California Drought Update
by Patrick Ruckert
June 4, 2015
Taking his cue from Obama, who, speaking recently to the graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, declared “man-caused global warming a national security threat, Jerry and his Brownshirts began waterboarding the residents of California on June 1.
That was the day that the California State Water Resources Control Board– better known as the Water Board– officially began its enforcement of water conservation in cities and towns, and as one commentator put it, “marching out orders for hundreds of communities across the state to make reductions of up to 36 percent.” For those individuals and water districts that fail to comply, fines of up to $10,000, for each violation, can be imposed. Now, that’s an offer few can refuse.
State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus, who spent ten years working for environmentalist organizations before becoming a brownshirt, stated on June 1, that she hopes people will comply. She did not add the “or else,” since that was already well recognized.
The private utility that provides water to Atherton and Woodside, in the Bay Area, has warned that those customers who do not cut their water use by 36 percent will see their rates double.
Here is a report from EIRNS:
Brown's Fascist Water War against Population June 1 (EIRNS)--Jerry Brown's water wars are singling out "high volume" users for reduction, directly targeting large families in the process. The Los Angeles Times today runs a story of a resident in unincorporated Los Angeles County, whose family of seven just received notice that they would have to reduce water consumption 70%, or "potentially see their bill triple." As the article describes, the water company for Los Angeles County, under Brown's fascist decrees, has set consumption quotas for residential households. These quotas, however, are calculated for the "average use" for the area -- not per capita, or even relative to past usage -- thereby penalizing residents with larger families. Said one resident at a board meeting, "We were trying to figure out how we can do this, and who's going to tell the kids that they can only use the bathroom on Monday and Friday?"
The Stockton Record reported on May 29, that Cal Water, a private provider will impose “water budgets” on its customers, and those that go over the budget will pay a surcharge that is double the normal rate.
Now, have any state officials or even the members of Congress put forward even a word on how to provide the state with more water? Not a chance. There is no discussion or debate that either recognizes, as I reported last week, that even without drought the state does not have enough water to provide for all the needs of the population. Since these reports have repeatedly presented the alternatives, I’ll not repeat them here. To begin moving toward those policies requires a new presidency that will break the hold on the minds of the population that has allowed this crisis, and other crisis, to develop.
Underlying the problem is, though mentioned once in a while, the potential that California’s climate has reverted back to the historical climate of the past 1,000 years of alternating mega-droughts and mega-floods. For background here is a link to my book review published one year ago of “The West Without Water,” by the paleoclimotologists B. Lyn Ingraham and Frances Malamud-Roam: http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
The Drought and the Water Management System
Extreme drought conditions expanded by 3 percent in California the past week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor released June 4.
Excerpts from the following commentary published in Ag Alert on May 30, by Lawrence H. Easterling, Jr., provides some useful background on California water and the water management system of the state:
We are witnessing the dismantling of the California water conveyance system that supplies drinking water for 25 million California residents and four million acres of prime farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.
On average, 200.0 million acre-feet of water a year blankets our state. One acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons of water. Of that precipitation, 75% originates north of the Sacramento River. The other 25% falls in central and southern California.
The water that is not manageable by us is 120.0 million acre-feet. Some of it evaporates, but most of it settles into the ground, fills lakes, and what remains heads for the Pacific Ocean. The balance of the water is called “directable” surface water (80,000,000 acre-feet) and this is where we have the opportunity to put it to its best and proper use.
By 2005, according to the Department of Water Resources, 48% of that directable water went to the environment, 41% to agriculture and the remaining 11% to rural areas. This balance of such a precious resource seemed at the time to be equitable to all parties, thanks to the ingenuity of our forefathers in the 20th century. Their foresight gave us a water conveyance system second to none in the entire world.
Some distinctions should be made here as to how much directable water we are actually concerned about. At full capacity, the two California water conveyance systems—the State Water Project (SWP) and the federal Central Valley Project (CVP)—deliver water from northern California to southern and central California. Each system, the CVP and the SWP, has the capacity to each deliver 4.0 million acre-feet water each year. However, this water delivery capacity has never been tested. The record shows that in the years prior to 2005, the average total delivery COMBINED for both projects was 5.4 million acre-feet per year. The ultimate users of this water went to agriculture (60%) and the rural population (40%).
The volume of water available, on average, from the Sacramento River, including the San Joaquin River, is 30.3 million acre-feet. It is from this volume of water that the 5.4 million acre-feet are sent south.
More background is provided by an op ed in the Los Angeles Times on June 2, by Karen Ross and Daniel Summer. Under the title, “California agriculture: It’s worth the water,” they give further evidence blowing a big hole in the big lie that California agriculture is an insignificant part of the state’s economy, since it represents only 2 percent of the state’s GDP. Excerpts follow, which, whether the authors understand it or not, demonstrate how parasitical most of the “economy’ have become since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. California used to have more than 400,000 aerospace workers, but now has more than 400,000 real estate agents.
….And the 2% figure grossly undersells the importance of food grown in California.
