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C.S. Lewis and Progressivism
Progressivism was succinctly defined by C.S.Lewis as “state-love”. One of Lewis’s novels, That Hideous Strength, strives to plumb the depths of progressivism, its nature and likely ramifications. The story centers on the attempt to takeover Great Britain by the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). It’s an organization dedicated to science and scientific management, but the science has more devious inclinations than the acronym implies. From the novel, Lewis encapsulates the character of progressivism in the form of NICE: “The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.”
The cause of science-based control has a darker underbelly in the form of a security force that is headed by a Miss Hardcastle.
One of the chief protagonists, Mark, has a conversation with Hardcastle on the willingness of different groups to accept NICE propaganda. Mark expresses faith in the educated classes to be resistant. Hardcastle counters,
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
The novel and the dialogue in it foreshadow a warning about the real consequences of progressivism. A cadre of college-trained “experts” will fill the ranks of government service to more and more manage the affairs of the people. Accountability to those same citizens will be diluted because one scientific view among many will be imposed without reference to the wishes of the citizens. Their decisions have the force of law and the general public is increasingly subservient to them. Therefore, a dual threat exists in the form of a loss of sovereignty and an expansion of the state’s police powers, ergo That Hideous Strength.
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California and the Feds, Simpatico Bros
I was thinking of Lewis’s novel while reading about last year’s spate of wildfires in California. California is the epicenter of modern progressivism, a NICE writ large. Sacramento has a compulsion for all things state-love. The state’s ruling party has found few things that couldn’t be, in their estimation, improved by state intervention, especially if it is a holy war against purported oppression of fashionable victims’ groups, suppression of groups not in fashion, and the administrative deification of the environment as Gaia. One of the consequences could be an entire state literally going up in flames, among other calamitous maladies.
Our political leaders try to avoid responsibility for the disasters by directing blame elsewhere. Both of California’s recent Sierra Club governors – Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom – lay the blame at the foot of “climate change”, recently rebranded from “global warming”. From the angle of their opponents, Trump wields his rhetorical machete at California’s governing classes for their blind subservience to environmental extremism. Trump’s jab unsurprisingly comes in the form of a tweet storm:
” The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…..” (Nov. 3, 2010)
In the end, Trump’s right … partially. The lefty gang in Sacramento is enthralled to an ideal of maximal environmental preservation as defined by the state’s entrenched swarm of well-heeled eco-activists. Many of the state’s public policies appear to channel the Environmental Defense Fund to such an extent that the colorful banter among the powerful in Sacramento and Coastal soirees must center on the History Channel’s “Life after People”.
The state’s ruling class is fully on-board with the Stalinist Green New Deal. Shortly after the giddy 30-year-old freshman congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District (Ocasio-Cortez), flush with microphones and celebrity, announced the monstrosity, state party chieftains and power brokers like Kevin de Leon proudly gushed that the state was pro-Green New Deal before the Green New Deal, with its own eco-Gosplan, to be 100% “carbon neutral” on date certain. For an eco-extremist, extreme eco-ideas appear pale, and so they do for de Leon: “It’s not radical. By no stretch of imagination.”
But, then again, 57% of California’s designated forest lands are federally controlled, leading to Newsom’s subsequent tweet stab of hanging the wildfires around Trump’s neck in his response. Truly, almost three-fifths of the state’s forests are controlled out of DC … kinda. Yet, federal policies don’t always occur in the insular DC bubble. Some states have front row seats in the construction of federal land use policies, going back to 1970, in the form of review and comment procedures.
A little history lesson is in order. The Gordian Knot of federal environmental regulation got bigger with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). The mammoth law requires a period of comment for affected parties, including states, as part of the Environmental Impact Statement process. Before the US Forest Service implements land management policies, the states and everybody else in the eco-hive have to have their say. If the agency decides contra to their wishes, it’s off to the courts.
Ditto for the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). Both require inclusion of state and local perspectives in federal decision-making.
Granted, the amiability between DC and a state matures into a tag team when both are riding the same Green Peace bullet train to ecotopia. Problems arise when a state wants to get off the train because it sees the conveyance careening to disaster. That’s no problem for California. It’s got an annual pass, shares bunking privileges, and enjoys the ride to ….
What I mean is that California tacks hard left on environmental policy, like much of the federal bureaucracy since the founding of the EPA. Regarding that bureaucracy, if the 2016 election is any indication, and the Clinton-Trump race is emblematic of the divide about eco government-worship (an admittedly debatable correlation), 95% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Clinton, which comports with California’s landslide vote for Clinton (by 4.2 million votes). If anything, it’s highly probable that the ideological inclinations of the federal environmental bureaucracy coincide with the state’s ruling political machine.
