California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
May 21, 2015
For a Solution to the Water Crisis, Understand the Difference Between Man and Beast This week's report begins with the question Jerry Brown will not consider. On May 18, on the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee discussion, Lyndon LaRouche addressed the water question in this way: “Most types of animals become readily extinct. They have no ability to create, out of themselves, an animal which is superior to themselves. No animal can do that. Animals evolve, but in one-shot cases. “Well, what about human life? Human life does not change in its characteristics. It changes only in its self-development. But no animal as such, is capable of such self-development, only the human being. “Why is this so important?-- the water system. The answer is, what is the species that can do something about that? And only the human species can do that, and how can the human species do that? Only from a galactic standpoint. “What is the difference between mankind and an animal? The difference is that mankind, intrinsically, is able to change the character of its species. And the very character of the scientific discovery, for example, true scientific discovery, always represents that. And we know the difference, we know Zeus from Prometheus, and that's the difference. And that's what the definition is, and if you don't have the Promethean conception of mankind, you don't have mankind, you have something which looks like a man but is actually a beast.” I referenced the following last week, but it is worth repeating. Here is the link to the transcript of Benjamin Deniston's presentation on the LaRouche Scientific Basement Team on the New Paradigm for Mankind weekly webcast on May 13, 2015:
“Bringing the Rain”
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2015/2015_20-29/2015-21/pdf/05-15_4221.pdf
El Nino-- Its Deja Vu All Over Again Over the past week, repeating almost word for word stories from about this time last year, articles have been hyping the possibility of a strong El Nino next winter as the best hope for ending the California drought. El Nino, unfortunately, did not arrive this past winter, or rather a very weak El Nino did occur, which some climatologists nick-named “El Flopo.” But, since the arrival of any El Nino would not occur until at least late December or sometime in January next year, we will put aside, for now, any further mention of it. More Rationing, Water Cut-offs and Warnings This past week has seen a flood of announced water cut-offs to farmers, some details of the urban rationing regime and warnings of disasters to come. And as long as the Brownshirts are in control we will see more of the same while they ignore real solutions. Some firsts are being “achieved” these days. For the first time since the water began to flow from Owens Valley to Los Angeles in 1913, via the Los Angeles Aqueduct, no water will be delivered this year. This unprecedented development means that three of the four major water management systems of the state will deliver no water, or in the case of the California Water Project only 20 percent of the contracted deliveries. The Federal Central Valley Project, which used to irrigate more than three million acres and provide water to three million people will deliver zero water this year. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, built by the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power William Mulholland, when completed in 1913, was considered the greatest project in human history. Normally, the Aqueduct provides one-third of the water Los Angeles uses every year. Along with the 80 percent cut Southern California normally receives from the Central Valley Project, we can expect very soon the announcement of even more draconian rationing policies soon from that region. As reported, for the first time in memory, farmers with the oldest water rights have been ordered by the State Water Board to stop pumping water from the San Joaquin River watershed. The order will go out on May 22, and more and broader orders to stop pumping water are expected to follow. Another first announced last week delivered an even bigger blow to the farmers of the Fresno Irrigation District than that they received last year. The Central Valley Project last year delivered water for only two months to the district, as opposed to the normal six months of deliveries. This year they will receive zero deliveries. This is the first time since the district was formed in 1920, and the first time since irrigation began in the Fresno area 145 years ago, that no water will be delivered. It is now May. Back in January farmers throughout the state purchased seed and fertilizer for this Spring's planting; equipment was purchased and contracts were signed with canneries and others. Farmers in the Delta were warned in January that all water-right holders should plan for possible shortages of water this year. These farmers were trapped. If they did not plan and purchase in January they could not plant in April and May. So, they took a chance and now they may be partially or totally cut off from being able to withdraw water-- for the first time since the 1850s when irrigation in the Delta began.
Reuters reported on May 15, that farmers on the California-Oregon border have been informed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that they will receive about one-half the normal water they expect this year, and more cuts may follow. This affects about 1,200 farmers in the Klamath Basin.
Here are excerpts from an article in Capitol Press by Tim Hearden on May 21. This is currently the best summary of the catastrophe now hitting Central Valley farmers that I have seen. The article is titled, “Water shutoffs, shortages imperil ag in San Joaquin Valley:”
FRESNO, Calif. — Roger Isom was shocked by what he saw as he drove along Highway 33 through the west side of the San Joaquin Valley: Thousands of acres of rich farmland were fallowed because of a lack of water.
“It’s fast becoming more and more like Nevada,” said Isom, who runs three organizations that help cotton and nut farmers and processors. “There’s nothing here anymore.”
