California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
April 9, 2015
The Drought Intensifies
This week’s U.S. Drought Monitor indicates the worst is yet to come. We began the year with 32 percent of the state in “Exceptional Drought,” the most extreme category of drought. Last week the monitor had 41 percent of the state in “exceptional drought.” The April 7 monitor now has 44 percent of the state in that category– an increase of 3 percent in one week.
This week’s update begins with a statement from LaRouche PAC:
April 6, 2015
On ABC News‘ “This Week,” Jerry Brown proclaimed:
“And I can tell you, from California, climate change is not a hoax. We’re dealing with it and it’s damn serious.”
In a New York Times article entitled “California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth,” Jerry Brown is further quoted as follows:
“You just can’t live the way you always have. For over 10,000 years, people lived in California, but the number of those people were never more than 300,000 or 400,000.”
If Jerry Brown and those who think like him, including at the New York Times, were to prevail, then indeed the population of California and much of the rest of humanity would be doomed.
The fact of the matter is that the crisis in California is not caused by human activity. Climate change as Jerry Brown conceives it is indeed a hoax.
As Ben Deniston of the LaRouche Basement science team demonstrates in his recently published “Memo for the next President: New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis,” the cause of the crisis in California and elsewhere is to be located on the level of solar, cosmic, and galactic factors.
The real crisis is not climate change due to human activity, but rather a failure to address a change in the climate caused by solar, cosmic, and galactic factors, as a result of human inactivity, specifically the suppression of human scientific creativity.
Not taking showers as proposed by Jerry Brown will not solve the problem. Nor would group showers, which Jerry Brown might be inclined to propose in the near future.
Rather, the only solution lies in what Jerry Brown has a short supply of—creativity.
Ultimately, the choice is to grow or die. If Brown’s policy is adopted, then the population of California may very well be reduced to 300,000 or 400,000 people in the short-term.
But the alternative to that is that, by mastering scientific principles—Keplerian principles—we can harness water resources that would allow for an increasing population at an even higher standard of living than currently experienced, including in California.
Two immediate sources of water identified by Ben Deniston in his memo, are nuclear desalination of ocean water, which Brown has adamantly opposed, and ionization-based weather modification. Anyone who wants to prevent human extinction should deal with this, and take this damn seriously.
During his 1982 campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator in California against then Governor Jerry Brown, LaRouche Democrat Will Wertz issued a pamphlet in which, in addition to proposing the construction of NAWAPA, he specifically proposed implementing two major planned nuclear desalination projects which had been sabotaged by Brown and his green-Brown allies.
The first of these was called the Bolsa Island nuplex off the coast of Orange County. This plan, which was initiated in the mid-1960s called for a dual-purpose nuclear desalting plant located on a man-made island. The complex was to have been built in two phases. In the first phase, the desalination plant would produce 50 million gallons of water per day. Within 4-5 years, an additional 100 million gallons per day capacity would be added, for a total of 150 million gallons per day.
In May 1967 a congressional bill authorizing the project was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. In August 1967, then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed Assembly Bill 1782, authorizing the plan to proceed.
Neither of these plans was implemented, thanks to Jerry Brown, who was Governor of California from 1975 to 1983, and his green-Brown allies. However, both plans could now be part of the solution to the present crisis.