So, Gavin Newsom’s reply to Trump relies on a completely unsupportable contention that the state’s one-party governing class is at ideological odds with the inclinations of the federal bureaucracy, particularly that part of it enchanted with the left’s ecotopia. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has the inside track to the governor’s mansion, state legislature, the state’s Democratic convention, and the state’s public workforce, as they do for a good chunk of the federal civil service. Complaints from the state’s mandarins about the emergence of matchstick federally-managed wildlands ring hollow since they did nothing – and were prone to be in agreement – as the fuel load mounted on those vast stretches of the BLM and USFS estates over the preceding decades. It’s a federal/state alliance for sins of omission and commission.
As all this was gestating, to be clear, Trump was nowhere to be found. He, among other things, was in and out of bankruptcy court, immersed in his tv show, and finagling real estate deals when the feds and California went eco-crazy.
Sorry, Gavin, you and your ideological fellow-travelers are complicit in the don’t-touch-nature movement, and the subsequent explosion of wildfires in the state. For Trump, he can’t even get many of his federal appointments approved, let alone leave an imprint on management practices on federal lands to counter the recklessness. Heck, that same bureaucracy is intent on trying to hang him à la impeachment.
It’s amazing when ideological biases infect the self-styled “experts” in the administrative state. Well maybe not amazing. Human beings are naturally prone to the favoritism of their biases regardless of place of employment and level of education.
What About That Sinister Culprit, Climate Change?
Have human beings inadvertently engineered a warmer climate? Could be – after all, 2.8 billion people in China and India are discovering the joys of air conditioning and the comforts and independence of the automobile. No more the dirt floors, rickshaws, and intestinal parasites for them.
The amount of greenhouse gasses from the energy necessary to power the two behemoth nations out of endemic poverty has grown dramatically. No need to belabor the point.
Has it contributed to a slight and general warming of the atmosphere? Probably. Is it catastrophic? Now that’s another matter.
Back to California, though. Regardless of the dust-up over “climate change”, the state has been dealt a difficult drought hand by mother nature, aka Gaia to the well-fed middle class twenty-somethings manning the ranks of Earth First. It is already prone to extensive dry spells due to its Mediterranean weather regime: dry summers and a short rainy season. It’s the very thing that attracted the aerospace industry, motion pictures, the trendy rich and powerful, and millions escaping the wintertime tundras everywhere else in post-WWII America. And it’s the very thing that caused the population to flood into the chronically dry biomes of the coast and foothills.
Such a climate is easy to tip over into drought. If the state doesn’t get its necessary allotment of precipitation in its 3-5 month wet season, it won’t get it at all. In fact, a study of tree ring data and other natural evidence bears the habit of significant dry spells, really big dry spells – all before Michael Mann became an ideological huckster with his “hockey stick”.
“Megadroughts” have afflicted the state over the last 1,000 years. One drought lasted 50 years starting in 850 AD. After that, another one stretched 150 years. Others extended over 10 to 20 year spans. They illustrate the fact that most of the state occupies a zone on the west coast with a sensitivity to drought.
You’d think that the state’s ruling class would realize that the same thing drawing them to the Golden State was the same thing to make it difficult to keep their swimming pools filled … and cause their chaparral vistas to explode in flames. And hopefully, one would think, lead them to ameliorate the worst of the threat. Instead, they dance to the tune of an aging water delivery system, energy policies that strip the electricity grid of the resources to protect it, and allow the fuel load to pile up on the chaparral and forest floors.
It ain’t “climate change” as the numero uno suspect for what ails the state. The offender is the same climate in existence since before the internal combustion engine, combined with the eco-foolishness that is the stock-and-trade of the state’s ruling classes. These folks are literally playing with fire.
The Tinderbox
Progressives are fond of “experts” as if the label is some kind of magical incantation. The word normally connotes a person with technical proficiency and depth of knowledge in a particular subject matter. Yet, our modern liberals can’t come to grips with the fact that these “experts” bring more than technical competence to the table. They often possess the same prejudices and biases that afflict the rest of us. If they are gung-ho for the eco-craziness of the Green New Deal and spout the same ideologically-laden tropes of much of our schools’ tendentious curriculum, they’re just as capable of bringing forth a fiasco as anyone left to flying by the seat of their pants. The designers of California’s highly combustible wildlands policies have many “experts” among their number.
And the results are disturbing. Broad expanses of dead trees have become a common fixture in the forests of the state.