About 40 miles away in Dinuba, Calif., grower and packer Jay Gillette watched a bulldozer rip out about one-third of his navel orange grove.
“I don’t know anybody near here that isn’t affected” by water shortages, Gillette said. “I think it’s going to take some years off people’s lives. The stress is just incredible.”
A pall hovers over the San Joaquin Valley these days. Water shutoffs and shrinking aquifers threaten to turn what has long been the nation’s most productive agricultural region — producing slightly more than $22 billion in crops in 2012 — into a patchwork of abandoned fields.
Water in decline
The drought gripping California has forced more than 2.8 million acres statewide to go without surface water again this year, according to the California Farm Water Coalition. A large portion of that is in the Central Valley. More than half of California’s irrigated farmland will receive 20 percent or less of normal surface water supplies, forcing farmers either to drill wells to supply their crops with a shrinking supply of groundwater or to let their fields go fallow.
Drought-related water cutbacks last year caused an estimated 400,000 acres in the state to be fallowed and cost the region some 17,000 jobs. This year, fallowed acreage could top 600,000 acres and cost more than 20,000 jobs, said Craig McNamara, president of the state Board of Food and Agriculture. The Fresno County Farm Bureau estimates the amount of fallowed ground could total closer to 1 million acres.
Since the early 1990s, Central Valley Project water allocations to farmers south of the Delta have declined with each new environmental protection — from winter run salmon temperature controls in the San Joaquin River to biological opinions further protecting salmon and the Delta smelt.
Between 1995 and 2006 — normal years for precipitation — CVP allocations averaged 75 percent for farmers and 94 percent for urban uses south of the Delta, according to California Citrus Mutual, a trade association with 2,200 grower members. As growers without senior water rights have been getting no federal water during the drought, water allocations to wildlife refuges have only been cut to 75 percent.
For valley dairies, which produce California’s top-valued commodity, the drought is part of a perfect storm of misfortune as the industry also grapples with milk prices below those paid under federal marketing orders. Producer groups say more than 350 dairies have either closed or left the state since 2007 because the state’s pricing formula hasn’t kept pace with escalating feed, fuel and other costs.
The average price of milk in California in the final three months of 2014 was $20.09 per hundredweight, barely above the two-year average production cost of $19.05 per hundredweight, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture.
But the average milk price for January through March has plummeted to $13.93 per hundredweight, said Annie AcMoody, Western United Dairymen’s director of economic analysis.
Cotton shrinks
California once grew 1.6 million acres of cotton and operated as many as 299 cotton gins, said Isom, who leads the California Cotton Growers, California Cotton Ginners and Western Agricultural Processors associations. This year, somewhere between 150,000 and 170,000 acres of cotton will be grown in the valley, he said.
The reason for the decline has been a steady drop in water supplies from the Delta to the valley’s west side, he said. Some 500,000 acre-feet of water was lost because of two biological opinions — one published late in 2008 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the tiny Delta smelt, the other in June 2009 by the National Marine Fisheries Service to help salmon.
The cutbacks had a profound impact on an area that has produced some of the highest quality, best yielding cotton in the world, Isom said. With its hot weather, California has grown 90 percent of U.S. Pima cotton, used for high-quality shirts and towels. While the national average for cotton yield is 650 to 850 pounds per acre, California’s average is 1,600 pounds per acre.
But now, field after field in western Fresno County remains idle.
Note the report in the above article that Central Valley Farmers have not had full deliveries of water most years since the early 1990s. No one can continue to claim that the present crisis is a surprise. As you will see below in my Part IV of the report, “Nuclear-powered Desalination in California,” had what was planned in the 1960s not been killed by the likes, and participation, of Jerry Brown, there would be no water crisis today.
And in the cities
The Board of Directors of the Lompico Water District on May 19, doubled the cost of water to residents from $105 every two months to $205.
The City of Irvine has instituted a tiered rate structure which charges minimal water users 88 cents per unit (748 gallons), and for those who use more will pay $12.60 a unit.
As reported by SF Gate on May 19, Silicon Valley faces dramatic cuts to allowable water use. A uniform water allocation for all residential customers is assigned and for those who go over they will pay double or triple the normal price.
Oregon and Washington Again
On May 15, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee declared the whole state to be in a drought emergency, while the State of Oregon doubled the number of counties that have declared drought emergencies to 14 of the state’s 36 counties.
More on Lake Mead
Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam, which provides water to millions, could, by January, 2017, for the first time, be declared officially in a state of shortage, which would trigger cuts in allocation. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on May 20, that the Federal Bureau of Reclamation will make such a declaration when the reservoir falls below 1,075 feet above sea level. By January, 2017 the lake is now expected to be as much as 15 feet below that level.
