Posted on 09/22/2014 3:19:42 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
California is run from a sort of Pacific Versailles, an isolated coastal compound of elite rulers physically cut off from its interior peasantry.
To understand how California works — or rather does not work — drive over the I-5 Grapevine and gaze down at the brilliantly engineered artificial Pyramid Lake. Thanks to California water project deliveries, even in a third year of drought its level still fluctuates between 90 to 100% full — ensuring, along with its companion reservoirs, plentiful water for the Los Angeles-area municipalities for the next two years. The far distant watersheds and reservoirs that feed Pyramid Lake are about bone dry.
The same disconnect is true of Crystal Springs Reservoir along the I-280 near San Francisco. The Sierra watershed that supplies the now 90%+full lake is drying up. But San Francisco will have an assured water supply from its manmade reservoirs for some time, even if the drought persists.
Yet most of the policies of the state that have led to cancellations of additional water projects over the last thirty years — or those that have resulted in vast diversions of diminished reservoir water from contracted agricultural use to fish replenishment — are made by Los Angeles and San Francisco area legislators, judges, and public officials.
It would be as simplistic as it is true to say that water policy in California has been set by those who have plentiful water supplies in manmade reservoirs with the highest priorities in claims on far distant snow melts. Water elites pontificate about environmental restrictions on water use to others who do not enjoy a rank so high in the water-allotment queue.
By that I mean at no time did any Los Angeles or San Francisco legislator offer to divert their Pyramid Lake or Crystal Springs allotments to replenish the San Joaquin River for salmon runs or to improve the delta landscape of the 3-inch delta smelt. Instead I think the mentality could best be summed up as something like, “Unnatural dams and reservoirs are necessary to supply water for elite coastal grandees like us so that we can live in arid, picturesque Pacific communities without aquifers and thereby have the leisure to cut off water for others not so worthy.”
The same paradox is true of public utility policy. There are rarely frosts or scorching 100-degree temperatures from San Diego to Berkeley, the coastal strip where there is little need for air conditioners or for daylong use of central heating. For hoi aristoi, California’s public utilities can be regulated and taxed for all sorts of utopian alternative energy investments in lieu of drawing on massive newly discovered fields of California natural gas to lower generation rates.
TThe Lear Jet Leftists expect to form the core of the global Green Inner Party. They will continue to enjoy the finest foods and most advanced gadgets the world has to offer — while deciding your fate for you.
If you work very hard with unwavering loyalty, you may be permitted to join the global Green Outer Party. You will be allowed occasional servings of meat - and air conditioning on a rationed basis.
The rest of us will eat insects and swelter – “for the good of the planet”.
“A History of the Last Days of Mexicalifornistan.”
One has to wonder when they are going to get wise in my native state and install desalinization plants for northern and southern California cities andstartallowing the CONTRACTED water to be given back to the farmers where it is needed.
Yes they are.
This goes on in a lot of places. Government buildings are turning into palaces. The government workers really are turning into the new ruling class.
In the state that uses the most gas in the country.
But it's OK as long as the oil comes from somewhere else...hidden from view.
The land of Screaming Hypocrites.
Hunger Games.
Let California secede and perhaps enough far left loons will move there to leave the rest of our country majority conservative.
This is the issue republicans can win on, if they feel like it.
In historically conservative Orange County there is a planned but controversial desalination plant.
The liberal environmentalists oppose it. They are more concerned about the wellbeing of fishes, than of people.
And they make outlandish warnings, about the consequences of building the plant.
Up the coast a few miles, these same environmental extremists opposed a pair of jetties, created to restore tidal flushing into a degraded coastal wetland.
Since the project has been completed, NONE of the bad results warned by the liberal environmental extremists has occurred.
They never do that. They always crap their nest and leave to go crap in everyone elses’.
There are hidden contradictions within the minds of people who “love nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature”--but beavers and their damns are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver damn (erected by beavers for beaver’s purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purpose of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race--i.e., his own self-hatred. In the case of “Naturists” such self—hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate. As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. Sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women-- it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly “natural.” Believe it or not, there were “Naturists” who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being “unnatural” and a “despoiling of nature.”
However, the chocolate ration will NOT be increased.
Radical liberalism of Taxifornia’s leftist government taking care of its own. Just ask Jerry Brown.
Let them drink Perrier?
The state agency that allocates water rights was not required to limit how many it allocated. As a result, there are ten times as many water rights allocations as there is actual water available. Just a minor error in legislative drafting there...
We fought a five year battle with them to get a San Diego County desal plant open.
Actually the government of screaming hypocrites, just like, oh , N.Y., D.C., Washington State and a lot of other places in America.
Does Victor Davis Hanson ever leave his home in Selma, in Fresno County, to spend much time on the coast? I live about 30 miles from the ocean and we regularly use central heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.
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