For more, see:
“Don't Let California Go Brown: The Water Exists, Develop It!” https://larouchepac.com/20150406/dont-let-california-go-brown-water-exists-develop-it Jerry Brown, the leader of the brownshirts It was Jerry's father Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, Sr., who as governor from 1959-1967, built the California Water Project, which provides water to 20 million people in the state and irrigates 750,000 acres of farm land. Brown, Sr. ensured that tuition at the state's colleges and universities for California residents was zero. Brown, Sr. was an ally of President John Kennedy, and he and Kennedy together inaugurated the building of the San Luis Reservoir in 1962. The State Water Project and the State Aqueduct continued the tradition of the American System Democratic Party begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who build the Central Valley Project, the Grand Coulee Dam and the Tennessee Valley Project, all of them among the greatest infrastructure projects in U.S. history. Now Jerry, Jr. wishes to force upon the people of California a foreign ideology and policy; foreign in that it is the British System idea of depopulation and the fraudulent idea that resources are limited. As Ben Deniston demonstrates in his paper, “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis,” larouchepac.com/20150401/new-perspectives-western-water-crisis, it is man's creative power that creates the resources he requires, thus there are no limits to growth. The press this past week has inundated the state and the nation with the Jerry Brown, Jr. story, bluntly putting it that Jerry must repudiate all his father had built. As our lead item (above) summarizes it, the New York Times has led the pack, like it did in 2003, with the lies about Sadam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. In its April 5 article, "California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth," the Times states clearly its idea that it is “nature” not man who determines the future: “But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.”
I won’t torture you with more from that articles, since there were plenty more of a similar vein, including one in the Washington Post on April 2, “Jerry Brown battles Calif. water crisis created by his father, Gov. Pat Brown.” Just a couple of sentences from this one will do:
“This philosophy — unlimited water for every Californian at any price — was behind Pat Brown’s massive mid-century push for water projects in the Golden State. And it’s a legacy his son, who just announced California’s first mandatory water restrictions, must endure.
“Brown succeeded — and created a nightmare. The population of California in 1959 was about 15 million. Today, about 39 million people live there, and they’re all thirsty. Meanwhile, some of them have thirsty crops.
“But it was the father who helped bring an intractable problem to the state that the son must now solve.”
And from the Christian Science Monitor on April 5, this, “California drought or dream? Jerry Brown at a hinge of Golden State history.” One excerpt:
“…Brown’s greatest legacy might be presiding over a moment when the legacy of plenty created by his father began to come up against the stark realities of that vision – a land increasingly pushed to its environmental limits by its continued success and climate changes.”
And right on cue, Jerry doubles down on his belief in man-caused climate change. Media all over the country quoted him on that, so I won’t bore you with details.
But, I must give credit where credit is due, though with Brown, anything he does or says that happens to be truthful costs him nothing. In this case the damage is already done. Jerry has defended his not imposing more cuts on agriculture, confounding his environmentalist supporters. He is widely quoted saying, “”If you don’t want to produce any food and import it from some other place, of course you could do that. “But that would displace hundreds of thousands of people and I don’t think it’s needed.”
Despite the widely reported virtual cut-off of farmers in the Central Valley from any water from the major water projects this year, articles are still popping up complaining that “agriculture was let off the hook.”
Here is a headline from CBS-News on April 6: “How long can Calif. farmers dodge water restrictions?”
Push back
We are not the only voice dissenting from the stampede of hysteria and the shouting of “cut, cut, cut, conserve, conserve, conserve.” Though we must caution the reader that while some of the Republicans are blaming the environmentalist mentality for not building the dams and reservoirs that were planned in the 1960s and early 1970s, their policy of just doing that now is completely inadequate and fails to address the reality that the climate is changing and what is required now is the creation of new water cycles like nuclear-powered-desalination and tapping into the atmospheric moisture flows right above our heads.
First, a farmer responds in an opinion piece in the New York Times on April 7. “Dan Keppen is the executive director of the Family Farm Alliance, a grass-roots organization founded by Central Valley farmers and ranchers that now advocates for agricultural irrigators in 17 Western states.”
Keppen wrote:
“About two million acres of prime California farmland saw its surface water supply from the federal government shut off last year. That action will be repeated this year. Another million acres that gets water from the state received only 5 percent of its supply last year. Add it up, and you have an area equal to the size of Connecticut left with just a bare trace of its once reliable water supply. This land typically provides vast amounts of food and fiber to the world, and is the economic foundation of local rural communities.”
Other farmers and farm organizations are beginning to speak up, too. See next week’s issue for more.
The Orange County Register ran an editorial on April 3, titled: “California paying for its neglect of water infrastructure.”
