utopia. TheCalifornia Penal Code grants armed police powers to state public employees policing food, drugs, and chemicals.

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Drat those deplorable human masses yearning to breed free and plunder the planet.

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California Environmental Law.

The most authoritarian elements of California’s 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 laws and more enrich bureaucrats, environmental consultants, green industries, lawyers, and crony capitalists.

California Endangered Species Act. Under eco-ethics, every deplorable human is commanded to care about nobler species like the road kill scavenger, the California Condor. In time, the ESA zealots may recover the Unicorn, lost in ancient fables or more likely the Black Plague, the 1918 flu, and/or small pox.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  CEQA routinely extorts outrageous concessions, green blackmail, “mitigations,” of cash, land and project modifications from property owners. Only the very wealthy or large corporations can afford the consultants and lawyers required. Governments routinely grant exemptions for crony capitalist friends and privileged projects, e.g. sports stadiums, solar and wind projects, public transit, “bullet” trains and subways. 

CEQA limits economic growth and stops or delays vital housing, roads, bridges, dams, canals, refineries. CEQA delays efforts to clear away kindling, dead, dying and dry trees and brush, to prevent catastrophic firestorms. In 2018, like policies killed 88 people in Paradise California and statewide destroyed 10,000 homes, business and cars.

Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65). Unreal, but usefully scary, Prop 65 requires warning labels and regulations on nearly 1,000 chemicals. ‘The State of California has determined,” presumes, chemicals and their users are guilty for causing cancer or birth defects.  Yet the American Cancer Society says California lacks a scientific basis for its cancer warnings.

California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32). A few“experts” of science and economics command and control major sectors of the economy. 360 major industries. Carbon is the prime target. Businesses buy and sell, trade, emission allowances. Like Soviet five-year plans, Cap and Trade demands quotas. Carbon emissions are ordered to decline every year. It is a phony market pretending to reflect the supply and demand for greenhouse gases.

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California’s Environmental Apparatchiks

California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA). The second highest building in Sacramento, capital of California, is the headquarters of the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA). Cal EPA’s 5,000 employees have their own safe spaces from Nature, cars and citizens. They have bike racks and no parking. Caught using a verboten rodenticide to kills rats infesting the CalEPA environs, EPA caved under pressure. Rats, fleas, plague, hantavirus and typhus all breathed a sigh of relief.

The EPA building is the home of six omnipotent deep state bureaucracies: California Air Resources Board (CARB), State Water Resources Control Board (WRCB), Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHMA), Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) and Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle). 

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), the eco-state’s Air and Space Force, has summarily convicted carbon in air pollution for causing lung cancer and chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD). In fact, compared to historical and geological time, carbon is now in very short supply, a drought.

Condemning the “economic poisons” of capitalism, CARB’s claims about air pollution are suspect. Smoking, not air pollution, explains almost 90% of deaths from lung cancer and COPD. Similarly, fine particulate matter (PM), dirt blowing in the wind ruins visibility, irritates existing lung conditions, but rarely kills. Bacteria, viruses and fungi, e.g. pneumonia, influenza and mold do kill. Compared to unhealthy individual behavior—smoking, dirty homes (cockroaches, rats, dust, mites), obesity, alcoholism—chemical pollutants are insignificant. The air inside the most sanitary homes is two and five times more polluted than the air outside.

California works tirelessly to drive people out of the mobility and safety of their cars. The Board blames the car for air pollution and death from lung diseases. Yet individuals are responsible for their own unhealthy lifestyles including reckless and drunken driving. The environmentalists care little about individual responsibility and freedom. California law aims to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT), freedom.

California steals 80% of taxes on gasoline. California builds or repairs few roads and bridges. They recommend sidewalks, bike paths, buses, trains, telecommuting, car pools. Preferring “smart” growth, high-density housing, California opposes affordable suburban housing. Life in high-rise Soviet style housing projects, like rats in cages, is filthy and frightful.

In 1990, California ordered carmakers to produce electric cars, aka “Zero Emission” Vehicles (ZEV). Policy overlords expected to jump start innovation and repeal the laws of physics, the limited energy storage capacity of batteries.

California Energy Commission. The Commission has stopped Big Oil’s evilly profitable access to both America’s largest shale reserves in the Monterey Shale and off shore crude oil reserves.. The Commission has also succeeded in banning or tearing down nuclear and hydroelectric power plants producing cheap, clean and reliable electricity. The Commission has commanded all new single-family homes and apartments have solar panels by 2020.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (392 MW) got special permissions to kill Desert Tortoises. Taxpayers paid millions to relocate handfuls of turtles. subsidized wind projects kill Golden Eagles, hundreds of thousands of birds and millions of bats.