The New York Times Attacks the Legacy of ‘Pat’ Brown Once Again
On May 16, the New York Times once again blamed former Governor “Pat’ Brown as responsible for the current water crisis because he built the California State Water Project, opened up new colleges and universities, and generally did what all elected officials should do. Under the headline, “Brown’s Arid California, Thanks Partly to His Father,” the Times just repeats the same thing it reported on April 5, under the title, “California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth.” Both articles harp on the theme of “limits to growth,” and how they have been reached and exceeded, especially in California.
California and 11 Other States Internationally Sign Agreement for Suicidal Reduction in Greenhouse Gases
May 20, 2015 (EIRNS)–California and leaders of 11 other states and provinces in the U.S. and abroad signed a “climate change” agreement yesterday to cut their outputs of so-called greenhouse gases by 80-95 percent by 2050.
This action accords with “flat Earth science” that promotes the notion that human activity causes global warming, and thus feeds the Malthusian view that there are too many people and too few resources, pushed by the British Empire for centuries to get rid of “useless eaters.” Actual science exposes it as dead wrong.
The group, pushed by left- and right-wing zero-growthers, from California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzengger (R), will escalate with a climate conference in Paris in the fall.
This is another attempt to shut down human economic activity after the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009.
In fact, American statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s Science Team has shown that weather and rainfall are controlled by our galaxy, as our solar system passes through its spiral arms, and travels above and below the galactic plane in a 32-million-year cycle. Climate changes are not caused by human activity, but by galactic cycles. See the new article by Benjamin Deniston, here:
https://larouchepac.com/20150520/vernadskian-reconsideration-galactic-cycles-and-evolution
California’s anti-science Gov. Jerry Brown signed this “suicide pact” yesterday, joining Oregon, Vermont, Washington State, USA; Acre, Brazil; Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany; Baja, California and Jalisc, Mexico; Catalonia, Spain; Ontario and British Columbia, Canada; and Wales.
Jerry Brown’s refusal to take effective anti-drought measures in Calfornia tracks his effort to stop
human productive activity in the name of reducing greenhouse gases by up to 95% by 2050.
Arnold
To organize this genocidal action, washed up “beast men” have been called into action, such as former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As Lyndon LaRouche explained in 2003, many people were surprised by Schwarzenegger’s political rise, “because they never really understood how Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. They have overlooked the fact that Schwarzenegger was chosen for politics because he is in real life, the unhuman beast-man whose role has been his most lucrative Hollywood screen-role. They do not understand what fascism really was, and is… Schwarzenegger was never really an actor, not a political thinker; he was, like the worst of his film characters, essentially a freak: a ‘Freddie,’ a ‘Jason’ from ‘Friday the Thirteenth.’
Beast-man Schwarzenegger traveled to France and met with President Hollande in October 2014, to plan the 2015 Paris conference on global warming. He also took “climate change” to the Munich Security conference in February 2015, where he presented a new policy paper, “The Future of Energy,” in which he lectured the military thinkers assembled there that “green energy” leads to energy independence: “We should be fighting climate change right now.” At the Munich Conference, Schwarzenegger also fawned over Vitali Klitschko, the head of the UDAR (Punch) Party, which in the summer of 2014, was in a coalition in Ukraine with the fascist Svoboda Party.
Arnold: A chip off the old block
Schwarzenegger’s Father, a Brown Shirt and Nazi
A son is, of course, not guilty of the sins of the father. But most fathers do pass some values and attitudes to their sons and it is worthwhile to consider what kind of attitudes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father had that the son may have learned from him. USA Today reported here that his father applied to join the Nazi party on March 1, 1938, about two weeks before Austria was annexed and while it was still illegal in Austria. There is some confusion about when his application was accepted. It may not have been accepted until 1941, about the time he joined the Wehrmacht.However nearly a year after he applied to join the Nazi party, he joined the Brown Shirts (or SA), also called Nazi Storm Troopers. That means he was not just a member of the Nazi party, who may have joined for social reasons
https://raumfahrer.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/schwarzenegger/#FATHER
Obama did Schwarzenegger one better, in his commencement address at the U.S Coast Guard Academy on May 20: “I’m here to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security,” said Obama, “an immediate risk to national security… It will impact how our military defends our country. So we need to act–and we need to act now.”
