Posted on 04/10/2015 5:12:06 AM PDT by thackney
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 in the Central Valley and into the San Francisco Bay in order to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered fish that environmentalists have continued to champion at the expense of Californians. This water is simply being washed out to sea, instead of being channeled to the people who desperately need it.
While they have watched this water wash out to sea, liberals have simultaneously prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades. This has happened during a period in which California’s population has doubled. It is clear that improved or additional infrastructure would allow for greater conservation before droughts — especially as the population continues to explode — but California has not completed a major water infrastructure project in 50 years.
Largely because of these policies, 99% of California is in some kind of water shortage, according to the United States Drought Monitor, and 67% is experiencing “extreme” drought conditions. Thirty-seven million people are estimated to be affected.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
She was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate from California in 2010.
Hear! Hear!
Finally someone speaking out against radical environmentalism.
Pray America is waking
Environmentalists who worry about a species of fish going extinct are the ultimate science deniers.
99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. That’s a scientific FACT.
To get upset over a single species of fish is to live in a mind-set where the demise of unicorns is a source of daily pain and sadness.
Fiorina is a feisty lady and that’s a compliment. I hope she gets in the presidential race if just to shake things up and go after the Rats on the war against women issue. Also, she can highlight the failure of liberal policies in her home state.
I just wish she had not virtually destroyed HP.
OTOH, let’s have her run the IRS into the ground...
HP was on its way out long before Fiorina got there...and I do think it’s good to have somebody from Crazy California and the Left Coast who can speak with authority on exactly how disastrous lefty-enviro-wacko policies have been there.
And now Texas is being overrun with these people.
The old saying “you make your bed and you lay in it to sleep” holds true for these absolutely stupid liberals in Kalifornicaia.
They brought this upon themselves and now they must live with it.
Liberals deliberately created this problem so they could “solve” it by taking ever more control over other people’s lives.
This is what they do with EVERY issue and EVERY situation. They’re arsonists who insist on being honored as firefighters.
Truly a liberal exacerbated problem.
Of Course this is an Engineered water shortage, - how else could the Dems take more and more control of your life?
Everybody knows this, or should know this rather than trust Moonbeam.
Fines and Taxes..........while Freedom goes down the drain!
Enjoy!
As a resident of California, I’m so happy the non native silverfish is thriving in our state. Kinda like illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, my native children are having their water rationed. It’s so wonderful.
But...but...but we’re gunna have a high speed train to nowhere. That’ll fix it. Really, that’ll fix it.
MAN-made? Why only blame men? Oh I forgot this must be part of the alleged “war on women.”
I couldn’t resist....
I hate when these “Cali’s” pull into Oklahoma in their Bentleys with Ipads and PC’s hanging off them.
Go back to Cali you stinking Calis’ we don’t need your kind in these here parts.
Mars was wrecked by a liberal environmental group trying to save the Martian grey minnow funded by billionaire George Suaceros.
These problems need to get worse (and they will quickly), so that people can get a taste for what 100 yrs of progressive policies have wrought for the USA. Obola’s policies have accelerated the decline and hopefully have turned up the temperature on the frog to where he might jump out of the pot. We are near the upward end of the swing on the progressive pendulum.
And when it starts raining again, you can bet your bottom buck that the Dems will say that the rain will not relieve the drought and that all the restrictions must remain in place. This has happened after every drought I can remember.
Carley F cribbed all this from Victor Davis Hansen. Good for her>>>>
A Tale of Four Droughts | Works and Days
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/four-droughts/?singlepage=true
Hubris
If one studies the literature on the history and agendas of the California State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, two observations are clear. One, our ancestors brilliantly understood that Californians always would wish to work and live in the center and south of the state. They accepted that where 75% of the population wished to live, only 25% of the state’s precipitation fell. Two, therefore they designed huge transfer projects from Northern California that was wet and sparsely settled, southward to where the state was dry and populated. They assumed that northerners wanted less water and relief from flooding, and southerners more water and security from drought, and thus their duty was to accommodate both.
Nor were these plans ossified. Indeed, they were envisioned as expanding to meet inevitable population increases. The Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes, and Sites reservoirs were planned in wet years as safety deposits, once higher reservoirs emptied. As population grew larger, dams could be raised at Shasta and Oroville. Or huge third-phase reservoirs like the vast Ah Pah project on the Klamath River might ensure the state invulnerability from even 5-6 year droughts.
One can say what one wishes about the long ago cancelled huge Ah Pah project — what would have been the largest manmade reservoir project in California history — but its additional 15 million acre feet of water would be welcomed today. Perhaps such a vast project was mad. Perhaps it was insensitive to local environmental and cultural needs. Perhaps the costs were prohibitive — a fraction of what will be spent on the proposed high-speed rail project. Perhaps big farming would not pay enough of the construction costs. But one cannot say that its 15 million acre feet of water storage would not have been life-giving in a year like this.
In any case, Ah Pah was no more environmentally unsound than is the Hetch Hetchy Project, without which there would be no Silicon Valley today as we now know it. One cannot say that hundreds of millions of public dollars have not gone to environmentalists, in and outside of government and academia, to subsidize their visions of the future that did not include food production and power generation for others. They are no less subsidized than the corporate farmers they detest.
One of the ironies of the current drought is that urbanites who cancelled these projects never made plans either to find more water or to curb population. Take the most progressive environmentalist in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the likelihood is that his garden and bath water are the results of an engineering project of the sort he now opposes.
Fantasies
The state and federal water projects were envisioned as many things — flood control, hydroelectric generation, irrigation, and recreation. One agenda was not fish restoration. Perhaps it should have been. But our forefathers never envisioned building dams and reservoirs to store water to ensure year-round fish runs in our rivers — a mechanism to improve on the boom-and-bust cycle of nature, in which 19th century massive spring flooding was naturally followed by August and September low, muddy, or dry valley rivers.
Engineering alone could ensure an unnatural river, where flows could be adjusted all year long, almost every year, by calibrated releases from artificial lakes, ensuring about any sort of river salmon or delta bait fish population one desired. One may prefer catching a salmon near Fresno to having a $70 billion agricultural industry, but these days one cannot have both. Releasing water to the ocean in times of drought was not the intention of either the California State Water Project or the Central Valley Project; again, it may be a better idea than what the old engineers had planned on, but it is predicated on the idea that those living in Mendota or working in Coalinga are an unfortunately unnatural species, at least in comparison to river salmon and bait fish.
Population
Even with drought, cancellations of dams, and diversions of contracted water to the ocean, California might well not have been imperiled by the present drought — had its population stayed at about 20 million when most of the water projects were cancelled in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately the state is now 40 million — and growing. Illegal immigration — half of all undocumented aliens live in California — has added millions to the state population. And agriculture is a key route for Mexican immigrants to reach the middle class. Either the state should insist on closing the borders and encourage emigration out of state to no-tax states (which is already happening at about the rate of 1000 to 2000....
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Read more: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/four-droughts/#ixzz3WuowPJrg
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