How California Should Prepare For The Future

Thanks to Black Swans and my Boy Scout training, I find the current govt behaving like a Disney(tm) Ostrich, with its head in the sand.

There is no serious preparation for Peak Oil or fuel interruption, and right now there must be or we'll get screwed when that Black Swan finally happens. Some of this needs to be enabled by govt. Or govt needs to get out of the way. As the current governor is obsessed with the Train To Nowhere and keeping his constituents in LA happy with water subsidies, I have to think of all the things I would do BETTER if I were in charge. Every man knows he can out-think a fool, even if the man he's sure is a fool really isn't. Its entirely possible that Brown is utterly stymied by entrenched communists in the Assembly and Senate, preventing preps he's pushing for but never get airplay on the media because Peak Oil prep isn't sexy enough. Its possible. I just don't know. I have never met Gov. Brown myself. Maybe he knows all about Peak Oil. It just isn't happening.

If I ran the state of California, if I were the governor, I'd be focused on two things. California is about Agriculture and Tourism. That's what we do ever since we exported our technology jobs. We have great weather and great scenery and most of the state is EMPTY. Despite 33 million people here, its mostly empty. A great safe place to visit. So bring in the tourist dollars. We're not getting full employment for 33 million people by outsourcing our jobs to China and India. Sorry, but we're not. That must be reversed.

Our agriculture is dependent on irrigation, supplied by our annual winter monsoon rains. The trouble with those is sedimentation is filling up the dams and reducing their capacity. Some of that is erosion following wildfires, which means preventing wildfires, or at least managing them better so there's a lot less erosion is crucial to that multi-billion dollar industry. Funny how forestry is so important to the state. Its the Sierras that stop the clouds and force the rains to fall. Adiabatic heating, is the scientific cause. That's half the issue.

The other issue is the sediment filling the reservoirs needs to be dug out and removed. The way to accomplish that is temporarily drain the dams, or do the clearing when water levels are low, with bulldozers and trucks. Dredging and silt don't go together. It just liquefies and ends up downstream making the mess worse where there's other problems. Like between the levees, making the river level rise higher and higher so floods cut through them and flood the protected delta farmland. This happens, too.

Flood control is a huge issue here because, like the Tigris and Euphrates basins, we get our floods at exactly the wrong time. The floods come right after planting instead of before, like you see in Egypt.

We solved this crucial problem with the above dams, catching the snow melt and paring it out for summer irrigation. This is what they tried to do in ancient Sumeria (aka Babylon aka Iraq) and often failed. Siltation is the enemy of flood control. The 3 Rivers Gorge Dam is filling up with silt so those two million people and 3,000 year old temples they evicted and destroyed? Wasted effort. In a decade or less it will be full of mud and just an expensive waterfall. That's what happens. Lake Mead is doing the same thing. Damming the Colorado River just traps the silt a while. LA has given up its water rights to the Colorado, getting it from us instead. Every tax-payer in California is paying for cheap water to LA so LA can have green lawns and we have low-flow toilets and showheads. Thank you LA! I hate you!

Technology is a sideline which should be encouraged, but outsourcing production should be tariffed to hell so outsourcing companies are penalized instead of rewarded. It needs to be built here. So people here have jobs. Staying home unemployed just leads to babies you can't feed, drug problems, burglary, and other crime. It is NOT leading to new businesses. A big part of that is the regulations which scare away the largely ignorant new business makers from actually doing business here. They leave the state so they can figure things out as they go rather than be fined and shut down out of ignorance and vicious Fascist inspectors who are actually looking for a bribe a new business can't afford. And I wouldn't say bribe if I wasn't personally aware of many cases of EXACTLY that. And that person still has their job as a State fire inspector! WTF! Even local newspaper coverage didn't get them fired. Or arrested since a crime was committed.

Detroit is a fantastic example of our national unemployment problem. All those beaten down car engineers that lost their jobs when the big 3 went under (just long enough to fire them). How many started businesses with ideas their supervisors turned down as too expensive or not fashionable enough? None that I know of. Though some likely exist, none of them did it in Detroit. Smart people abandoned the place like the war zone it became and went elsewhere. Move somewhere cheaper and safer that still has streetlights, sewer and water. Detroit is like Beirut without the TV coverage and truck bombings. But the violence is there. You don't start businesses in war zones if you just want to make better cars. I think many of the engineers just plain retired, or found entirely different careers. And this is a terrible loss for America. If GM and Ford hadn't refused to upgrade their suspensions, they would have competed with the European cars which handle better because they don't have a fixed axle with leaf springs. Hondas outsold American sedans because they're all independent suspensions which won't flip over and kill you because there's a pothole on the corner. That MATTERS. Honda also doesn't fall back on "Oh they all do that" when you complain to the dealer about a problem. GM and Ford and that other one that just makes trucks, they failed customer service consistently for decades.

