Stop it. Your sounding like someone who reads.
Here is a Friday ramble. This may be my comments on ePlanner when the time comes. IDK, blogging seems so passe nowadays.
I'm reading "Cadillac Desert". Reading any book takes me a while because I'm a methodical OCD reader who annotates.
TLDR version, a single consumer group pulls off the biggest resource grab in the history of the world and gets the US taxpayer to fund it. They become a lobby BLOC that makes the NRA cower in fear and we continue to feed their dragon. Since John Westley Powell, if you controlled the water, you controlled the west. The science shows that current water use patterns are unsustainable, but we keep doing it. The water empire was built on the lie that the resource was inexhaustible and we would die without it. Looking at Lake Mead, is there anyone who still thinks that? There are actual proposals to pipe water from Alaska to California. Try to get your head around that.
The rules are changed. It is now "If you control the energy, you control the west." It started with with O&G, then wind, now solar. Wallets get fat and it has damned little to do with climate change. It is all about the same old model of exploiting the public lands to fill your coffers. The energy empire is built on the same lie that the resource is inexhaustible and we will all die without it. Even the arguments around breaching the Snake River Dams are more often about energy than irrigation; and that from the American Farm Bureau.
Now we enter the phase where the resource is not what's under the land or on the land, but the land itself. Why do you suppose that AFB and Big Energy rallied their minions to stop NACs from being publicly traded? It is to their advantage to perpetuate the myth that the land is worthless in and of itself.
The first lie the exploiters now have to sell is that "worthless" public land is inexhaustible. 22 million acres is such a big number that a human brain cannot grasp it. It seems infinite. This tilts the public land equation on its ear. Why not just sell it to them if it's junk land and make them pay taxes on it? Legalities aside, they would not do this if they had to own the land. That would tip their ledger to the expense side.
The second lie will be that we will die without it. What that really means is, "We are going to sell you a resource that your tax dollars helped us exploit at a favorable startup cost."
Don't think the profit margins are small. When I was on the road servicing computers, I once fixed a down server at a wind farm. The manager said it was costing him $50k per hour to be down. (Never mind that for one hour's revenue, he could have had a failover server in place...)
What are "incentives"? Incentives, be they land, resources, or checks, are the Government giving away the common assets of the people to encourage a behavior. The gods of industry help those who have lobby teams to push incentives their way.
americanlamb.com
theprogressplaybook.com