A US Forest Service aerial survey in 2018 of California’s forests on state, federal, and private land discovered an additional 18 million dead trees to bring the total number to 147 million. How does it compare with previous years? A USFS official puts the normal number of additional deceased trees per year at 1 million. Drought appears to be the main driver, but drought is a chronic condition in a Mediterranean climate. Plus, why are 147 million dead trees still standing? Dead trees in a drought-sensitive climate should come as no surprise to anyone, especially to those living there. But 147 million!
Watch the progression of slides showing the increased intensity of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada from 2014 to 2018.
Reality takes a back seat to ideological jihads. Tree harvesting has been on the decline since endangered species became watchwords for ending the timber industry. In the 1990’s the debilitating reproductive habits of the spotted owl were discovered, with natural predators also reducing the species’ life spans, and an entire industry found itself locked out of many of the state’s forests. This and other campaigns have suppressed harvesting on federal lands alone to one-tenth of what it was in 1988 when Reagan was president. As a result, new tree growth outstrips harvesting. In a seven-year drought, that means lots and lots of dead trees waiting for an arsonist, a lightning storm, or a decaying electricity grid.
Here’s the kicker: the subsequent fires from neutered management practices are a greater emitter of CO2 than forests thinned of the dead stuff and therefore healthier and more capable of absorbing CO2. As one CalFire official put it, “Current flux [of CO2] may not be sustainable without forest management!”
For all the protestations for a carbon-neutral future, the state’s governing class can’t get their story straight. What do they want? Do they fancy an end to anthropogenic CO2 or more wild fires and CO2 from drought-stricken and incendiary forests and scrub land? The two go hand-in-hand in the fanciful passions of the state’s powerful eco-mandarins. Eco-passions keep getting in the way of eco-passions.
“Sustainability” and Fire
Low and behold, many of the most destructive fires originated with the policies and practices of two largest of the state-chartered energy monopolists: PG&E and Southern California Edison. There isn’t much that they do without looking over their shoulder at the frenzied eco-fancies of the ruling party in Sacramento. The state’s NICE-equivalent government, as all big governments inevitably are, has a nasty habit of leaving behind a long slime-trail of unintended consequences. One is a disintegrating infrastructure as the operators seek to patronize the lunatics running the asylum of this state’s government, the same ones who have instigated an energy-delivery infrastructure that can function as a stimulant of conflagrations.
Indeed, one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that PG&E and Southern California Edison are less about the provision of energy and more about pyromania. 6 of the 10 most damaging wild fires in the state were ignited by electrical equipment. CNBC intoned, “PG&E’s equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018.”
But how did the state’s energy giants get there – “there” being their grid as a fuse and lighted match? Many seeking to blame capitalism focus on the “investor-owned” aspect of the companies. For them, it’s simply a matter of corporate greed, notwithstanding the fact that the companies are just as much “state-controlled” as they are “investor-owned”. Anyone with the least knowledge of the state’s Public Utility Commission knows that “investor-owned” doesn’t in the slightest mean “investor-controlled”. If an eco-craze becomes the latest and greatest thing to sweep the commanding heights of academia and government, you can bet the utilities, already cognizant of the need to ingratiate their powerful regulatory benefactors, will hop to the tune. If “sustainability” – meaning wind and solar – is all the rage, they’ll happily dance to the music.
However, the song is a hot mess … as it applies to keeping the servers running and the lights running 24/7. When you trade something of high value for something of low value, it will be known as an economic exercise in degringolade (a sudden decline). It’s unavoidable. In energy parlance, the “high” valued energy is reliable and stable, such as a 24/ power generating facility like a dam or fossil fuel plant. The “low” valued kind is the energy from the intermittent-producing wind or solar farm. They’re not dependable since the wind isn’t so obliging at all times and solar rays aren’t so cooperative through cloud cover and low sun angles . So, the lunacy of greenie energy policy lies in the tenacious push for the undependable to replace the dependable.
The priesthood of the “sustainables” – and it more resembles a clergy of a new mystical faith than “science” – will rely on their incessant calls for more truckloads of cash to be poured into greenie energy research. Aha! Batteries, they preach, are the answer, but they aren’t now, but they proclaim that they will be the answer if only we pile more of the public purse into feverish attempts to make them so. I suppose that they’d be proven right if only we allow them to bankrupt the country in the endeavor.
Absolutely, an unlimited budget can work wonders if we forget the reality of economic tradeoffs. As you lavish money on one thing , you soon realize that it’s not available for something else. More money into “sustainables” may result in a Pentagon barely able to defend us from an invasion of the Federated States of Micronesia; or a Social Security system barely able to keep the needy elderly from freezing to death in winter; or we become accustomed to a hyperinflation that would make Wiemar Germany’s seem like a paragon of monetary probity … if we try to have it all.
