Posted on 04/16/2015 11:14:46 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
The blistering drought that has Californians timing their showers, driving dirty cars and staring at brown lawns and empty swimming pools is a “man-made disaster,” according to critics, who say the Golden State’s misguided environmental policies allow much-needed freshwater to flow straight into the Pacific.
In an average year, California gets enough snow and rain to put 200 million acres under a foot of water, but environmental opposition to dams over the last several decades has allowed the majority of the freshwater to flow into the ocean, even as the state’s population exploded to nearly 40 million people.
~snip~
“This is a man-made disaster,” said Bonner Cohen, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research. “Southern California is an arid part of the world where droughts -- even severe droughts -- are commonplace, and knowing this, you’d think the government of California would have included this mathematical certainty in its disaster preparedness planning, but the government has done nothing, not even store rain, as the population has continued to grow.”
~snip~
The critics say California gets plenty of water to meet its needs, if it were only managed properly. More than half of California’s surface water flows from the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east down to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California. Much of the mountain runoff is managed by two of the world’s largest water storage and transport systems – the federal Central Valley Project and California's State Water Project.
~snip~
Environmentalists have since stopped the construction of water storage and delivery systems through legal and political actions. They have also fought to ensure that captured water is released into streams and the ocean -- rather than the water delivery system -- in order to boost fish populations and dilute the salinity of the delta.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
open your pocketbook ... throw money at it!
That's not a quote from the article nor is it from a Freeper.
Why are you putting it forward as a quote?
Outside of your strawman: investment in water infrastructure is vital for populations in arid climates or in places with heavy runoff.
For instance: the Israelis get something like 40% of their domestic water from Desalination plants.
They don't get a lot of rain, so they do something about it.
California (OTOH) erects insuperable barriers to desalination licenses as well as other water infrastructure. I seem to remember that Poseidon just got a desalination license after jumping through multiple environmentalist hoops at huge expense.
government’s solution ... throw your money to government ...
And that’s merely the Cliff Notes version.
“Man-made disaster”? Well...yeah...CA is pretty much desert, and became an oasis only because most water well into surrounding states was diverted thereto.
Required: read/watch “Cadillac Desert”.
TL;DR - CA as we largely know it shouldn’t exist, and is well on its way to that condition.
I read somewhere that when these enviros try to stop a water project in California they use the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act signed by Republican Nixon plus the California Environmental Quality Act of 1968 signed by Guv Reagan.
They not only stopped building dams... THEY TORE THEM DOWN! I found with a little research these idiots have torn down over 500+ dams in the US in recent years!
The people of the United States were once an industrious, practical people.
These qualities and a free market capitalist economy made for a wealthy nation that could afford to be generous and doting on their children.
Their children could then carry their natural inclinations of idealism well in to adulthood where in years past idealistic notions were the play things of childhood left in the nursery.
However idealistic dreams put in to practice can be tolerated for so long before they cripple or destroy an economy. A nation must produce food and goods to feed and clothe its people or be conquered by nations that do.
California was once a dynamic state. A magnet for people that wanted to be entrepreneurs and seek their fortunes in the sun. Now people with aspirations of success flee the state for islands of the free market like Texas.
The truly sad news is that California is not so much the exception of foolish environmental idealistic childishness in this country it is simply the leader of the pack.
We as a country must either return to our practical roots and free our economy or wither and die. We can not continue to strangle our economy with idealistic environmental regulations that neither promote a natural ecology nor a strong industrial economy.
The major problem that works for the environmentalmidgets, and against the populace is the populace’s lack of attention to all things political until that time politics is of necessity something to participate. Like elections.
Now that the environmentalmidgets have everything screwed up, the populace is scratching their collective heads wunnering wha hoppen?
You do not seem to understand that we won't have enough snow runoff and rain to fill our existing reservoirs, let alone new ones. Building new dams with only 140 million cubic feet of annual precipitation which is the historic normal, as opposed to the 200 million CF we got used to during the 20th Century, will only produce more empty reservoirs. Building a dam to store water is useless without the water to fill it.
San Diego will have a new desalination plant go on line in a few months to give it another 56,000 CF a year, but that took them 15 years from planning start to construction completion due to fourteen environmental lawsuits.
Having studied some of the dendrochronology upon which that claim is based, I can say with some confidence that they really don't know what those rainfall years really were, particularly because of the Little Ice Age.
related and you will say where they may have gone astray.
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