Where's the Real Drought Solution?

by Deacon Blues

I’ve been very busy of late without a chance to stay up on events. Nonetheless, let me throw out two short items for discussion over the weekend.

Hillary and the GOP Pack
It truly helps Hillary to have the likes of Chris Christie and Scott Walker attacking her for foreign policy and other failures. Both of these GOP governors have done so much damage to their states, in lackluster job growth, bad fiscal policies, terrible cronyism, attacks on education and the safety net, and their own whoring to the Koch’s and other GOP oligarchs that any attacks by them can be swiftly rebutted with the facts. As for Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, a simple “we need serious candidates for serious times” dismissal by Hillary is enough.

Lastly, can someone tell me what’s wrong medically and physically with Jeb? The man is practically shrinking inside his clothes ever since he went public.

California and the Drought
Governor Jerry Brown and other state leaders, as well as our California media are doing the worst possible public service in their attention to the California water shortage, because that’s what it truly is. This isn’t really a crisis of consumption, even though almond farmers shouldn’t be able to plunder their contracted rights to supply the Chinese while major reservoirs go dry this summer. No, the real problem that neither Brown nor anyone else confronts is that climate change has destroyed the State’s supply of water, something you cannot adequately address alone through conservation or new storage. There’s nothing to store, because there’s no longer enough snow and rain runoff to create the necessary water supplies for the existing population and businesses, let alone the relentless and stupid growth being allowed.

The state needs to create more water, plain and simple. And the only way to do that is a massive public works program to build water desalinization plants up and down the state in partnership with local water districts. Yes, it will take a decade, and yes, the best case scenario is that we’d only be able to perhaps create 12-15% of our water needs after such a program, but that amount may be the difference in overcoming the up and down cycles of water production we may be saddled with now in this state. The only entity that can do the bond indebtedness needed for such a program is the State; these needs should not be left to individual water districts tackling costly projects on their own in a disjointed and uncoordinated way.

And it would be a far better investment for the State right now than the billions being spent on the bullet train.