Pre-announcing Obama’s intention, Arrest Climate-Change Deniers by Adam Weinstein was published on March 28, 2014, and states, “It was laid earlier this month with all the appropriate caveats, by Lawrence Torcello, a philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology
Nuclear-Powered Desalination in California, Part IV
The California State Government’s Role– 1970-1971
(First published November 7, 2014. Republished May 21, 2015)
https://www.facebook.com/CaliforniaDroughtUpdate
or, http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/
Parts I, II and III are on both sites above, dated April 9, 2015, April 30, 2015, and May 14, 2015.
The 1970 “Water for California-- Outlook for California,” (published by the California Department of Water Resources) water plan was an optimistic forecast and plan to create new water resources for the state. We should recall that the California State Water Project was nearing completion at that time and the state officials were thinking and planning 20 to 50 years ahead, knowing that the state's population would at least double in that period. On page 72 of that report begins a section titled, “Desalting,” and in the introduction to that section a general overview of desalination is presented. Following the introduction, the report then states: “In California, with an abundant water supply from surface and ground water, desalting has played essentially no part to date in water development. From the standpoint of economics it is not considered that desalting will play a significant role in supplying substantial quantities of water in California much before the turn of the century. Large-capacity desalting is expected to be by that time a technical alternative and, possibly, an economical alternative to other water supply sources, particularly in coastal areas. Already, however, existing or planned coastal cities with a population of up to 50,000 and isolated inland communities could be provided with a supply of high quality desalted water from commercially available apparatus at costs acceptable for municipal and industrial uses....” (emphasis is mine-PR) As the report states, the state government had entered agreements with the federal government's Office of Saline Water in 1957. The two governments had cooperated to build a functioning desalination plant at Point Loma in San Diego, which began supplying water to the San Diego system in 1963. In 1964, the plant was dismantled and shipped to the Guantanamo U.S. military base in Cuba after the Castro government had cut off the U.S. military base located there from its water supply. It is still functioning there today. On May 1, 1970, after the state had updated its agreement with the Office of Saline Water the year before, California signed an agreement with that office to undertake a sitting study for a prototype desalting plant. As the report states: “The prototype desalter program is intended to develop a desalting plant with a nominal capacity of up to 50 million gallons per day (equivalent to 50,000 acre-feet per year). The exact capacity will be a balance between the need for technology and the market for the desalted water....” (50 million gallons per day is the capacity of the Carlsbad desalination plant now being built in Carlsbad for the City of San Diego--PR) “This program is needed in the 1970s to develop large-capacity desalting technology so that operating and cost information can be available for decision-making purposes in the 1980s concerning the role desalting may play in meeting some of California's future water requirements....” Then the report discusses the MWD 1964 agreement mentioned above: “One of the most complete studies for determining the probable cost of desalted water in large-capacity plants was the Bolsa Island Project, a dual-purpose nuclear power and desalting plant, studied by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, local power utilities, the U.S. office of Saline Water, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. “The desalted water from the Bolsa Project delivered to the Diemer filtration plant for distribution was estimated in 1965 to cost $88 per acre-foot ($0.27 per thousand gallons), and estimated in 1968 to cost $143 per acre-foot ($0.44 per thousand gallons). This project did not proceed largely because of escalation and the cost and uncertainties associated with licensing of the nuclear reactors.” Already in 1970, the anti-nuclear environmentalist ideology was gaining a foothold in stopping the technology and projects required for the future. The final excerpt from that 1970 report expresses the optimism that even the problems caused by economics and environmentalism will be overcome: “Desalting in the future “As the technology of removing dissolved solids from water is developed and the cost of such processes is lowered, the economic feasibility of supplying desalted water to more areas of the state will increase. It is anticipated that developments in desalting will provide new and promising means to assist in the future development of California's water resources and must be considered as an option in the development of future water supply sources. “Reduction in the cost of desalted water from large-capacity plants of the future can be achieved through the application of nuclear energy, most likely in dual-purpose plants....” “Looking into the future, the expectation is that the technology needed to build dual- nuclear systems could be developed so that construction of large sea water desalters might be initiated in the mid-1980s for operation in the 1990s.” To conclude: There it is-- the policy of the state government of California in 1970, that had it been carried out, would have made the affects of the drought we are experiencing today a blip on the screen of history, rather than the real disaster that it is. In 1971, one year after California's 1970 report, President Nixon, in response to the international financial crisis, abandoned the post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system and floated the dollar on international markets. That began the deregulation of the the banking/financial system and the start of globalization, which has destroyed the idea of finances determined by physical economic criteria, including infrastructure investments and projects that are built with the future productivity increases that characterized, for example the policies of President Kennedy and Governor Pat Brown. That, and the growth of the environmentalist insanity, was why the 1970 Water Plan was scrapped.