Limits To Growth: California’s Dysfunctional Political System

California

H/T Walter Russell Mead

While there are geological limits to growth (such as Peak Water in Saudi Arabia), OD has always been fascinated by the interplay of other factors upon the energy question.

Some of the limits to growth are purely political … such as the development of California’s offshore oil reserves, or the national influence of the Democratic Party in Congress:

“Sixty-percent of the electricity in Los Angeles, a key bastion of Obama support, comes from coal-fired plants in Utah and Arizona; much of the natural gas that provides nearly half of the power for California’s grid is imported . . .

Nowhere is the element of choice inherent in energy policy more evident than in California, home to five of the nation’s twelve largest oil fields and energy reserves equal to those of Nigeria, the world’s tenth-largest producer. As high-paying energy jobs swell payrolls in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and parts of the Gulf, the Golden State has double-digit unemployment, a collapsed inland economy and a series of bankrupt municipalities. Amidst a great national energy boom, California’s energy production has remained stunted even as the state’s draconian “renewable” energy mandates are slated to drive up its already high electricity rates. The state’s high cost of energy has impacted industry: despite its vast human and natural resources, the Golden State, with 12 percent of the nation’s population received barely 2 percent of the country’s manufacturing expansions last year.

Such inattention to California’s resources may be popular in wealthy precincts of Silicon Valley, San Francisco and west Los Angeles, but the state’s green approach has helped place traditionally manufacturing-oriented communities such as Oakland, east Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Stockton in deep distress. Despite central California’s vast deposits of oil and gas, unemployment rates in some oil-rich areas there are over 15 and sometimes even 20 percent.”

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27 Comments

  1. Why does any-one involved in perpetrating this monstrous system imagine that the system is sustainable?

  2. They can’t wrap their minds around reality. In the marketplace of stories about the American future, the truth loses the competition with happy talk propagated by self-interested rackets.

    In this case, California’s offshore energy reserves are a politically imposed limit to growth. California voluntarily chooses high gas pices and unemployment over lower gas prices and middle class jobs.

    Just like the state chooses to cut higher education while offering in state tuition to illegal aliens. It is excellent example of how a dysfunctional political system intersects with the energy crisis to exacerbate the problem.

  3. We have the same problem in the South regarding using our resources. Yankeeland won’t allow us to dig coal or go after natural deposits, and they shut down the last of our textile industry in the late 80’s.

  4. So why doesn’t Arizona and Utah, or the people there who control the power distribution, cut off the people of Los Angeles?

    So why doesn’t the South, or the people who live there, just dig the coal and go after the natural deposits anyway, despite the Yankees?

    The two questions above, conceptually speaking, go to the very heart of every single iota of the problems discussed so stridently by pro-whites and the kind of people who visit this site and others like it.

    Or to put it another way, why do the “salt of the earth” and normal people, whatever name or designation you want to give us, allow a relatively small percentage of paper pushing Jews and Yankee liberals to simply always have their way?

  5. Do those things and the fed comes down on you with both boots planted in your face. That’s lesson learned the last time we tried going our own way. Now the smart plan is to let the union crash and burn then go our own way

  6. No, Stonelifter, you are still dodging my question and the point.

    It is NOT and was not the small paper pushing men in suits and ties who are “the fed” that put their boot on you or put a bullet through your skull. It was and is men who looked and look just like you and might have grown up and come from right next door who actually did that work. Probably 98 percent of them were not and are not much different in their actual opinions as you and I, if asked or in how they live and try to raise their kids. They are only WORKING for, and mostly for the same reasons you and I work, the paper pushers.

    So again, I ask, WHY is it that a small percentage of mostly small paper pushers have their way over us? The cop, ATF agent, soldier, is NOT the boss. The boss is just what I describe, for the most part.

    Today, it is just like I stated, in the final analysis, when you boil it down. A small group of weak, pencil necks and weirdos are controlling everyone.

    Why is this?

