Thirsty Californians and unemployed New Yorkers - Sacrifices to Liberalism's Global Warming Delusion

Liberals often live in a fantasy world that ignores the real world right in front of them. They continue to pour trillions of dollars into poverty programs despite the fact that poverty persists and grows. Their go to solution for failing and failed government schools is always spend more money rather than embrace solutions that actually work such as charter schools or voucher programs. It’s no surprise then that their tired solutions rarely ever solve the problems they are ostensibly focused on.

Strangely, that dynamic exists even when the problem itself is fiction. The perfect example of this is the state of California. In an effort to address congestion on California roads (which is a real problem) and to fight man-made global warming (which is a fiction) California is planning on spending anywhere from an estimated $68 to $98 billion taxpayer dollars to build a high speed rail link from Los Angeles and San Francisco. This, despite the fact that most traffic in California is from people traveling within metro areas, not between them. Think about it, LA’s worst traffic is usually 10-15 miles on the 405 or I-10 during rush hour, not on I-5 north of the city. A high speed rail ticket between LA and San Francisco that was originally projected to cost $50 is now expected to cost more than $81. That’s a round trip cost of either $100 or $162. Today you can get a round trip plane ticket between the same two cities for $135. What’s more, the line will likely require additional hundreds of millions of taxpayer subsidies annually just to maintain operations... and it will increase carbon emissions!

So there we have it, California plans to spend what will likely be in excess of $100 billion to build a rail system to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and another that can’t be solved by such a system. This, while the state is facing a real problem that it actually can solve: a shortage of water. The state has been gripped in a drought for years, but even in non-drought years water is a problem in California. In addition to families with no water, in the San Joaquin Valley, dubbed “America’s salad bowl” vegetable farms are left idle as there is no water for irrigation. (The drought is not the only cause there…) The $100 billion that the state is wasting building the rail boondoggle could be spent instead on desalinization plants up and down the Pacific coast. Recently the nation’s largest desalinization plant opened in San Diego… but it almost didn’t as years were wasted fighting litigation by environmental groups. That $1 billion facility will produce enough drinking water for approximately 250,000 people annually. Using that metric, for the amount of money California is wasting on the rail system it could desalinate enough water for 26 million people, more than 65% of its population.

The reality is however that the state doesn’t need to build desalinization plants to support 65% of its population. It’s likely that building the capacity necessary to provide water to 20% would be more than sufficient to address most water issues, and that could be done for approximately $30 billion. But that’s not on the books. Given that California is the epicenter of liberalism in the US, that’s not a surprise.

If there is a second center of liberalism in the US, it’s undoubtedly New York, and not surprisingly, it suffers from the same problem as California. Only in New York the tool of choice for seeking to slay the faux dragon of man-made global warming is not absurdly expensive transportation subsidies, but rather absurdly expensive green energy subsidies. New York has recently agreed to spend close to $1 billion subsidizing multi billionaire Elon Musk’s money losing solar panel installation company, SolarCity. This, while the governor of a state with a 6.6% unemployment rate continues to ban the fracking for natural gas, a cleaning burning fuel that has pumped billions of dollars in to the economies of states from North Dakota to Pennsylvania while creating tens of thousands of good paying jobs. So once again, a liberal state is spending boatloads of taxpayer dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist while at the same time it refuses to look at a viable solution to real problems – in this case unemployment and energy prices.

And so it goes with liberalism, using rational solutions to attack real problems takes a back seat to solving fake problems that dovetail with the left’s worldview, regardless of the consequences. California is in the midst of a water shortage that is having devastating consequences on millions of its citizens on a daily basis. New York is seeing jobs and citizens flee the state for lower taxes and better job prospects. In both states the governors have decided those very real problems are not as important as pandering to their political base by tilting at the windmill of global warming. The result is actually worse than if the state did nothing at all. If they were doing nothing the taxpayers would at least be no worse off than they are now. Unfortunately however, the taxpayers in the 4th and 1st highest tax states (respectively) are on the hook millions or billions of dollars and will be much worse off in the long run. Such is liberalism: obscure failure in the real world by selling grand designs of some future success that never quite works out as promised… then simply count on voters to forget about that failure as you dazzle them with your next quixotic mirage.

