California Confronts an Imaginary Crisis with An Imaginary Train

In 2008, California voters approved the construction of a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco that would run mainly through the Central Valley, as described in this article.

That was fifteen years ago. One would think that by now you’d be able to board the super-train in Los Angeles and ride in perfect comfort and quiet to San Francisco without the hassles of travel to the airport, rude security people, delays, and dehydrating aircraft cabins. Dream on.

The railroad is nowhere near completion and may never be finished. As of today, not one mile of track has been laid and costs have risen to $128 billion with no end in sight. This is a wasteful boondoggle of unprecedented proportions.

Of course, it has provided jobs for unionized workers and resulted in huge windfalls for excavators, heavy equipment operators, land speculators, lawyers, politicians, and others. But not one bit of benefit has accrued to citizens and taxpayers who have footed the bill for the whole thing.

The same so-called environmentalists who favored the railroad over air and car transportation based on phony climate alarmism have stood in the way of the railroad for a thousand other reasons.

The latest scheme to salvage this fiasco involves a plan to run the entire railroad on wind and solar power. Of course, this is a pipe dream.

Solar modules do not generate any power at night or in bad weather. Windmills do not generate any power when the wind is not blowing above certain speeds. Both systems produce intermittent power. To be useful at all, you will need enormous battery storage capacity, which is also not feasible. There is no train system in the world that is fully operated on wind and solar power.

Considering California’s failures to date, there is no reason to believe this hare-brained wind and solar scheme will be any more successful. If you think the mess is confined to California, it’s not.

California is practically broke, and the State Transportation Secretary has admitted, “We can’t get this project done without federal support. It’s just not going to happen.” So, you will end up paying for it.

The article offers the best summary of the situation: “After all, it is not as if this bullet train is ever going to exist anyway. As such, its visionaries certainly have an interest in periodically devising new, wholly unrealistic schemes that appeal to those who voted for it as a way of distracting from their incompetence.”

In the end, one pipe dream (wind and solar power) has been piled on another pipe dream (a long-distance high-speed train in California) to pursue ideological goals and suck the taxpayers dry. It’s a small wonder taxpayers and businesses are leaving California in droves.

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.