    I can well imagine that the vast majority of cops, soldiers, and the other men who work as the “Muscle” of the “State,” pretty much share our morals and ideological beliefs and are not pro queer, pro nigger, pro wish-all-women-were-sluts, pro Bill Clinton social politics, etc–you get what I mean.

    But they allow the kind of people like what we hate to be their bosses. A small group of bookish types run the show and can order armies of men who are mostly like you or I to put a boot down on faces. And the orders are always carried out.

    Why?

    That is the concept I am speaking of, stonelifter.

  7. “Simply because we submit to the authority of the federal government and accept its legitimacy.”

    Exactly. That is what I mean and am asking why about.

  8. And let us not talk in only abstractions here. The Government is an abstraction. It is made up of living, breathing, humans with names and faces. And mostly they fit the physical description I gave above.

  9. in the now, money. Folks have debt to pay off, kids to feed etc and no real wealth of their own so they’ll do damn near anything to protect what little they have. That and life is still easy living for the vast majority of Whites, with to much to risk and to little to gain. We’ll see that change as the debt and all the non-sense our service economy is based on

    easy living is a curse

  10. Maybe we will see that change.

    Maybe.

    Sadly, however, I am forced by what I have seen over and over to not be willing to bet over a dirty nickel that it will change much. I don’t think there is going to be any uprising or any such thing.

    I don’t speak in terms of forever, because forever is a very long time, but I think they–you know what I mean–are going to continue more or less having their way over us for at least a hundred years.

  11. I don’t think things will get better in my lifetime either Brutus, A 100 years? I don’t think things can last that long. Sooner or later the debt, the lie of an economy based on debt and economic inefficiency that comes from affirmative action, environmental law etc will catch up. The USSR certainly didn’t last a 100 years, and BRA has been going on for a long time. The usa has been a socialist state for a lot longer then BRA. BRA/WRA is simply the latest version of american socialism. Seems to me 50 years give or take a few. Either way, I doubt it will happen in my life time. That realization has brought peace to my soul. I figure it is my job to provide my sons with the tools to see it done.

    I’d like to see the day, perhaps I will be blessed with that, perhaps not, but it is enough to know I’ve done what I can do. Perfect doesn’t happen. A man does what he can when he can and should learn to be ok with that.

  12. Who cares about economic growth? Brown people stagnate, so why should whites do more for them then the minimum? Damn the non-whites all but practically tell us explicitly that they hate ideas, but NO we whites keep on pestering them with “change.”

  13. @Brutus: “I don’t speak in terms of forever, they are going to continue more or less having their way over us for at least a hundred years.”

    The law of exponents will end this farce soon. Stated another way, doubling time assures the the end one way or another in so many fronts.

    Social security is bankrupt yet 1) the baby boomers, the pig going through the python, are starting to stop working and start taking; 2) SS disability takers are growing by leaps and bounds. Medicare also is growing faster and faster as is Medicaid. Obama Care if implemented will spend even more money faster and faster. Spending is accelerating at all levels of government given the contracts signed by “bought and paid for” politicians with Government Employee Unions especially for pensions and benefits.

    Just look at the growth of spending under the last Bush and now Obama: Bush was the biggest spender in presidential history yet Obama made Bush appear to be a piker. See: http://tinyurl.com/3ql6uc3 or . With spending growth “baked in the cake” already the economic engine of America is running over the cliff with Municipal and State Bankruptcies galore and ballooning Federal Deficits that will crowd out most private sector borrowing unless one chooses to destroy the dollar, either way the financial system collapses.

    We don’t have 100 years; we don’t have 10 years; we may not even have 5 years.

    The bright side: with collapse there is the possibility of renewal.

    Dan Kurt

  14. Dan Kurt makes a good argument for over-spending leading to collapse, but sees a possible bright side.

    In fact, the abuse by the nation’s power centers of economic realities may be the purpose of our adversaries who may have an interest in national collapse. If so, their plan is undoubtedly to take advantage of a major crisis to plug the USA more thoroughly into a global state structure. At that point, readers’ votes will be equal with votes by Argentinian clam eaters and mini-African pygmies.

