…is that it stands in the way of tyranny. Some years ago, there was a minor revolt within the ranks of the Sierra Club. A rogue faction wanted the club to declare unchecked immigration to be harmful to the environment. The San Francisco Chronicle, in pursuit of its own agenda, recruited a member of the club’s board of directors -- who just happened to have a Hispanic surname -- to compose a statement denying the environmental significance of immigration, checked or unchecked. In the statement he blamed personal freedom and not immigration as being the actual threat to our natural world. How? Because we get to eat what we want to eat; live where we want to live; do what we choose to do to make a living. If there was more authority controlling our behavior the world would be a much nicer place.

This frame of mind has been expanding on steroids ever since. Berkeley has already banned all new natural gas hookups. Gas cooking stoves and space and water heaters are now threatened with being outlawed. Various municipalities are forbidding the opening of new gasoline filling stations. The perceived villain here is, of course, fossil fuels: petroleum, natural gas and coal. If we were really supposed to use them, they wouldn’t have been buried so deeply in the bowels of the Earth. Humans, being both clever and evil, have managed to get their mitts on them anyhow… in order to make their unworthy lives considerably more comfortable.

A glaring flaw in the push for electrifying cars, stoves, and home heating is that electricity is still mostly made by the combustion of fossil fuels. It’s just that this process happens far away from where the electricity is used. A basic fact of physics is that a pipeline is the absolutely most efficient way to transport a gas or liquid. Whatever goes in one end, comes out the other in its entirety. Meanwhile, a significant amount of the energy put into electrical transmission is lost due to resistance in the wires through which it travels. This is sort of mitigated by stepping up the voltage and then stepping it down just before it goes into your home. What about “clean burning hydrogen” used in fuel cells that power some cars and busses? Well, about 96% of commercially available hydrogen is made from fossil fuels -- a.k.a. hydrocarbons. The residual carbon often takes the form of CO2 which can at least be used to put the fizz in Pepsi or just fly out the window.

A day hardly goes by without a new spate of obnoxious edicts being proposed by members of the political class. Some actually make it into law, but the laws are often so ill-conceived that they go unenforced. In California it is illegal for a person to use more than 55 gallons of water per day inside his home. The worms who drafted the law left it up to the various water districts for enforcement. The various water districts have no idea as to how many persons occupy each address on their grid… let alone how much water is used indoors versus outdoors. It would cost billions of dollars to install new meters and other necessary plumbing so as to meet the requirement. Bottom line: What California really needs in order to deal with the normal oscillation between wet years and dry years is more storage capacity for its reservoirs.

The twisted logic behind this flood of tyrannies was elegantly demonstrated a few years ago when a couple of city planners, in a broadcast on my local CBS radio station, provided a discussion on improving urban traffic congestion. Rather than suggest increasing road capacity, especially at “choke” points, they both agreed that elimination of a large portion of available parking spaces was the proper solution. Should parking be harder to get, then public transportation would be the preferred option. Yeah, they’ve been pushing us onto public transportation for years… so they can control where we go and how. The pandemic kind of threw a monkey wrench into that; and internet-enabled ride-sharing provided a price competitive and much more convenient alternative.

Just for the record, the one technologic innovation that has improved human personal freedom more than anything else is the affordable automobile. Thank you, Henry Ford. Now, we get to easily visit grandma and grandpa even if they live over a hundred miles away. We get to go shopping at the really nice mall just across the county line whenever we feel like it. Also, we get to choose to live in bucolic suburbs while keeping our jobs downtown.

Image: John Enghart