The Arrogant and Dopey Politician
The fact that the vast majority of politicians are at best novices in scientific matters is a fair conclusion, since huge numbers of them spirited off to law school and not to the research labs of Dow Chemical or MIT after getting their BA’s. They have all the gullibility of the ill-informed.
After activist politician meets activist scientist, your congressional representative can become quite a zealot . Indeed, there is such a person as an activist scientist. Does Michael Mann remind you of the type? For me, he does. Like him, many are infected with the same ideological biases that circulate among our self-styled cultural betters, of which they might consider themselves a charter member.
Buttressed in their “truth”, having the support of compatriot ideological zealots in lab coats, the people with the power to make law and impose it on us can be quite conceited in their convictions. How many times have we been exposed to this or that firebrand officeholder resorting to the tendentious pronouncements of this or that supposedly disinterested agglomeration of scientific experts?
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a classic example of the type. The politicos mouthing the pieties of the ideological-driven group of “experts” are completely ignorant of the pitfalls, cognitive holes, foolish assumptions, loose inferences, and faulty modeling that were garnered from the routine experience of previous failed scientific explorations. The experience makes a real scientist much more humble, not so the militant politician.
Instead, we get the demand to sit down and shut up or face the state attorney general.
And things get worse for wind and solar. Once the prime sites have been taken, our potentates will have to command the move into less productive locations to increase generation. As energy productivity declines from more and more solar panels and windmills in non-accommodating areas, what’s the effect on the broader society? It won’t be benign as higher costs, poorer service, interruptions, dilapidated facilities and equipment, and a widening income gap filter through the population. Skyrocketing utility bills have that effect.
And, don’t forget, the eruption of more wildfires.
Those Pesky Marginal Sites
Just imagine those high voltage transmission lines stretching over long distances of chaparral scrubland from the few places places with acceptable amounts of sun and wind to cities and towns further away. The highly-prized locations aren’t likely to be near those high-rises and exurban subdivisions with their curvilinear streets and swimming pools. If the lines are poorly maintained and subject to extreme weather, expect the hills to burn bright at night.
To bring the generation closer to the end-users means probable placement in less productive spots, because if prime locations were near the cities , the facilities would already be there. It begs the question. Greenie energy isn’t as location-friendly as a fossil fuel plant. Conversely, you could build a coal/gas-fired plant just about anywhere, if you can get past the nimbies [not in my back yard] and celebrity sit-ins at the construction site.
The expansion of wind and solar into marginal locations exacerbates the cost problem with these sources. They are already behind the economics eight ball before you move a spade of dirt. Once we include the costs of backup plants (peaker plants to keep the power flowing when the wind and sun doesn’t cooperate), longer transmission lines, subsidies, and immense dislocations due to guaranteed market shares, wind comes in at twice as expensive as conventional sources; solar power is three times as expensive.
Back to the problem of guaranteed market shares, promising anyone a customer base – or “market share” – ensures increases in costs by stripping the efficiencies of competition and volitional refusal out of the economic equation. The wind and solar producers get a first call on the taxpayer’s and ratepayer’s dollar.
Is that any way to run a grid? It is if you want your energy industry to look like something in the third world.
I wonder about the depressing effects of escalating energy costs on the overall economy and the economy’s ability to generate the funds for maintenance. Something has to give. People and businesses leave and/or reduce their economic activity which translates into disasters-in-waiting from a dilapidated grid, like the hillsides going up in flames.
Central Planners at Heart
Nobody in their right mind would knowingly wish for such a future. The emphasis is on the word “knowingly”. Point of fact, most of the public doesn’t know and their freely-chosen representatives are equally ignorant, but that won’t stop them from foisting the hot mess on their constituents.
Imposition is absolutely essential because the discomforting consequences would become so readily apparent to those with eyes to see. Thus, people must not be allowed to freely choose or not choose the nonsense. Their self-anointed “betters” have already decided the proper course for them. Whether with the velvet glove of subsidies – aka bribes – or the stick of punishing rates, people must be made to fall in line. In the end, greenie energy leads to one place: central planning.
So California, and her like-minded sister states, gets to relive the economic performance of the Soviet Union. The only problem is the unintended consequence of shortages and blackouts … and a grid that reflects the broader economic slide. It’s Gosplan with a fiery end.
The two photos above signify the same thing: two powerful central planning agencies, one in Sacramento and the other in Moscow. In the former, towns burn down.
In the latter, people queue up.
Lewis’s NICE would be mightily impressed, and at the same time care less.
RogerG