California leads the nation in self-imposed power blackouts and bankrupted utilities.The state schedules rolling blackouts and approves blackouts to prevent wildfires. These actions cover up California’s inadequate supply of electricity caused by its war on oil, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric energy. 

The Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR) leads a totalitarian assault up your cars’ tailpipe and your pocketbook. Almost 100% of cars today have low emissions. Hence, California’s annual SMOG tests are a scam for collecting more taxes on Californians’ “perverse love of their cars,” freedom. Paying cash for clunkers separates poor people from affordable transportation.

The regulation of diesel particulate matter (PM), based on the flawed study of a CARB fake Ph.D., kicks thousands of small independent truck owners out of business.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District, SCAQMD, the eco-states’ Army, Southern Command, has perfected bureaucratic art of exercising the death penalty on all stationary sources of air pollution. The District placed a moratorium on all oil production off the California coast after the Santa Barbara oil spill. Eliminating one bad smelling GHG, sulfur dioxide, has only succeeded in reducing regional hazy skies. A few days of wildfire, a volcano eruption or an steroid easily wipes out a full year’s emissions from all automobiles.

The all-powerful District has driven tens of thousands of the smallest mom and pop enterprises (dry cleaners, body shops, independent gas stations) out of business. While heavy metals and solvents from oils smell bad, there is little evidence their concentration in water are health risks (parts per billion and trillion). The independents once competed on gasoline prices with Big Oil.  

In short, The District has waged a war on economic opportunities for the poor, the young and the middle class.   

The Water Resources Control Board (WRCB), “control” being its Prime Directive, exercises near absolute power over California’s water, both its supply and quality. The Board has halted the building of major water storage, new dams, for forty years. It is working to tear down existing dams. The Board is diverting water from humans to fish.  

The water Board and the Department of Water Resources steal voter approved bond monies. Time and again, California voters are deceived into believing phony promises to build new water storage. Yet only 12% of bond funds are spent on new water storage.

Water Quality. WRCB’s second absolute power is water quality. It defines clean water as it wishes. It hypes up public fear of tap water, some of it the cleanest water on earth. Most violations of state clean water regulations and laws are clerical, technical, minor, even trivial and frivolous infractions presenting little or no danger to public health or the environment.

Less than one per cent of all the violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act involve organic chemicals like pesticides. A full 70 per cent of dangerous clean water violations are disease organisms, requiring increased use of chemicals, chlorine and a hot sun, to keep water safe.

The primary achievement of the WRCB is scaring citizens, corporations and local governments out of money to pay off lawsuit-chasing attorneys, environmental consultants, prevailing wage unions and state certified crony capitalist contractors to build water treatment plants releasing water cleaner than it comes out of the sky, rivers, lakes or wells.

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California’s Chemistry Police.

California trumps up dangers of chemicals through its Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR). Toxic chemicals cause less than 3% of cancer.   

Within the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) California’s Ministry of Politically Correct Science, is the overlord for the health risks of about 1,000 chemicals. OEHHA and others have “determined” fire-fighting foam causes cancer or reproductive harm. Note the chemicals concentrated in chocolate cake are 250 times greater than typical risk guidelines for toxic chemicals.

Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). Born, nurtured and grown to one thousand employees, the DTSC arose out of public outrage over alarming stories of hazardous toxic chemical waste sites and road spills. Easily deceived citizens blame  their bad health upon some dump, factory, farm, or refinery close by. The Superfund solution has been totalitarian, never ending and immensely profitable to lawyers and remediation companies.

DTSC has taken the lead in seeking safer alternatives to toxic chemicals used in nail salons. California’s has thousands working in hazardous waste teams responding to spilled milk and overturned trucks.

California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR). DPR is a complex   bureaucracy dedicated to smothering regulation and the nations’ most stringent laws banning and restricting the use of the Devil’s own pesticides. California is the breadbasket of the world. There is no link between disease and pesticide residues on food. Recently listed food recalls of the Federal Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control are entirely for microbes, pathogens, bacteria and viruses, not pesticides. Glyphosate, Roundup, found in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream would take very mighty doses–200,000 pints of ice cream to  kill–roughly six pints a day for 100 years. One will run out of either ice cream or life before dying from Roundup.

The pesticide free world, willfully, if silently, protects deadly, killer, species of pests and microbes– fungi, malarial mosquitos, Bubonic Plague rats, Ebola fruit bats, E. Coli, salmonella, listeria, vibrio cholera, etc. The ban on DDT protects the deadliest predator on earth, the mosquito, transmitting deadly malaria killing 1 million every year– a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds. Mosquitoes also spread dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis and West Nile virus.

California has experienced hysterical episodes over Malathion, Methyl Bromide, chlorpyrifos as well as Roundup.

