Letters to the Editor: Build desalination plants, not a high-speed rail

Long Beach Press Telegram ^ | 4-15-2015 | Edna Jones, Pasadena & Richard Morrison, Lakewood

[Citizen Zed]

Instead of spending money on a bullet train, California should build desalination plants. We cannot live without water or food. California supplies 70 percent of the food for the country and we have cut off water to the farmers to save the smelt fish. The legislatures are more interested in catering to their money backers than doing what is right for the citizens of California.

Which sounds better, water or rain? Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a firm grasp on reality would say water is the only answer. We don’t need a bullet train that starts in south nowhere and ends in north nowhere. We will need water for all of our life, but no one will ever need the train to nowhere.

Desalination is one method of gaining usable water as well as conservation of water being another. As with other commodities, we will be water rationed when needed and taxed whether needed or not, but paying for a train that won’t bring a single drop of water to a single community is beyond common sense and reality.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

I like Choo-choos and think they have a place in California—BUT look at reason—put the train on the back burner and built the desalination plants NOW. We can do the trains later—Build them will illegal aliens labor—Catch em, fine em, and use them for workers at $2 an hour.

[trebb]

Why haven't any politicians suggested this?

For the same reason that the Left is against drilling for oil, nuclear power, and other things that make energy more abundant and cheap - when something is abundant and cheap, it's harder to use it as a club to control the hoi polloi. They like the way that they have already restricted water flow to the residents and the power/control they have when it comes to getting those they harm to pay for the "solutions".

[econjack]

Bingo!

[Michael.SF.]

You’re right. I forgot that one.