George Rebane

Governor Moonbeam’s latest dicta about how Californians should now take showers underlines the years long insane policies under which the Left has governed our state.  The most recently mandated 25% (of what) reduction of consumer water use is the direct result of “decades of environmental excess”.

Since 2000 alone the public has expressed its will to increase water storage capacity in NorCal by voting over $22B for such improvements in managing the state’s water resources.  Yet these monies have been redirected and pissed away by liberal state councils and commissions toward alternative uses such as affordable housing and “sustainable land use”.

NorCal has the state’s largest untapped water sources and locations for new water storage reservoirs.  But under the Agenda21 umbrella, which prescribes liberal land use and environmental initiatives, NorCal is recognized as the most inviting and logical region for population growth in California.  However, that flies straight in the face of A21’s stack-and-pack vision for America’s and world’s management of human populations.  Uninhabited lands must be retained uninhabitable and/or made so by appropriately draconian laws and regulations.

Environmentalists long ago latched on to A21 as their raison d’etre for all the prescriptions on public and private land use.  Consider that in California no major water infrastructure project has been completed since 1970.  One of the several cohorts of liberal dunderheads that is responsible for this travesty is the State Water Resources Control Board.  This group has mandated the ongoing release of millions of acre feet of fresh water into the Pacific because “every smelt matters”, and there have simply been no more places to store water during our wet years.  California has had four droughts during the last fifty years.  Fifteen years passed between the last drought and the start of the current one; fifteen years of unneeded water losses, especially from NorCal.

Today such bureaucracies are even hindering the development of alternative water sources such as desalinization plants – once the darling of environmentalists until technology advances made them feasible in the marketplace – since these would support growth in places distant from surface water sources.  In San Diego desalinization company Poseidon has been six years in permitting and litigation to build a $1B plant to supply 7% of the city’s water.  Among the hurdles was requiring Poseidon to “restore 66 acres of wetlands in return for its desalinization permit.”  In sight of such punishments by government, other desalinization projects have been abandoned.

There is a lot more to say about how socialists and central planners are dunning our state and country – and we will get it said in the fullness of time – but for now consider that everything to impede growth in California is being done that can be done without inciting revolt among the sheeple.  Today their crosshairs are on the state’s agri-businesses and its politically recalcitrant rural counties.  Moonbeam’s train from nowhere to nowhere will be completed before NorCal adds a single reservoir to capture and store water between the periodic droughts that California has suffered since Paleolithic times.  Something to think about as tonight we welcome the latest of the year’s sparse storms to grace the Sierra this winter.  (more here)