Then the Big 3 opted to build SUVs when they knew damned well there were no serious oil discoveries since 1964, and even Prudhoe Bay just helped a little, didn't fix the problem and would run dry soon. If they'd been smart, they could have talked up sexy cute cars and build something like a Spyder with fender flares and a good engine roar that got 40 mpg back in 1985. And no, I'm not talking about that POS Pontiac. They should have taken part in and promoted rally car racing so the Europeans would see our cars and been impressed instead of dismissive. They could have done this. We should be doing this now, leading the way. Instead Detroit got taken over by the Governor, the mayor etc face dereliction charges and probably other fun stuff involving felony jail time and Detroit's sole value is for making post-apocalyptic zombie movies. Which really, we're all tired of.

As Governor, I wouldn't want any city in California to be a war zone. Not Oakland, not Stockton, not South Central LA or Fresno or South Sacramento. Any law enforcement chief refusing to answer 911 calls gets arrested for dereliction of duty. Felony dereliction. Have fun in prison. I'd put into LAW that 911 calls must be responded to, and force it through the state constitution so it can't be overturned or ignored. If you are a civilized country, you protect your citizens from crime. No excuses.

I believe in self defense. Especially for young women and mothers who are way too often victims of violent crime. I would allow concealed carry and repeal the no-guns in public spaces rules because its not fair for a housewife with a stalking ex husband to be murdered at the post office or picking up her kids from school. There's been ONE post office shooting in 200 years. Banning CCW there is asinine. Particularly since cops carry there so it is already violated.

I would also see about offering low cost loans to FAMILIES so they can get foreclosed houses instead of "investors" who then rehab and jack up the rent, leaving families broke and unable to get the white picket fence, something very close to my own heart. I think Habitat for Humanity is doing good charity work. More organizations like them should exist.

I would also offer incentives to move business out of the really expensive cities with water pumping keeping them green and shift population back (from the coastal cities) to where water is gravity fed and cheap (central valley). The best way is to shut off the water subsidies and make residents pay the real price. Leave the $1000/month water bills to rich people. Many central valley cities are ghost towns but would be cheap to run those big Bay Area and LA businesses. The water is already there. Pumping water 5 feet up a well is a hell of a lot less energy than 1200 or 3000 feet over a mountain pass. The energy cost of irrigation of cities in California is horrifying. We could be energy independent if LA was left a desert. Instead we spend billions on pumping WATER. That has to end. A large portion of the irrigated land in the southern San Joaquin valley is ruined by caliche, a form of calcite sealing caused by over-irrigation. The damage has been done, and can't be fixed for long. The land is a lost cause. It would make good rice paddies... or we could rebuild the massive lake that used to be there which served as wild migratory bird habitat. Allow the Kern River to flood there and provide just enough water flow to keep it from going stagnant so the birds come back. They WOULD. We'd get our flamingos again. And all those geese and ducks. Environmental win instead of parched desert. The only real downside is potential mosquitoes, however with all the water you could plant appropriate mosquito eating fish, like brown trout, and that offers sport fishing. Its also food for the birds. Yet more potential tourism opportunities.

A California governor should get involved in the solar debacle. Solar is something which would work here, provided we're building the panels really cheap and thus can afford to install them on every roof. We get over 320 days a year of sun, give or take 20 days for drought or a wet year. PV Panels plus batteries means you can cut California power demand by half. Maybe more. Most power goes to water heating. If you pour the PV power into a water heater, all day long as the sun shines you're heating your water tank and NOT drawing from the grid. This is a good thing and is very simple. An independent loop means its not interfering with PG&E so the issue of dealing with them is moot. I remember well the blackouts in California associated with the Enron scam. No riots, but there could have been. It was HOT those nights. If we'd had Cheap Solar then, we could have jailed Enron instead of bargained with them and ending up tripling our power bills. Since the power grid is falling apart, we really NEED solar for those inevitable blackouts coming. I'm NOT touching the grid unless California leaves the Union and joins Cascadia, and the whole state needs to vote on that referendum.

Around half the people in jail in California are there because they were caught with a joint. I don't like pot. But it's hardly the same as kidnapping or rape. I'd decriminalize marijuana possession but still treat public intoxication and DUI like alcohol and other drugs.

I'd also offer a path to ex-convicts to becoming a proper citizen again, with rights they can regain with every step of recovery. Drug treatment while in prison, with testing, shortens the sentence and makes them eligible for parole. This means they don't have to stay criminals and form mafias out of necessity. Offer recovery path and many will take it. CalFIRE is proof it works. If they go recidivist, they get shot. If they follow the program they get their rights back. This would eventually cut down on crime, and crime costs. Those hundred thousand prisoners are expensive.

