Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Regulators are going to parcel out that money, determining what projects qualify for financing. In another words, it is going to be another $27 billion added to the tens of trillions of dollars of debt we have aleady accumulated (some of it on schemes just like this), that turns into political graft. The opportunity cost isn't just the $27 billion that will never find its way to more productive uses (what never gets accounted for, because it's not easy to see). It will be the interest we pay on that $27 billion. On top of it, they are going to securitize whatever loans they make and sell them into the Wall Street financialization machine, which in theory will use the $27 billion to try to attact way more money than that to targeted uses (that someone at the EPA in all of his or her paternalistic goodness will be deciding). In reality, that securitization is just going to blow up the misallocated capital to a much bigger dollar amount, creating a much greater opportunity cost -- what are the way more productive uses that capital would have found its way to if it remained in the form of people's savings and they were forced to looking for the most best potential ways to invest it (and have a personal incentive to steward it well)?

We're our own worst enemies, and as long as stupidity like this keeps happening, we are going to continue to hamper ourselves, not help. As a country, we are way worse off today because of the endless number of boondoggles like this from the last several decades. The price gets extracted years into the future and in ways that aren't obvious to people in a direct cause and effect way. Which is why tee same corrupt politicians keep getting away with it, I think. I won't say we'd be better off lighting $27 billion on fire, but we are going to get an incredibly small fraction of that kind of value from it relative to what that money could have accomplished without our government trying to run a command economy.

 

This is related to the "They sold an aquifer to a foreign country" thing someone recently posted. A lot of land in Arizona is owned by Saudi agribusinesses and they are growing alfalfa. One thing to note. ... for some reason these stories always say that alfalfa uses a ton more water than growing other crops (I don't think they said that in your link), and it just gets taken as a fact. I thought it was a fact because I had read it so many times. The reality is that Alfalfa doesn't use more water than other crops. But the reason that land is valuable is that they can grow alfalfa year round and it's like a million acores of land, a huge mass of land. If you were to grow spinach or corn or tomatoes year round on that much land, it would require a lot of water, too. The difference is that alfalfa -- and this is why they grow it in particular -- yields a lot of crop per unit of water, so it's actually really efficient in its water usage. People here have no clue what alfalfa is, but if we had a severe drought, an alfalfa crop would actually be a particularly good use of the limited water for human consumption, because it's actually a very water-efficient crop.

In any case, since we are talking about water and droughts. ... I watched this video over the weekend and it was interesting. It's about water desalination, the costs, but how the Saudis are working on something that can bring the cost down quite a bit, while pulling trace minerals from the leftover brine (that has been a nuisance in the past, and has been dumped back in the ocean or sea, creating an environmental cost) that are actually quite valuable (things like cobalt, which is rare and super expensive to mine, but is a necessary ingredient for EV car batteries).

 

If you can bring the costs of desalination down a little ... but at the same time pull minerals out of the brine, the value of the copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium might more than offset the higher cost.