Posted on 04/30/2015 5:45:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
The present four-year California drought is not novel -- even if President Barack Obama and California Gov. Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells -- like those of 1929-34, 1976-77 and 1987-92 -- more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.
What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought -- well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent immigration.
A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one's view on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure.
Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers' advice to continually increase water storage.
Environmentalists counter that existing dams and reservoirs have already tapped out the state's potential to transfer water from the wet areas, where 75 percent of the snow and rain fall, to the dry regions, where 75 percent of the population prefers to reside.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Ping
Find West on the dial
Go West young man and you will find water
They would also have a lot more water for people if they stopped sending thousands of acre feet into the ocean for salmon and smelt.
You really have to live in cloud cuckoo land to think you can double the states population and not increase the water supply. Why “environmentalists” we’re able to grab so much power and flout common sense is beyond me. Send all illegals packing, stop trying to save a damned (and already doomed) minnow, replace certain inappropriate water-hungry crops and problem solved.
The irony is traveling west on the billion dollar speed rails to get to that salty water rather than forgo the rails and build desalinization and piping to the east.
The Salinas, Sacramento, Klamath and Columbia Rivers dump millions of gallons of fresh water into the Pacific every hour. Pipelines could replenish California lakes daily and keep the central valley fertile.
But, liberal politicians would rather spend billions on a high speed train to no where. Get your tickets to see a vast wasteland go by at 200 mph and an economy go down even faster!
Then build the plants
Things are never easy for him.
Thou hast struck the nail directly upon the head. Environmentalists stopped the practice of creating fire breaks in the Angelinos Nat'l Forest and massive fires is the result. With depleted forests, spring rains bring landslides. No dams, no water. Cause, meet effect.
In the 1800s, the American West, beginning with the High Plains, was not called THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT for nothing.
I have a solution to the California drought. Get every bull dozer on the planet on the California border, and start pushing towards the ocean.
Ironic that a state with the third longest coastline is having water problems.......
The best way to save that minnow is to commercialize it. Make it a hot seller in the pet stores or food stores and you’ll have more of them than can be counted.............
No chit
There was the California Environment Quality Act in 1970(Reagan). At the federal level there was NEPA, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Magnuson Act, and others. The courts establishing minimum instream flows via Reserved Water Rights means you can't take all the water out of the stream to satisfy prior appropriation water rights(delta smelt).
It was only about 10 years ago that CA had to give up a significant portion of the Colorado that they had been allowed to use until the upper river states needed it.
A lot of this came to be as a result of the grandiose water projects that were proposed in CA and the western US back in those days when Congress spending a lot of money and the Bureau of Rec/Corp of Engineers reached their engineering zenith.
Projects like Ah Pah Dam, two more dams on the Colorado, NAWAPA, etc were rejected then and are not likely to be approved today. The more dams you build, the fewer potential dams sites remain.
Instead, what you see is the water storage projects approved by the CA voters last November: Sites Reservoir, Temperance Flat Dam, and raising Shasta dam.
There is a good historical record of water development in CA and the west that can be read or watched on YouTube: Cadillac Desert
That is why I added It’s their own fault to the title
The irony of desalinazation is that the government has been pumping fresh water into the ocean only to pull it back out and desalt it.
Why not just use it in the first place?
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