The Lords of Scarcity

[Kamaji]

The Lords of Scarcity

Corporations and financial special interests have long since realized that environmentalism is a means to control markets and capital.

By Edward Ring
June 19, 2022

One of the farmers who supported our attempt to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act for the November 2022 ballot was John Duarte. It was a privilege to speak with Duarte, because his reputation had preceded him. Duarte is the man who had the temerity—and uncommon courage—to sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when they ordered him to stop farming one of his properties. The Corps argued that the rain puddles that formed on Duarte’s 450 acres in Tehama County were vernal pools.

The case was eventually settled in 2017, but only after the government countersued and a federal district court rejected Duarte’s claims. Facing the infinite resources of the federal bureaucracy, Duarte decided against filing an appeal and paid the fines. During our first conversation, and subsequently, it was Duarte who coined the phrase “Lords of Scarcity.” It is a vividly accurate way to describe the many special interests, public and private, that benefit from regulations and rationing.

This economic fact remains underappreciated: When regulations are imposed on businesses and public agencies that make it almost impossible for them to build something, whatever that something produces becomes more expensive. This fact rests on the law of supply and demand, and only requires a minor intuitive leap from that foundation: When demand exceeds supply, because supplies have been restricted, whoever owns existing supplies makes more profit.

These owners are the Lords of Scarcity, and California is their citadel.

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The consequences of that realization are predictable and have been in full effect for years. Environmentalist overregulation is no longer an economic burden to large corporations, if it ever was. Rather, it is a way to create barriers to entry for emerging competitors, and a way to wipe out existing competitors that lack the scale or the financial resilience to comply with new environmental edicts. And here again, irony abounds.

Our initiative campaign was vilified as a vehicle for “wealthy landowners” and “powerful multinational corporations” to “subvert environmental protections” and “create a bottomless slush fund for the super-rich.”

But what is really happening? Could it be that the biggest, wealthiest landowners do not want the price of water to go down? Why would they want that? They also do not want the price of land to go down. The more these necessities cost, the wealthier they get. Here is the exact transcript of an email I received from a wealthy landowner, in response to my request to support our initiative: “I am not for it. I think it will not be helpful.”

You don’t have to try too hard to read what is unwritten in that statement. Affordable land and abundant water are unhelpful if your wealth is tied up in land with water rights.

As for powerful multinational corporations, here is the exact transcript of an email I received from a member of a partnership formed to financialize water markets:

“Thanks for the details, Edward. Unfortunately, I can’t support this as I think it is fundamentally the wrong strategy. More supply? Really? The exact opposite of my beliefs.…”

Precisely. There is no incentive for wealthy landowners or powerful multinational corporations to see the value of land or water go down.

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The Lords of Scarcity have correctly identified energy and water as essential prerequisites for almost every other product or service. Activist and former gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger identifies nuclear power and desalination as two game-changing options that have been suppressed in an April essay for Eurasia Review.

Shellenberger, who has long advocated for construction of more nuclear power plants, presents the original blueprints for Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, showing that PG&E originally planned to construct six reactors. As it is, Diablo Canyon’s two operating reactors are scheduled to be shut down by 2025, which Shellenberger alleges is 40 years premature based on their design life. With its continuous output of 1.1 gigawatts, just one reactor at Diablo Canyon produces enough energy to desalinate over 2 million acre-feet of water per year. But there’s much more to this story. Shellenberger writes:

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Source:  https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/19/the-lords-of-scarcity/

[Smokin Joe]

California is only five percent urbanized. Five percent. The significance of this bears further explanation. The state of California sprawls across 163,000 square miles, there are 25,000 square miles of grazing land and 42,000 square miles of agricultural land. Of that, 14,000 square miles are prime agricultural land. You could put 10 million new residents into homes, four per household, on quarter-acre lots, with an equal amount of land set aside for roads, parks, and commercial districts, and you would only consume 1,953 square miles. If you built those new cities on the best prime agricultural land California’s got, you would only use up 14 percent of it. If you scattered those homes among all of California’s farmland and grazing land—which is far more likely—you would only use up 3 percent of it.

The reason this doesn’t happen is that in every case, on every potential building site, there is an irreplaceable ecosystem that must remain pristine, and well-funded environmentalist attorneys prepared to engage in endless litigation to preserve it. If California’s current land-use policies were in force for the last century, where would anyone live? Would anything have ever been built?

The Lords of Scarcity, using an extreme and self-serving interpretation of environmentalism as moral cover, have declared war on every essential resource necessary to deliver Californians an affordable and decent quality of life. Every building block of prosperity and every enabling economic foundation of the civilization we enjoy—water, energy, housing and food—is under attack.

And the same model is being used nationally.

It has to stop.

Old School Conservationists knew there was a balance that could be struck between human use of natural (not farmed) resources, farming, fishing, hunting, ranching, mining, and industry that would support large populations reasonably well, without scarcity--in fact with an exportable surplus that would enhance the basic prosperity of having enough, with being able to trade for items which could not be made, grown, mined, or built within that ecosystem. It was about balance, about keeping a dynamic system going, not about trying to preserve it in some arbitrary stasis. But it is in the name of that stasis that areas are being closed off, and resources are being denied, and often lost.