Green Tape

President Biden, channeling a combination of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, Marie Antoinette (apocryphally) dismissing the peasants' starvation with 'let them eat cake,' and Alfred E. Neuman's 'what, me worry?' indifference to all that is besetting Americans and America, just canceled leasing opportunities for oil and gas exploration in Alaska's Cook Inlet.

California, in the midst of a three year drought, just rejected a desalination plant in Huntington Beach that would have provided 50 million gallons of drinking water a day for Orange County.

California environmentalists are seeking to kill a proposed reservoir project north of Sacramento, for all the usual reasons (that, when dissected, boil down to hating humanity).

In California as well, green initiatives have coupled with union resistance to modernization and anti-gig-economy strictures to bottleneck cargo flow through the Long Beach port, contributing substantially the supply chain issues that have plagued the nation for the past few months.

New York City is enacting a ban on gas heat and appliances in new buildings. This layers on top of the cancellation of several natural gas pipeline projects that would have crossed the Hudson River from upstate to provide that fuel to the metropolitan area - cancellations that have prompted the local utilities to moratoria on new natural gas hookups.

The risk of rolling brownouts this summer in places like California, where carbon energy is being abandoned with reckless abandon, is increasingly likely. Yet, plans to shut down the state's last nuclear power plant, despite nuclear power being greener than everything else, remain in place.

Gasoline prices across the nation are at or near record highs, but rather than ease up on the war against oil that the administration adopted from Day 1, the administration makes specious accusations about industry indifference and greed in order to deflect blame and avoid doing anything.

Welcome to the world of "green tape," where regulation, bureaucracy, institutional inertia, and duplicity are used to worsen our lives.

For no good purpose. As I've blogged repeatedly, none of these green initiatives will amount to a hill-of-beans difference in global warming, given geo-political realities, resource availability, and technological limitations. Many engage in willful delusion to avoid admitting these truths. Others don't care - the virtue is in the act, not the result. Still others have baser reasons for their against-any-sense obstinacy, including the desire to impose socialistic economics, to achieve personal power and/or wealth, and just a hatred of humanity itself.

The imposition of Byzantine ("of, relating to, or characterized by a devious and usually surreptitious manner of operation") rules on the private sector by our governments is nothing new. Rent-seekers, power-mongers, and anti-liberty types routinely exploit the labyrinthine complexities of our regulatory maze (yes, that's a redundant metaphor) for personal gain and to advance their preferred outcomes.

This isn't new. Enviros routinely delay or kill developments, no matter popular public sentiment or overall benefit to society, by exploiting the bureaucracy and the legal system. Three epic examples are New York City's Westway project, Tennessee's Tellico Dam, and Northern California's water shortage in the earlier 2010s.

Westway, a massive development of Manhattan's western riverfront in the wake of the collapse of a section of the West Side Highway in 1973, was delayed and ultimately killed, thanks to the persistence of one person (Marcy Benstock, known as the "Soot Lady") and a massive leveraging of federal courts. It took additional decades for that decrepit stretch to be renovated and utilized, and it’s still nowhere near what Westway promised to be.

The Tellico Dam was delayed by enviros levering the Endangered Species Act over a fish called a snail darter.

California's water problems can be traced to the delta smelt, a fish that lives in the San Francisco Bay, and the heart of the water wars of recent years. The ripple effects of that water mismanagement continue to this day.

In all of these and many more matters across the decades, prudent stewardship of the environment has been superseded by anti-humanity excess, with small minorities of dedicated fanatics quashing things that would benefit the people. These range from the global (e.g. the war on carbon energy, anti-DDT, anti-GMO), to the national (e.g. the administration's hatred of cheap gasoline, “net-zero”), to the regional (the aforementioned examples and thousands more), to the picayune (bans on plastic bags and drinking straws).

Green tape that restricts our liberties.

Green tape that slows our projects and progress.

Green tape that reduces our living standards.

Green tape that grants excessive power to fanatics.

Green, we are told, is good. And, indeed, googling the phrase will return all sorts of "good" examples.

At its core, however, "green" is really about hating liberty and human prosperity. Not the idealized, aspirational green that is about a cleaner and happier world for us to live in, but the actual green that is the opposite.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.