 The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) prohibits the “taking” of the lives or habitat of any endangered or threatened species of wildlife. With the help of the feds, it has driven many loggers, farmers, miners (gold, sand, gravel), cowboys and land owners out of California. ESA’s absolutist takes or reduces the value of private property without just compensation and due process of law. Along with CEQA, the ESA has halted the building of adequate numbers of homes, roads, dams etc.

The California Coastal Commission, the eco-states’ Marine Corp specializes in driving private property owners off their own land and out of their homes. The Commission also usurps the powers of elected local officials. The Commission’s near-dictatorial powers extend in the “coastal zone.” That’s 1,100 miles from the Oregon to Mexico border seaward three miles and as many as five miles inland.

The California Resource Agency, and related entitiesare devoted to preserving all of California’s natural resources. The federal and state government owns about 52% of California’s 103 million acres. Not good enough, the Resource Agency has declared 75% of California is wildland. Unfortunately, about 28% of such sacred ground is still in private hands. Conservancies are “voluntarily” absorbing private land into woodland, wildlife, nature, or “agricultural” preservations. Access for recreation, logging, mining, farming, motorized recreation etc. is limited or outright prohibited. Banning logging and burns (controlled and natural), allied with bark beetles have killed 129 million trees fueling catastrophic firestorms.  Many owners squat as serfs on their own homesteads in the Kings’ forests.  

Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) works hard for a perfectly waste- free, “Zero Waste” regime. Otherwise, California’s 100 million acres might run out of space for landfill. A trash gestapo collects a tax, a “California Redemption Value” of a mere five or ten cents on each of ten billion or so pop, beer and juice cans and bottles a year.  Fewer and fewer Californians are feeling virtuous about giving their free labor picking rags, sorting trash, fondling “post-consumer” garbage, and diving into dumpsters. No wonder so much meticulously sorted trash quietly goes directly to a landfill. It takes a lot of indoctrination, technology and phony analyses to justify massive recycling. More people recycle than vote. How’s that for environmental indoctrination?

California’s education system, a wholly owned subsidiary of the California Teachers Association (CTA), successfully maintaining the second highest teacher salaries, has driven math, English, science and civics out of California schools keeping the serfs too ignorant, tired or intimidated to object to eco-tyranny.

Roger Canfield, Ph.D. americong.com

Mid career Dr. Canfield applied for a position with the California Forestry Association fighting the destruction of California’s timber industry by state and federal protection of the allegedly endangered Spotted Owl. The eco-terrorist Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, murdered Gilbert Murray the better man the Forestry Association hired.

Canfield has been researching and writing about environmental issues for over thirty years as a college professor, candidate, legislative staffer, consultant, journalist, and public information officer. Listening to the complaints of hundreds of Californians, he has first-hand knowledge of California’s environmental tranny.  

As a child, the author swam in an orange pond of an abandoned open pit coalmine down near the Ohio in southern Indiana and came away with a hard head and harder teeth. He worked three California summers spraying asbestos laden plaster upon the ceilings of new homes and businesses and came up 25 years later with a bad heart and lungs…from decades of heavy smoking.  He interned with the special Projects Office of the Navy building Polaris nuclear submarines. He worked a summer at a piece-work plastics factory in Sweden.      

As a Public Information Officer for the Department of Water Resources (DWR), he attended symbolic public meetings. In one series, he felt angry citizens were close to lynching the unresponsive DWR bureaucrats before them. Why had the DWR spent millions to study, but had no plans for new flood control dams, levees, flood plains? Why did DWR believe its computer models instead of the flood experience of citizens before them. A lynching appeared quite justified.

For over thirty years, he has supported building a water, power and flood control dam at Auburn to protect and serve the Sacramento region. Environmental groups vigorously opposed, claiming to protect the Delta Smelt, while fronting for rafting companies and the commercial salmon industry. 

In 1990, the author was campaign manager opposing a statewide ballot initiative, Prop 117, of nearly a billion dollars to provide habitat for Mountain Lions. Today Mountain Lions roam California farms and urban areas munching on livestock, pets, Long Horn Sheep and an occasional jogger.

On a long tour of the Klamath River watershed, he attended a rally in southern Oregon of angry homesteading farmers losing water to bottom feeding, bony suckerfish and Coho Salmon.

 For failing to care for levees because DWR protected elderberry beetle habitat on levees, DWR was successfully sued for the deaths and destruction following a flood in Linda California.

Working for the County of Placer where environmentalists, e.g. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the Tree foundation, opposed cutting trees or clearing brush and pine needles to prevent wildfires. Therafter, the Agora fire destroyed 242 homes and 67 businesses in South Lake Tahoe.

Working for the City of Colfax, he observed a locust of lawyers suing city for petty paperwork violations of clean air law costing the tiny thousands to fix and millions to build a new water treatment plant producing cleaner water than pristine Sierra runoff.