If California Didn't Exist, Austrians Would Have to Invent It

Clownifornia delivers another lesson in central planning and interventionism gone wrong. Retail sales spiked in October when California issued a stimulus check. Retail sales fell in November.

If America chose a pet rock for president, it would be a successful term because the pet rock would not intervene. Unfortunately, there are bad policies that do constant intervention that must be unwound, but a pet rock would come up with no stupid ideas, which it seems is the only thing the Baizuo ruling class can come up with.

Do Californians Know They Live in A Desert?

Part of climate change hysteria is driven by Americans who live in deserts and don't know it. SF Chronicle: Mono Lake was supposed to have been saved from going dry. Now, the ‘white stuff’ forces a reckoning

The drought bearing down on Mono Lake and the rest of California picks up on a two-decade run of extreme warming and drying. It’s a product of the changing climate that has begun to profoundly reshape the landscape of the West and how people live within it.

Nope. You live in a desert.

Phys.org: Ancient Southwest marked by repeated periods of boom and bust

This is particularly important as droughts of just five or ten years were enough to prompt major shifts in the small niches where Pueblo people grew maize, their major crop.

The niches, said Kohler, were "woven together with a web of ceremony and ritual that required belief in the supernatural" to ensure plentiful rain and good crops. When rains failed to appear, he said, the rituals were delegitimized.

"Then there's a point where people say, 'This isn't working. We're leaving,'" he said.

That starts a period of exploration in which people look for new places to live and develop new ways of living, followed by a period of exploitation in a new niche with different behaviors and values.

"There's a new period of wealth creation, investment in architecture and culture change," said Kohler.

The researchers said the first period of exploitation, known as Basketmaker III, took place between 600 and 700 A.D. It ended with a mild drought and was followed by a period known as Pueblo I, in which the practice of storing maize in underground chambers gave way to storage in rooms above ground.

The researchers think this represents a shift from unrestricted sharing of food to more restricted exchanges controlled by households or family groups. The period ended around 890 with a slightly larger drought.

The exploitation phase of the Pueblo II period ran from 1035 to 1145 and was marked by large shared plazas and great houses—what we would today call McMansions—in the Chaco Canyon area south of Mesa Verde, Colo.

"We're talking some of the largest—actually, the largest—prehistoric masonry structures in North America north of Mexico," said Kohler. "These things are huge."

Wood for roofs had to come from 50 to 75 miles away, requiring an unprecedented level of coordination. The mix of large and small buildings also suggests a more hierarchal social structure with someone in charge.

Climate change is a big deal when you live in a place that has adequate rainfall and water supply for a few hundred years and then turns into a dry desert. Ignoring the reality of this cycle moves a society from one in deep trouble facing serious climate problems to one that exterminates itself with energy and economic policies that facilitate mass distribution of Darwin Awards.

Don't Build a Megalopolis in a Desert

California has been a desert for most of its history. The aberration is the climate that has existed the past few hundred years. In terms of policy, there has been zero consideration of water supply.

Yahoo: California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought

California regulators on Thursday rejected a $1.4 billion desalination plant on environmental grounds, dealing a setback to Governor Gavin Newsom, who had supported the project as a partial solution for the state's sustained drought.

The California Coastal Commission voted 11-0 to reject the proposal by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management, to build the plant on a low-lying coastal site at Huntington Beach, near the town of Costa Mesa, about 30 miles (50 km) south of Los Angeles.

The plant was designed to convert Pacific Ocean water into 50 million gallons (189.3 million liters) of drinking water a day.

That is enough for 400,000 people, but the plant would use a process that staff experts at the commission said would devastate marine life and expose the plant to future risk of sea level rise while producing expensive water too costly for low-income consumers.

The state isn't in a sustained drought. It is in a desert. There isn't going to be any low cost solution.

Maybe this plant was a bad idea in this location though. The state is dumb enough to have that high-speed rail boondoggle ongoing, so it's better to assume policy is like an episode of Three Stooges with bad ideas all around. Looking at it from a distance and knowing what I know of the state, Californians don't want a plant on their coast. A large component of environmetalism there (and everywhere to be fair) is NIMBYism. Perhaps they should negotiate with Mexico for a plant there and pipe desalinbated water into the United States.

Putting a climate change label on this post because California's climate is changing, albeit predictably and not because of anything man has done. The water shortage is manmade though, because California didn't plan for it. Instead, they did as they are doing with electric cars, they ramped up demand (via mass migration across the border) while at the same time supply of water was in decline.

First of Many: California Town Bans New Gas Stations

Axios: Cities are starting to ban new gas stations

Petaluma, California, has voted to outlaw new gas stations, the first of what climate activists hope will be numerous cities and counties to do so.

You can be 100 percent assured they did zero study of future demand needs.