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As we all know, environmentalists are absolutely dedicated to saving trees, and endangered species.
Unless, of course, those trees and endangered species are standing in the way of environmentalists making a lot of money. Then, it’s get the chainsaws and D9s out, and let ‘er rip. Which is just what senior Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi plans to do to a pesky koala habitat in the way of her real estate development.
And “green” California isn’t about to let its “iconic”, protected, Joshua trees get in the way of making a bundle of money from lucrative real estate developments. Especially when the “renewables” scams get in on the act.
Democratic Assembly member Juan Carrillo recently introduced legislation that would exempt commercial developers from environmental regulations protecting Joshua trees. This is less than a year after state governor Gavin Newsom passed the law supposedly protecting them.
Funnily enough, the California Building Industry Association, which supports Carillo’s bill, has donated at least $300,000 to Democrat politicians. Funny, that.
And now the “renewables” scammers are getting involved. So, it’s a big, fat, “fuck you” for the Joshua trees.
“4,200 Joshua trees are scheduled to be removed and replaced by solar panels for the Aratina Solar Project near Boron, CA in June of this year. They will not be salvaged but funds based on the size of the tree will be placed in a mitigation bank”, according to Basin & Range Watch.
Sierra Wave Media
Wait, what? What’s a “mitigation bank”? They’re supposed to be a way to “offset ecological loss”. In reality, they sound more like a way to fatten the state government’s coffers.
The penalty for messing with a Joshua tree? If you kill one, it is up to $5,000 for the first conviction, $10,000 for the second, and $20,000 for the third or six months in the Graybar Hotel.
According to reporting from KTLA-5 in Los Angeles, if you are caught stealing a Joshua tree in San Bernardino County, the largest county in California, it’s up to a $20,000 fine. Back in 2021, a California couple was fined $18,000 for bulldozing Joshua trees on land they owned to clear it for a house they wanted to build.
But the government stands to make big bank, even at the bargain-basement deal Cali is handing to the solar developers.
California Fish and Wildlife has set up a Western Joshua Tree Mitigation fund to accept tributes penalized by the agency in return for the destruction of Joshua trees. According to a .pdf on their website, the fee, per acre, to remove trees for granted use is $10,521.95 per acre. If that full assessment is applied to the 2,435 acres of Aratina, that would be a tidy little sum of $25.6 million. Does anyone want to place a small Shohei Ohtani translator wager that the money collected doesn’t end up going to replant Joshua trees elsewhere in the desert, and instead gets dumped into the sinkhole that is California’s general budget deficit?
Sound like a conspiracy theory? Oh, you know what we say about conspiracy theories, these days.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Earth Day a couple of weeks ago, April 22nd, just happened to announce as part of billions being blanketed across the country for solar and wind energy projects, they were awarding $250 million to California’s California Infrastructure Economic Development Bank.
Looking Through the Chaos
Mind you, all that’s a drop in the ocean of California’s debt. In true left-wing fashion, the state is drowning in an ocean of debt: anywhere between $68 billion and $73 billion. Which is practically peanuts, it must be said, to Victoria’s $156 billion and rising.
And, in a twist BFD readers will feel with a sharp twinge of recognition, there’s even a dodgy rail project thrown in.
That’s not including the sunk cost of the high-speed rail boondoggle from Madera to 1/5th of a mile closer to Shafter over the last 45-plus years. That project, if it’s ever going to get anywhere near completion, is going to cost, at a bare minimum, another $100 billion that is currently not being covered by the federal government.
Cal Matters
No matter where you go in the world, “green” left-wingers are all the same.
