Posted on 02/15/2014 6:12:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
President Obama visited California's drought-hit Central Valley Friday, offering handouts and blaming global warming. But the state's water shortage is due to the left's refusal to deal with the state's water needs.
Following legislative action last month by Speaker John Boehner and California's Central Valley Representatives David Valadao, Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy, whose Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act was designed to resolve the long-standing problem of environmental water cutbacks that have devastated America's richest farmland, Obama is grandstanding in California, too.
His aim, however, is not a long-term solution for California's now-constant water shortages that have hit its $45 billion agricultural industry, but to preach about global warming. Instead of blaming the man-made political causes of California's worst water shortage, he's come with $2 billion in "relief" that's nothing but a tired effort to divert attention from fellow Democrats' dereliction of duty in using the state's water infrastructure.
The one thing that will mitigate droughts in California a permanent feature of the state is to restore the water flow from California's water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south. That's just what House Bill 3964, which passed by a 229-191 vote last week, does.
But Obama's plan is not to get that worthy bill through the Senate (where Democrats are holding it up) but to shovel pork to environmental activists and their victims, insultingly offering out-of-work farmers a "summer meal plan" in his package.
"We are not interested in welfare; we want water," Nunes told IBD this week.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Sounds like Russia to some extent. They were starving with permanent drought since 1920 into late 1990s importing all the grain they could.
Since 2009 or so they are a major exporter, for the first time since 1913.
Is it globull warming or what? /s
There’s nothing wrong with California ten million less foreign gullets wouldn’t fix.
What did they think was going to happen, allowing millions more people to move here in short order, that now need to drink and utilize water we didn’t have back ten to twenty years ago.
And now the Republican GOPe leaders are pumping the same dry well.
Here is an email I recently sent a friend in Aptos, CA:
Dear Liberal Friend:
As this situation worsens I would like to remind you that the “uncaring” conservatives were the ones who wanted to conserve CA water.
In addition to liberal groups suing the state to let water from dams flow into the ocean, (google for example “delta smelt” which is NOT a native California species), they killed the Auburn Dam Project in the 70’s and 80’s which would have TRIPLED the amount of reserve water in CA.
Anyone in their right minds would be in favor of the project looking at historical rainfall patterns.
So as you walk into the bathroom and are confronted with toilets that need to be flushed, I would like you to think of the crap that REALLY needs to be flushed in California, which is liberal policies and politicians.
All the best...
When I hear about the things Progressives do, the thought “kill your parents and bemoan the fact that you are an orphan” comes to mind.
signs all over the central volley have it right.... the bust bowl that congress created
Yeah, I’m stationed at Travis AFB. Been here since 2010. Really weird this year...
The key fact is that water is more valuable for development than it is for agriculture. As long as that is true the crooks in the "investment" business are going to tweak things against farming. They're "investing" in farming overseas in "places more appropriate for farming (see "comparative advantage" and "free trade"). So they get the trade agreements they want, push those annoying owners off their land, so that they come running to cities, including here, looking to be the customer base for their housing. That they'll subsidize exactly the same way they are doing now using your tax dollars to feed, clothe, educate, and medicate their brainwashed children up to speed, you know, until things are "fair." They'll make better slaves because they already know the score. Americans are too deluded with relic ideas of "freedom" to be quite as useful.
You really didn't think that Democrats like Pat and Jerry were going to let the "wrong people" make money did you? They got the farmers to pony up the cash for the construction of this massive investment subsidy, by teasing them into salivating at a profit in real estate. They got the farmers to pay for the infrastructure and let them hold the bag until the big boys saw the right time. They had to wait until they were finished building out the desert anyway. The recession plus the idiot voters wishing up a passenger train boondoggle presents exactly such an opportunity.
Smelt, smelt, oh no, the smelt are dying... uh, the farmers are still hanging on... Oh steelhead, salmon, oh the humanity!!! (they're more photogenic anyway.) So it goes. I'll bet whoever wrote that biological opinion will end up running a lab.
29 posted on 06/09/2009 7:27:54 AM PDT by Carry_Okie (Grovelnator Schwarzenkaiser, fashionable fascism one charade at a time.)
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Isn’t Travis up by Sacramento?
