Ringside: The Abundance Alliance

Abundance, and its political twin, affordability, are now bipartisan mantras, but cannot be realized if the only permissible avenues are via urban infill, renewable energy, and water rationing. California is uniquely positioned to do much more. Breakthrough technologies and big projects, both pioneered here, could unite a powerful coalition of farmers, energy companies, high tech firms, and reasonable environmentalists. Such a coalition could transform California, permitting innovation and smart investments to restore ecosystems while lowering the cost of living.

The world is watching. Achieving sustainable abundance, everywhere, is not far fetched. California can lead the way. With appropriate stewardship and innovation unhampered by over-regulation or corruption, there is abundant energy, abundant water, and abundant land available for everyone on planet earth, and there always will be.

The case for each of these is straightforward. Water abundance, the hardest to achieve in many regions, is nonetheless feasible through a combination of runoff harvesting, recycling, innovative conservation especially in commercial agriculture, interbasin transfers, rain inducing reforestation, aquifer recharge, and desalination. From low tech rain capturing half moon crescents in the Sahel to large scale desalination in the Middle East, worldwide water abundance is possible.

Energy is also a manageable challenge. For everyone on earth to consume half as much per capita primary energy as Americans, global energy production must double. But enhanced geothermal, satellite solar power stations, ultra high efficiency land-based solar, small and large scale nuclear, and modern natural gas power plants with 70 percent (or more) conversion efficiencies all promise to rapidly increase total global energy production. As long as coal, oil, and natural gas fuels are not precipitously abandoned, but instead are produced as responsibly as is reasonably possible, global energy production can keep pace with the rising aspirations of people in developing nations.

It may be counterintuitive to suggest that there is abundant land, but that is the trend. Humans, in general, prefer living in urban environments. A massive and voluntary migration to cities from rural areas is depopulating landscapes faster than what remains of human population growth will fill them. Meanwhile, ongoing advances in high yield crops, aquaculture, and indoor agriculture equate to a decisive increase in land abundance over the next few decades.

What should inspire and unite Californians is the fact that nowhere else in the world are so many elements already in place to leverage new technologies to set an example of sustainable, affordable abundance for the world to emulate. And to make this happen politically, perhaps the most compelling unifying argument is the possibility of a grand bargain, whereby with energy and water abundance, environmentalists and advocates for affordability will be able to fulfill goals that previously seemed all but impossible.

Do environmentalists want to refill the Salton Sea, top off Mono Lake, and demolish the O’Shaughnessy dam to bring back Yosemite’s twin, the magnificent Hetch Hetchy Valley? Then support the many projects that could add ten million acre feet to California’s annual water supply.

Do environmentalists want to see the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta thrive, end nitrogen blooms in the San Francisco Bay, revitalize the Los Angeles River, and see fewer superfires in our forests? Then embrace big projects. Dredge the delta to restore cool channels for salmon while also developing safe ways to divert water during winter storms. Invest in enhanced wastewater treatment in the San Francisco Bay Area. Support recycling and desalination in Los Angeles instead of spending billions on indoor/outdoor rationing schemes. And permit a resumption of responsible logging so our forests won’t be overgrown tinderboxes.

Anyone who wants to make California affordable again will have renewed optimism, once they realize that deregulation will lower the cost of living. For example, if we stopped shutting down a natural gas power plant every time another utility scale solar/battery farm went online, electricity prices would decline. At the same time, proponents of solar energy would finally have a chance to prove what they’ve been saying for years – they would have a chance to sell their electricity at a competitive and affordable price, because supply would at last exceed demand.

When it comes to housing, environmentalists and affordability advocates might recognize that California is a vast state, and that even if ten million new residents were to move into sprawling new suburbs on open land, it would only increase California’s urban footprint from 5 percent to 6.2 percent. There’s plenty of room. Restricting housing to hyper-regulated infill guarantees high prices. But with abundant and affordable water and energy, fewer unreasonable building codes, and an end to “urban containment” policies, private developers could make a profit building homes without subsidies that people would not only want to live in, but could afford to buy.

To convince skeptics that this model of affordable abundance is not only sustainable, but the only way it can ever be realized, California requires an alliance that unites farmers, water agencies, energy companies, and, crucially, the high tech community. There is risk and sacrifice if businesses embrace the price-lowering competition unleashed by deregulation, but it also creates spectacular opportunities. Recent developments in the high tech community make their participation in a genuine abundance alliance feasible.

California’s high tech entrepreneurs are no longer just designing chips and software. They are becoming industrialists. SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril are dramatic early examples. Every imaginable industrial sector is on the cusp of another leapfrogging revolution, lowering costs and increasing productivity not by percentages, but by multiples. Software and chips were largely exempt from hyper-regulation. Industry, on the other hand, is not. The tech giant has been awakened.

Tech investors, who are accustomed to product timelines measured in months, not decades, are not going to accept crippling delays built into California’s current political and regulatory environment. Whether it’s data centers or new cities, their growing forays into projects that consume land, energy, and water face bureaucratic obstacles that they will use all their power to overcome.

The political evolution of California’s world leading tech community is a gigantic wild card, poised at a crossroads. The chance for California’s beleaguered energy and agricultural industries to partner with high tech industrialists is the biggest opportunity in generations. United, they can transform the culture in Sacramento, enabling an abundance boom that will inspire the world. It’s a choice, and it’s happening right now.