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Environment - Not Farmers Using 80% of California's Water ? Does the California Citrus Mutual have a point? In a Press Release - they also claim "The only sector that has been "exempt" from water reductions is, in fact, the largest user of water - the environment. " " For a second consecutive year farmers in the Central Valley will receive a zero percent allocation of surface water from the Central Valley Project. Citrus growers in the Friant Service Area are among the most severely impacted. " "As growers grapple with another year of no water, more and more acreage...

The University of Tulsa has received $15,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop the technology for a wireless system to measure how long hotel guests take showers and how much water they use. "Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world," according to a description of the project on the EPA's website. "Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests. "The proposed work aims to develop a novel low-cost wireless device for monitoring...

It comes down to this: Which do we think is more important, families or fish? ...With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could have been avoided. Droughts are nothing new in California — the state has suffered from them for centuries. The difference now is that government policies are making it much worse. Despite the awareness around this issue, liberals continue to develop and promote policies which allow much of California’s rainfall to wash out to sea. Specifically, these policies have resulted in the diversion of more than 300 billion gallons of water away from farmers...

Gov. Jerry Brown has taken a dramatic, but dangerous, step by issuing an executive order to cut non-agricultural water usage by 25 percent. The unprecedented and problematic step will accomplish at once too little and too much. It will not seriously impact the shortage, but will simultaneously sour Californians on the need for a new approach to water use. The seriousness of California’s water shortage is lost on no one. The state’s snowpack is a fraction of what it has been historically and ground water is being depleted at a rate well above replacement. The desolate images of California’s shrinking...

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is blaming California’s water crisis on “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.” “With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Ms. Fiorina said in an interview Monday on Glenn Beck’s radio show, The Blazereported. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population...

Radar images previously revealed thousands of buried glacier-like formations in the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres. That data has now been incorporated into computer models of ice flow to determine the glaciers’ size and hence how much water they contain. “We have looked at radar measurements spanning 10 years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is, after all, a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and...

Get ready for another historic SpaceX rocket landing attempt scheduled for Monday, April 13. This will be the second time that SpaceX will try to land a massive, 140-foot-tall first stage Falcon 9 rocket onto a platform that's floating offshore in the Atlantic ocean. (The first landing attempt took place last January and ended with a fiery explosion.)

Smart meters are now being used by authorities to crack down on “water wasters” in the state of California, but this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they can be used for. Ultimately, smart meters are designed to be part of an entire “smart grid” that will enable government bureaucrats “to control everything from your dishwasher to thermostat“. And in recent years, there has been a massive push to install smart meters in as many homes in the United States and Europe as possible. Back in December 2007, there were only 7 million smart meters...

Water authorities are using a new tool in a major effort to crack down on people and businesses wasting water in light of new water restrictions issued by Gov. Jerry Brown to fight the drought. The Long Beach Water Department says sprinklers at a McDonald’s restaurant on Bellflower Boulevard went on for 45 minutes at a time, twice a night, for an undefined number of nights. Complaints continued to mount as water pooled and wasted. The department, however, could do little about the wasting. That was before the smart meter.

Carly Fiorina is blaming liberal environmentalists for what she calls a “man-made” drought in California

I was just thinking about the water problems in California. Governor Moonbeam and his fellow travelers opposed a series of water projects in the '70s that would have lessened the severity of the current water shortage in California. Then they invite in a few million illegal aliens. Now he wants to regulate how long people can take showers? They have turned into Soap Nazis.

Shortsighted coastal elites bear most of the blame for California’s water woes. April 2, 2015 Photo by Cowgirl Jules California governor Jerry Brown had little choice but to issue a belated, state-wide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the Golden State’s wide diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography. We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water...

With the Sierra Nevada snowpack at its lowest level since 1950, California Governor Jerry Brown announced last week that he would implement the first mandatory water reductions in state history. But Brown also called on districts to streamline permitting practices for water projects, and to invest in new water infrastructure technologies. Brown’s comments amount to his first vocal support for widespread desalination (or desalinization). “Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow, “Governor Brown said at a press event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order...

Liberal policies turn a small problem into a statewide crisis.My family and I are in Los Angeles this week for some meetings concerning a super-secret venture, which, dude . . . it's super-secret! (But it won't be for long.)But one of the first things that became clear when we got here is that the state is in the midst of a water crisis - one so serious that Gov. Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown has imposed an unprecedented set of restrictions on the use of water. Friends we visited for Easter tell us the state isn't messing around. They send inspectors around...

The liberals who run California have long purported that their green policies are a free (organic) lunch, but the bills are coming due. Lo, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25% statewide reduction in water use. Consider this rationing a surcharge for decades of environmental excess.

Victor Davis Hanson, noting the draconian water restrictions that Gov. Jerry Brown has imposed on California, suggested that Brown and his cohorts have only themselves to blame for the effects of the drought in a piece in City Journal on Thursday. When Brown was first governor, in the 1970s, he opposed a number of projects that might have brought more water to parched Californians. Brown also diverted water to fish and river enhancement that might instead have lessened the effects of the drought.As a result of Brown’s folly, California’s agricultural sector is in great peril. This peril will impact...

California governor Jerry Brown had little choice but to issue a belated, state-wide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the Golden State’s wide diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography. We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin...

ABC anchor Martha Raddatz pressured Brown on criticisms that the new requirements he placed on California’s agricultural industry, which uses a reported 80% of the state’s water, were soft. To put this into perspective, Raddatz reported that more water is being used for almond production than by the combined businesses and homes of Los Angeles and San Francisco. “They’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers,” Brown said in response. “They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world.”

Signing far-reaching executive orders seems to have become contagious in American government, at least among Democrats. Gov. Jerry Brown went on national TV Sunday to explain his newly-announced mandatory water restrictions that will, among other things, require California residents to shower less. And if you've ever visited France, you know what that means. Last week Brown, now in his fourth term as chief executive of the nation's most populous state, said California has not properly prepared for the kind of long-term drought it appears to face now. Brown, who turns 77 Tuesday, did not blame George W. Bush, but instead...

Jerry Brown, Democrat governor of drought-stricken California, appeared Sunday on ABC's This Week and defended his executive actions that placed mandatory water restrictions on citizens but not on the agriculture industry. "There are farmers who have senior water rights," Brown told guest-host Martha Raddatz. "Some people have a right to more water than others." Of his own actions, Brown stated: This executive order is done under emergency power and it has the force of law. Very unusual. And it's requiring action and changes in behavior from the Oregon border all the way to the Mexican border. It affects lawns. It...