Posted on 02/09/2014 12:19:57 PM PST by James C. Bennett
Edited on 02/09/2014 1:47:47 PM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
California grows a mind-boggling amount of the nation's produce: 99 percent of artichokes, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, and on and on. That's why the record-breaking drought (yes, it's finally raining
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
If the farmer had simply supported more democrats, he could be like his neighbor with a field full of heavy trees with nuts in them.
The current drought is the excuse why those trees are parched, not the reason. Federal and state regulations, busting dams, and political games are the reasons why those fields aren’t producing. Worst is if a farmer happens to be along the corridor for the proposed high speed rail project; those farmers were the first to find their water allocations gone.
Payola for water; it is how the game is played in the central valley.
2. Isn't there a Delta Smelt controversy in there somewhere?
The water systems were put in specifically for agricultural use in the early days. California is an agricultural state. If morons want to redirect the water to some other use, or cut it off from areas where it was explicitly created to facilitate farming in the first place, then they better be ready to depopulate the state since agriculture, particularly in light of the states propensity to price itself out of the industrial labor market, is providing much of the tax revenue...
I was coming up I-5 yesterday and noticed a couple almond groves entirely ripped up by the roots.
The most destructive thing to hit California, bigger than any drought, flood, earthquake or other natural disaster has been the lock-stock-and-barrel political takeover by the hard left, and could be easily quantified by a beancounter willing to honestly compile the numbers.
Funny, I don’t see any mention of the Klamath Falls dam decision, and the effect it had on Oregon as well as California.
Selective reporting, as usual.
The EPA has done more damage to the US economy than any other gov’t department, and I’m INCLUDING the IRS!
If this follows the patterns I remember from my childhood, either this year or next year California will be devastated by floods. Made worse by the fact that the drought killed off the plants that would otherwise control the erosion.
I wonder if tugging icebergs from close to Alaska could be an option...
One hundred percent self inflicted wound.
They should have irrigated.
The state sits next to the Pacific Ocean.
Properly maintained desalinisation plants would make the state a freshwater exporter.
There is no cure for stupid.
Restrict water to the SF & LA urban centers...most would never know the difference anyway. While they are at it, drop a neutron bomb on Berkeley and Sacramento.
We were in Napa Valley with the kids the weekend after Christmas and saw a lot of vineyards ripped out. I was wondering if the world’s appetite was finally being sated. One of the tasting rooms told us that many of the vines are at the end of their economic life. Phylloxera broke out in 1983 and by the late 1990s nearly 75% of the affected vineyards had been replanted with phylloxera-resistant rootstock. Vines are economically productive 20 - 30 years, so it’s time to start with new vines. I didn’t see any evidence that wine grapes are short of water — thank God!
The most heavily affected areas of CA are the Westlands, which are on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. These were irrigated only by massive infrastructure projects built by the (evil) state government, probably subsidized by the feds, starting in the 60s. These bring water from the much wetter north of CA via enormous canals.
To use desal to provide the same amount of water would require it to cross the Coast ranges, meaning either massive pumping stations and pipes or boring of tunnels. Neither would be cheap. The Israeli situation is by comparison easy-peasy and itsy-bitsy.
Screw the farmers. We can get everything we need at the grocery store. We can’t save delta smelt without water. /s
I'm assuming that was rhetorical question.
California’s Two Droughts
An affluent society didn’t bother to add to the inherited system of canals and reservoirs that made it thrive....Californians have not built a major reservoir since the New Melones Dam more than 30 years ago. As the state subsequently added almost 20 million people, it assumed that it was exempt from creating any more “unnatural” Sierra lakes and canals to store precious water during California’s rarer wet and snow-filled years.
Then, short-sightedness soon became conceit. Green utopians went further and demanded that an ailing three-inch bait fish in the San Francisco delta receive more fresh oxygenated water. In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.
Others had even grander ideas of having salmon again in their central rivers, as they recalled fishing stories of their ancestors from when the state population was a fifth of its present size and farming a fraction of its present acreage. So they too sued to divert even more water to the sea in hopes of having game fish swim from the Pacific Ocean up to arid Fresno County on their way to the supposedly ancestral Sierra spawning grounds.
Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if this were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir — amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.
The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.
In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.
CA dwellers, or their elected masters,want everything for free, or practically, but also want to take up every new expensive idea and reg. tossed by EPA, while including illegals in the huge govt. handouts--what's not to love?
Coming to every state if we aren't vigiant, smart, and active.
vaudine
It would probably still be less expensive than the high-speed rail project, and definitely much better use of funds. The ROI would be infinitely greater on the water plants.
That's a lot of almond milk lattes. What will the progressives do without them?
It's sort of lopsided for them to prop up Silicon Valley technological innovations and not do the same for agricultural innovations.
Oh, wait. Can't support those inland "red" counties, can they.
The same counties that feed them and everyone else.
You won’t get any defense of the high-speed rail from me. They had a possibly even more stupid plan here in FL for such a train from Tampa to Orlando.
The supposed benefit was that travel time would be under an hour. Which is kind of weird, since it presently takes under 1.5 hours in a car, unless traffic is bad. And then when you get to Orlando, you have a car to get where you actually need to be, Orlando being an astonishingly spread out city.
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