They write: “But this didn’t have to be. Over the years, The Register and other publications have outlined ways to prevent the disaster. Here are two that can be done now:”
The editorial then lists, “Build more dams and reservoirs,” and “Tap desalination by cutting red tape.”
Nice, but the Republicans in Congress and in the Assembly say the same thing. The question they must answer is, “What are they going to do?”
More interesting is the article by Victor Davis Hanson in the City Journal, re-published by Families Protecting the Valley. The title: “An Engineered Drought– Shortsighted coastal elites bear most of the blame for California’s water woes.” Hanson writes:
We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems.
The Hanford Sentinel on April 2, goes after the new $1 billion drought package signed by the governor a week or so ago. The title: “Local officials say drought package only provides ‘welfare, no water.’” Here is an excerpt:
“Kingsburg Mayor Chet Reilly decried the effort as only providing ‘welfare, not water.’
“‘For those affected by the drought, it provides them with food, whereas it addresses actual water issues in Southern and Northern California that aren’t impacted as much as we are. We’re trying to redirect the legislation and bring actual water, and not welfare, to the Valley,’ Reilly said.
“Officials say the assistance with food distribution and bottled water funding is appreciated. However, the drought pack age does not address agricultural and municipal water supplies needed to ease economic and social suffering.”
Our final item this week makes this issue a little long, but it is worth it.
1966: A year that the U.S. Congress demonstrated leadership that is unknown in the Congress of 2015
In the fall of 1966, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to build a massive nuclear-power-desalination plant off the coast of Orange County, California. Had that authorized program been acted upon in subsequent years the present water crisis in the state would not exist today. The members of Congress who pushed through that legislation understood that while the then under construction State Water Project would begin delivering water in 1972, that by 1990, new sources of water would be required to meet the needs of the state’s growing population.
The following excerpts are from the Congressional Record from September 13, 1966 through October 4, 1966. It can be found in Legislative history: Saline water conversion act, Volume 6, Parts 1-2, page 669-683
Here is the description of the House bill as printed in the Congressional Record for September 13, 1966:
HR 17558. A bill to amend Public Law 89-428 to authorize the Atomic Energy Commission to enter into a cooperative arrangement for a large-scale for a large-scale combination nuclear-power-desalting project, and appropriations therefor, in accordance with section 261 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended; to the joint committee on atomic energy.
Both the House and the companion Senate bill passed nearly unanimously. Then the Vietnam war exploded, environmentalism began taking over the nation, and the economy was transformed into a gambling casino. And like the North American Water and Power Project, which was also moving through the Congress at that time, after the assassination of President Kennedy the nation changed, for the worse.
Introducing the Senate bill on September 13, 1966, was Thomas H. Kuchel, a Republican from California. He said:
“…I am pleased to introduce a bill (S. 3823) to authorize the Department of the Interior to participate in the construction and operation of a massive desalination plant and nuclear power generating facility to be built off the coast of southern California….
“It will provide southern California with 150 million gallons of fresh water per day…. it will more than double the combined capacity of all the salt water conversion plants in the world today.
“This bill is the outgrowth of a Federal desalination program extending back over 15 years. It is the fruition of the cooperative efforts of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Department of the Interior and the Atomic Energy Commission. On August 18, 1964, these agencies signed a contract authorizing a wide study of a huge nuclear fueled sea water conversion plant which would provide large quantities of electric power. The objective was a plant capable of producing 150 million gallons of water per day, enough to supply a city the size of Boston or San Francisco.
“One of the more interesting aspects of the report was Bechtel’s recommendation that the complex be placed on a manmade island about 3,000 feet off-shore from Bosa Chica State Beach in Orange County….
“Responsible authorities estimate there will be 50 million people in California before the turn of the century.”
Included in the Congressional Record by Senator Kuchell was a draft of the authorizing legislation from the Secretary of the Interior, Steward L. Udall, which included the following:
“The present plan is to build the desalting plant in two phases. The first phase will develop 50 million gallons per day of fresh water– the second will produce another 100 million gallons per day….