    That a collapse would benefit white liberationists and white Americans may be a wish, and not a possibility. Are we ready with a plan in the event of a collapse? Who is providing sensible, practical approaches to this?

  15. @ Brutus

    Because it’s easier to blame Jews and Yankees than to get off the couch, put down the can of beer, and take action.

    It’s pretty funny watching all these people poke fun at California. That state has its problems, but at least it isn’t infected by Negroes the way the South is.

  16. Ok, just let me get this straight.

    There is a ton of offshore oil along CA’s coastline, but the eco-freaks and the Malibu Barbie Movie stars don’t want to see oil rigs out their panorama windows?

    Why not make a nice eco-garden over these sites- make it look ‘attractive’ and then charge admission to these sites, and have the wells disguised? Make it a tourist attraction (only whites can go, no jihadists, tree-huggers, or Hollywood weirdos like Charlie Sheen, or Geo. Clooney) and charge admission to an ‘oil day spa’ like Catalina…. Just a conjecture…..

    Bite the nose to spite the face…. I now have a clear idea of what that really means, in this instance.

  17. WG:It’s pretty funny watching all these people poke fun at California.

    To an extent yes, it is.

    WG:That state has its problems, but at least it isn’t infected by Negroes the way the South is.

    Yet it has infected itself by allowing illegals in, who live off the system and drain it of its wealth. Along with all the liberals who promote it and drain it themselves. Then they export their white flight folks to corrupt other states. The worst part with the fleeing idiots being that most won’t/can’t distinguish between what was working for them back in CA and what caused them to flee for greener pastures.

  18. I have been debating about What to Do – vote Romney, or write in Paul.

    I’m going for Romney. He will do whatever his Israeli Overlords tell him to do. Which is get us into a war with Iran. That will crash us harder than Obama, and his buddy Holder – who will just kill us here.

    I WANT this to crash. The sooner the better. Dan Kurt is right about exponentials. Events accelerate. Now to 5 years is about right.

  19. If I really believed “now to five years” I think I’d be supporting Obama. Best he get the tattoo for “bigest loser American President of all time”. Let BRA take the blame for BRA’s failure and not confuse it with issues of Mormonism or even neo-Conservatism.

  20. RRS

    “Brown people stagnate, so why should whites do more for them then the minimum?”

    Atlas will Shrug if we all do as little possible to make wealth in a form of easy confiscation. Identity starts at the level of a local community. Support your local area businesses, make as much as you can on your own, grow as much as you are able too, trade before you use the paper dollar. Put as little money into New York and D.C. as possible.

    As far as a financial collapse is concerned, one of two things would expedite the process. A major financier of debt such as China or Japan announcing they were no longer going to buy Treasury Bonds as they realize the U.S. is monetizing the debt via printing, effectively ending dollar hegemony, would be the easiest way to collapse the system. Also, oil is traded exclusively in dollars, which has the effect of backing our currency. Were that to stop it would go a long ways into delegitimizing the dollar.

    Imagine, in the case of the first example, worthless dollars (by extension EBT, etc) not allowing feral types to adequately eat (let alone become obese) along with suburbanites not being able to commute into work and facing massive budget shortfalls due to fuel and food. Perfect storm for civil unrest. That could be the moment where the nation fractures.

  21. Maybe the Rockefellers could hire some Russian Scientists to teach the poor innocent Rockefellers the truth of Oil being Abiotic, and not “peak”. Or would the truth cause too much havoc in their pacific Imperial Empire? Only God, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers know for sure. Too bad Saudi oil is peak while Russian oil is Abiotic. I imagine California oil must be from dinosaurs bones : That’s what Fred and Barney said. Fred and Barney came on right before the Andy Griffith Show and after Bonanza. If my memory serves correctly.

  22. Bah, they’ll blame anyone but themselves. It doesn’t matter much who is in charge when the collapse comes.

  23. We are not pumping oil in this nation because it will be used to pay back the Chinese once the whole system falls apart. We have all this oil in both California and Alaska(and else where), what are we waiting for?

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