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Then Southern California is "desert" only in a most technical sense, and misleading. San Diego is downright tropical, not because of water shipped to it, but because of humidity and climate and more rain than in L.A., I'd wager. It might not be lush, but it would hardly be "desert" without a city there.
Vineyards and agriculture were pretty strong before shipped in water in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Fountain Valley (in the heart of Orange County -- yes, "the O.C.") is called that because of underground springs that were there (still are), and a lot of produce was grown there before it became citified.
Consider it a "desert" if you want, but ... I've been to deserts. San Diego and L.A., even without the cities, sure looked like they must have been pretty nice and fruitful deserts!
Yes, Travis is in Fairfield, right between Sacramento and San Francisco. And while we’ve had a few days of rain, it’s not much, and not like the previous couple of years. The wife and I drove down to Disneyland last Monday snd spent a week there. Saw the dust bowl down south on I-5. Just sad. Saw lots of almond trees ripped out and waiting to be mulched. No water down there.
Have you ever seen Mono Lake? I finally saw it for the first time last year. If I remember correctly, a lot of environmentalists are wailing because Mono Lake is that way because of water being diverted to irrigate crops.
Frankly, losing Mono Lake as the price of helping to nourish one of the richest and largest agricultural produce bowls in the world ... WOULD BE WORTH IT. Everything on this planet is temporary, and everything that happens on it is fleeting. We are along for the ride. Five hundred years in our scale is a nanosecond on the real geological scale.
Makes me sick to my stomach to see agriculture taking such a blow. Then again, a shocking number of them vote Democrat.
gee, I wonder if the reason for it is good irrigation coming from other parts of the state.
I don't. Know why?
Because I'm talking about what it was like before the irrigation.
the problem is that the claims of the central valley farmers and their supporters are only HALF right
it’s true that certain “environmental” concerns are receiving 100% of what the state designated as their portion of water, and the central valley is getting maybe 40% of it’s designated allotment
HOWEVER, even if all water interests in the state got an equal % of their regular allotments, there would still be shortages, because there has been and continues to be drought, in terms of the amount of water California had gotten use to receiving and what it has been getting in recent years.
Yes, the drought is more severe in the southern part of the state - always dryer than the north in good or bad years, in terms of water - but, the state resevoirs are a gage on the drought and a majority are at some stage of drought status and many have been for a number of years.
California has experienced large scale multi-year drought conditions, moderate to severe - 1918-20, 23-26, 28-35, 47-50, 59-62, 76-77, 87-92, 2000-2002, 2007-2009; and in terms of precipitation 2013 was the driest on record. A majority of the state’s resevoirs are at some level of drught status.
Yes - the Liberal ideolgoues and environmental nazis have made the problem for farming worse than it needed to be under the present conditions.
My point is that correcting that will not create the water conditions the state, and the farmers have been used to.
Solutions like desalinization plants are what is needed, or their will never be enough water to satisfy all interests in California, particularly through the dry years. That kind of solution is needed in the southern part of state as well, because the watershed that feeds the Colorado River has not been delivering the kind of quantities that were abundent when the Hoover Dam was built. There is some concern that its hdroelectric generation capacity may be threatened, if drought conditions continue or become more severe.
California has water problems up and down the state.
The pols and ideolgoues have made matters worse for the farmers, worse than needed to be.
But, their actions are not creating the drought, they just make the drought that is worse for some of state’s water interests.
SoCal liberals cling bitterly to their seldom used pools as the nations food supply goes thirsty.
Corn is a HUGE user of water compared to other food crops. And is a REAL waste when used for ethanol fuel, so I did a quick search to see if California was stupid enough. Seems that they are, but the article also told of how they were trying to move away from corn for ethanol:
http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2013/09/california-needs-corn-ethanol-reform
Transitioning away from corn ethanol makes sense for California and the rest of the country. From 2008 to 2011, the mandate has contributed to plowing up more than 23 million acres of wetlands and grasslands an area the size of Indiana in order to grow crops, largely corn...
Likewise, the National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions and may actually increase them, along with boosting air pollutants...
In California, where water shortages are common, it can take more than 3,500 liters of water to produce a single liter of ethanol, according to researchers at UC Berkeley....
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