$50 light bulbs! Unfortunately for you, the green in Green Energy is your dollars…

One has to ask the question about Greens, do they even live on this planet they are trying to save? They often seem to be living in a completely different universe if not just a different planet.

The most recent example of this is the LED light bulb, the latest answer to Congress’s 2007 energy efficiency mandate – which was regrettably signed by George Bush. Last week a story emerged that the 100 watt LED light bulbs slated to replace 100 year old inefficient incandescent bulbs will cost upwards of $50 apiece! That’s right, $50 for a light bulb…

Fifty dollars vs. the one dollar it costs for a typical incandescent bulb. It’s a bit hefty, but then they are more efficient. The question is however, are they 50 times much more efficient? Ah, no. Two years ago Carnegie Mellon compared the energy lifecycle of LED lights vs. those of compact fluorescents as well as incandescent bulbs. (The energy lifecycle includes not only the energy a bulb will burn over the course of its life, but the energy and materials used to manufacture it in the first place.)

The numbers were unambiguous… LED lights were far more efficient. If the energy lifecycle cost of an LED is $1, the cost of producing the same amount of light from a compact fluorescent bulb would be $1.14 and a whopping $5.36 from a traditional incandescent. (Compact fluorescents are those curly bulbs that have their own significant problems.)

So it’s true that green LED light bulbs are more efficient than traditional bulbs. Five times more efficient, which makes your soul feel warm and fuzzy. Unfortunately, your wallet, not so much. That warm and fuzzy feeling of a five times more efficient bulb will cost you fifty times more money to experience.

Of course that is just the latest in a long string of Green initiatives where your wallet plays no role in the choices you are forced to make. Ethanol is perhaps the most blatant example. Not only does it make gasoline more expensive, make your car less efficient, but it turns out that it’s also damaging your engine. As a bonus, it also has the effect of increasing food prices while doing nothing for the environment. Then there’s wind and solar energy, neither of which is even remotely close to being competitive with fossil fuels. Not only are they not competitive with traditional fuels, but at the same time they are unreliable and are not exactly inconspicuous in their footprints. How about those clean energy electric cars that cost twice as much as a similar gas fueled model and go a quarter the distance without needing a recharge? Greenies are so busy basking in the adulation received for not emitting any earth destroying gases that they forget that the electricity fueling their cars comes from coal plants which are far dirtier than gasoline powered internal combustion engines. They also conveniently forget the environmental concerns created from the manufacture of all of those batteries.

As if all of this was not bad enough, Green Jobs are expensive, highly inefficient and kill off twice their numbers in regular jobs.

Greenies inhabit s universe where cost is never a factor. Why? Because they don’t have to. They don’t have to make a coherent argument for their position and give consumers the choice of acting on those rational arguments. No, instead of the rough and tumble world based on the competition of ideas and science, they simply propagate junk science as real and then harness the police powers of government to advance their agenda.

This would be bad enough if it were just about light bulbs, gasoline and CO2, but it’s not. It’s about your fundamental choice of how to live your life. In the most simple sense, forcing Americans to pay $50 for a LED – or even $25 for a CFL – rather than the $1 they could pay for a traditional light literally takes $49 out of their pockets that they can no longer spend on anything else, from buying Twinkies to donating to the Red Cross to buying a share of the latest Internet startup.

Life is about choices and it is through the experience of making choices and living with them that individuals and societies learn about the connection between actions and consequences and by implication the responsibilities that come from choices.

Liberals of course don’t have to learn about consequences or responsibilities because they know what’s best for everyone. Even when their policies fail, both on an objective measure as well as achieving their announced goals, it doesn’t matter because they never have to face the consequences. Unfortunately it’s the rest of the population who are trying to figure out how far they can go on vacation with $4.00 a gallon gasoline who end up paying for the good fortune of living on the planet liberals are trying to save. And that doesn’t even count the taxes paid so the federal government could spend billions of dollars subsidizing electric cars, ethanol, as well as the wind and solar industries…