Jeff wrote:
> Certainly, the price of buying houses in the Silicon Valley Area and
> San Fransisco are amoungst the highest in the nation. But this has
> very little to do with the environmental regulations. It has a lot
> more to do with people love the climate and people like to work for a
> lot of money in the electronics and biotech industries as well as at
> some world-class universities.

Bull. There's still plenty of vacant land there; the only reason
housing is expensive is that the eco-nut movement "protects" most of
it in order to MAKE it expensive.

> The cost of electricity in CA is less than the cost in New England
> states.

Both areas have adopted so much eco-nut regulation that it's next to
impossible to build or expand power plants. Thus it's a race to see
which area will outgrow its installed capacity first. Up to last
year I would have bet on CA, but now that Schwarzenegger (a Democrat
in sheep's clothing if there ever was one) has managed to ruin CA's
economy even more than Gray Davis did, New England may get there first.

> I don't know how much of this has to do with environmental
> regulations. Much of the cost might have to with the free market
> system where utilities bought electricity from companies like Enron.
> California now gets a lot of its electricity from burning natural gas.

California has put off the problem for a few years by building wind
power plants (and forcing utilities to subsidize them), but the sites
where they'll work are pretty much exhausted (unlike New England, where
I hear Ted Kennedy still prevents them being built where they would
spoil the view from his beachfront house).

> However, I don't consider environmentalists nuts. Rather, they are
> people who like the environment that we all share to survive. I don't
> see what is so nutty about that.

Two things are nutty about the environmental movement. One is that it
is based on assertions of emergencies that just don't exist (and the
fact they don't exist is obvious to anyone who knows what he's talking
about). The other is that the movement explicitly rejects the only
two mechanisms that could solve such a problem if it did exist -- the
free market and new technology.

You need to read the works of Julian Simon, especially "The Ultimate
Resource 2".