I worked on fire prevention projects here over 10 years ago. I worked with state and local forestry and firemen to map roads for wild-fire fighting. One of the things I learned was that America learned from the indians how to clear the understory brush so wildfires from lightning wouldn't burn down the whole forest. Without understory brush, the fire can't get into the treetops, can't get very hot. The trees survive if there's only light grass and leaves on the ground. We funded the continued clearing from the Gold Rush until 1925 when Liberal policies ended the practice, focusing on putting the fires out rather than letting them burn the way nature did. Because of that, understory brush around trees is the most EVER and wildfires often become crown fires which burn down entire forests, fast, and then leads to massive erosion when the rains come months later, killing the salmon, causing flooding downstream, and overtopping the levees in the Central Valley where all the farms are. So a modest fire becomes a billion dollar problem for decades after. In face of this, I would fund CalFire for forest clearing and create a state habitat law/amendment which requires development dollars get oversight so they aren't wasted or hidden (real scandal!).

I want parks to go free rather than close because they can't pay for a gate keeper who wasn't needed in the first place. Charging visitors to pay the wages for the guy who charges the visitors? With state tax funds paying for the park in the first place? That's asinine, obscene, stupid, and a rip off. Make more parks free. Put staffing wages into the campgrounds and game management, fish in particular, so the nature tourists have more to enjoy.

Plant more trout! Too many California lakes and rivers are empty of fish. They used to be full of them in the 1970's. This is ridiculous. I gave up fishing because Fish and Game wasn't arresting the poachers carrying out buckets of fish, and they put them in on Opening Day rather than a month early so the fish had a chance to adapt and stop tasting like evil fish food goo and more like fish. I fished as a lad. It was great. Back then, you could actually catch something. Now? Forget it. That needs to be fixed. We had entire towns surviving on fishing dollars in places along the Feather River. Most of those died when the state stopped its fish planting programs. It was paid for with taxes, and lots of people had jobs because of it.

I am in favor of paving some trails so bicycles, especially parents with kids, can enjoy parks more easily. The Truckee River Trail is great for families. So are the paved trails near the American River. We need more of those. Safe pleasant parks so future generations will see nature as a good thing. Campgrounds with managers keep out the ugly and can call the armed park rangers to arrest the mean drunks or criminals that try to take them over or scare away the decent people. We're coming around to a point where there's enough desperation that 1980's level creepy villains are congregating in real life. We can't scare the tourists or they won't come back.

Hunt the pot fields in parks, like we used to, so people who want to grow it use their own land, legally. Not shooting innocent hikers or hunters. Take the money out of it and most of the violence will go too. I would also authorize FLIR helicopters (aka CAMP) use so we can find the meth labs and pot growers. Decriminalization should end illegal pot houses in the first place, but meth labs are scary and their operators murderers. Shooting meth lab people does us all a favor.

I would offer reciprocity for out of state scooters so 49cc can go unlicensed here. Make it easy. Make it cheap. Let them sell for $500 instead of $2200 by yanking control away from CARB, the Obstruction Agency they are now known for being.

I would expand the 49cc reciprocity to allow scooters up to 125cc with no license or registration requirement, just maintain the helmet law and a basic plate for a flat one-time fee. That would encourage people to use them by keeping the costs and hassles low. Scooters get 100 mpg or better. 125cc is pretty minimal in California, due to hills. Yes, scooter engines pollute, but people get to work on them. Full Employment is a good goal. Offering a cheap means to stay mobile and get to work protects our economy from rising gasoline costs and offers a way forward when the inevitable rationing comes.


I would offer experimental vehicle licenses for any car mods and make it easy, a simple online form to register and a special bright orange plate so drivers would notice the vehicle might be "exciting". Limitation being whether it can carry a passenger (requires inspection for passenger plate/license) and possibly requiring a helmet for the driver. If they feel nerdy they might not do it unless it really is an experimental vehicle. California used to be about innovation, not retirement plans. We need that youthful energy again. And we need to get rid of that bullshit motorcycle muffler law. 70 mpg, no exploited rare earths or wars required. Duh!

If I were the governor California would actually be a place the youth felt there was a future here, and govt got out of the way of innovation they wanted to try. A place business could grow, not be stifled. Did you know that welding shops have to pay a carbon tax because they use carbon dioxide gas while building machines to solve California's problems? That's a big FU to welders, and most fled the state over it. If you want a future you, you have to make it possible to operate, not make business run away screaming for a more rational place. Make California less oppressive and hateful than it has become. This is what we need for a future with more than tourism and agriculture.