“We believe the proposed legislation represents a dynamic step forward in the development of processes for the economical conversion of saline waters for beneficial consumptive use. We consider this proposal to be of paramount importance in the effort to find new ways and means of conserving and increasing the water resources of the Nation. We recommend its immediate consideration and approval.”
On September 21, 1966 the Senate “debate” continued, and again Senator Kuchel spoke, saying:
“Here the government and the people of the United States, by the participation authorized in this legislation, will be able to lead the way toward solving a water shortage problem which exists not alone the State from which I come, but throughout the United States, and across the seas in other countries….
“Our objective in building this saline water conversion plant is not to supply my State with an immediate supply of water. Massive as the plant will be, it will provide only 168,000 acre-feet of water annually to a State which now draws more than 5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year.
“Our present sources of water, augmented by State water project water, which will be available in 1972, will meet our needs until approximately the year 1990. However, our planning for the next increment of water to meet the needs after 1990 must begin immediately, as experience has demonstrated it takes at least 25 years to move a new major water development from the initial planning state to the operating stage.
“This legislation has the recommendations of all Federal agencies and State agencies, and represents, I think, a new milestone in the progress of mankind in solving the never ending struggle to find sufficient water to maintain life and [ensure] progress.”
Here are some of the remarks of Congressman Richard T. Hanna, California Democrat introducing the House bill (H.R. 17676) on September 13, 1966:
“The Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District, which distributes water throughout southern California, has agreed to support and cooperate in the project. One of the main points in favor of the project is that it is a water source independent of the flow of river and aqueduct systems, and, in an emergency, it might well prove more valuable than any of us are now predicting.
“This will be the world’s largest desalinization plant. It will be a show-place of great interest to the people of the many areas around the world, and in our own country, who are in need of water and power, and to those who see the day rapidly approaching when this need will arise.
“The President of the United States has asked Congress to approve this project. The distinguished chairman of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs has agreed to introduce a companion measure. It is my hope that we can act with dispatch and thereby assure the earliest possible completion of this most worthy project.”
Senate Bill 3823 passed the U.S. Senate on September 21, 1966. The amended bill S. 3807 passed the Senate on September 29, 1966. And on October 3, 1966 the House passed the Senate version (S. 3807) as its own. The House vote was 316 yes; 1 no; and 115 not voting.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law in May, 1967. In August 1967, then California Governor Ronald Reagan signed Assembly Bill 1782, authorizing the plan to proceed.
This was followed-up by the State of California in 1969, with a report by the California Department of Water Resources in Bulletin No. 134-69, issued in June of that year, titled, “Desalting– State of the Art.” Following a lengthy section on nuclear-powered desalination we find the following:
“Looking to the future, it is expected that the technology needed to build dual-purpose nuclear systems will exist so that single-unit large-scale sea water desalters can be built for operation in the early 1980s. It is further anticipated that light water reactor nuclear-steam supply systems will be utilized in plants built in the 1980s. Breeder reactors will begin to take over power production from water reactors in the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, dual-purpose plants will more likely be supplied with energy more from breeder reactors. “Rapid strides are being made in controlled fusion. While we do not know today the role, if any, fusion will play in supplying energy tomorrow, its role should be clear before the Twenty-first Century arrives. The odds for the economic success of fusion by the year 2000 are often Judged as about even. “Whole new vistas should be opened up to us 31 years hence, when the Twenty-first Century commences. The year 2000, in terms of technological developments, is really a long distance away. There is certainly time for some so-called far-out predictions to materialize and for new or unexpected developments to take place. The three-fourths of us living today who will still be alive then must be prepared for the vast technological, medical, and sociological changes that most surely will take place.”
That exemplifies the optimism about the future that used to govern this nation. It is time to restore it.
Next Week:
If you liked what Enron did to you when you allowed the privatization of electricity back in the 1990s, you will love what the Wall Street looters and speculators have planned for California water.