California’s economy is incredibly diverse, much like its topography, its climate and its population. That’s a significant benefit when you’re the eighth-largest economy in the world. And agriculture is a key part of that diversity.
Of course, many aggregate sectors constitute a larger share of our economy than agriculture. Finance, insurance and real estate tops the list at 21%. Professional services and government follow at 13% and 12%, respectively.
Beyond those sectors, we have a broad, flat grouping of several categories, each representing just a few percent of the state’s GDP. That’s a remarkably balanced profile that lends resilience and dynamism to our economy.
Let’s look more closely at that data, though. Is agriculture really just 2.1%? As is so often the case with statistics, what’s not in that number is more significant than what is.
Food is central to California in more than just the nutritional sense.
Take the “utilities” category, for instance. It includes power generated for farms and for processing and marketing crops once they’re harvested. The “real estate” piece includes sales and leasing of agricultural acreage and processing facilities. “Non-durable goods manufacturing” includes food and beverage processing. “Wholesale trade” and “retail trade” does not just mean the shopping mall; it includes the supermarket, the food court and the regional produce hub.
Categories such as “transportation and warehousing” and “finance and insurance” are linked into every one of our 78,000 farms, each of which needs trucks, banks and insurance coverage to bring in the harvest.
Karen Ross is California agriculture secretary. Daniel Sumner is a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis.
More water cuts to farmers
While the headlines focus on the 25 percent water consumption cuts imposed on the urban population, the farmers of the state are receiving notices every day or so that their water will be cut-off.
A summary of a Sacramento Bee article on Maven’s Notebook reads:
California farmers brace for more water cuts as Shasta releases cut: “California’s water crisis could be on the verge of getting a good deal worse. In a potentially significant setback for a system already stressed by epic drought, California regulators have ordered a temporary curb in the flows being released from Lake Shasta in order to protect an endangered species of salmon. Farmers and others said the immediate impact of the 10-day cutback, ordered late last week by the State Water Resources Control Board, is tolerable. But they expressed concern at a water board hearing Tuesday that the curtailments could go deeper, and last much longer. That could bring significant harm to agriculture and even some municipalities. ... ”
More on Oregon
As reported earlier, the Governor of Oregon has declared 15 counties to be in drought emergency.
The Associated Press reported on June 1, that the water shortages in the Klamath Basin are worsening. Excerpts include:
In April, the Bureau of Reclamation announced the Klamath Project would only receive 254,500 acre-feet, about 65 percent of the Project’s historic demand. But that water wouldn’t cover all the Project’s 210,000 cropland acreage. (the) Warren Act — also known as “B” — contractors received a lower priority than “A” contractors, leaving them with no water and fallow fields.
The initial allocation has been reduced to a range of somewhere between 210,000 acre-feet and 175,000 acre-feet, further ensuring farmers with Warren Act land won’t see a drop of surface water this year.
According to Matt Vickery, deputy director of the Klamath Water Users Association, Warren Act land — which helps support a $600 million-per-year industry — is spread across several irrigation districts.
“Eleven out of 15 Project irrigation districts are shut off,” Vickery said.
Desalination mentioned in the U.S. Senate
In Senate hearings on the drought on June 2, which mainly presented a bleak picture, Senator Barbara Boxer raised the issue of desalination. As reported by SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle), Boxer said she will push for more funds to research desalination. “I’ve known for years (desalination) was a solution,” said Boxer, reported SF Gate.
Meanwhile, the Poseidon desalination plant in Carlsbad is scheduled to begin producing 50 million gallons of fresh water per day sometime around Thanksgiving. While only providing 7 percent of San Diego’s water needs, the plant should provide the impetus for building the proposed Huntington Beach plant, but more importantly pave the way for the revival of President John Kennedy’s plan to build multiple nuclear-powered desalination plants up and down the California coast.
Depopulation is the real aim of those who run environmentalism
We will conclude this week’s report with an item from EIRNS on Obama’s requested meeting with one of the most vicious proponents of population reduction:
Queen Elizabeth's Genocidalist Stooge Obama Meets with Prince Philip's Genocidalist Buddy David Attenborough June 2, 2015 (EIRNS)--U.S. President Barack Obama met with the top genocidalist guru of Prince Philip and Prince Charles, Sir David Attenborough, to tell him that he was a dedicated environmentalist. In an interview in today's Daily Telegraph, Attenborough said he was "astonished" when last month he was called by Obama and flown to Washington for a private meeting about his BBC-produced documentary, "Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates," being aired in America. Sir David Attenborough, who is a trustee of the British Museum and Royal Botanical Gardens, as well as being prominent in the Optimum Population Trust, is about as genocidal a Malthusian as they come. Here is what he said in March 2011 at a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts, London: "It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet, human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births -- in a word, by contraception.... The alternative is an increased death rate, the way which all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That translated into human terms means famine or disease or war over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth." The meeting between the two kindred spirits, Obama and Attenborough, took place in the Blue Room of the White House, where the two discussed climate change, conservation, and Obama's "feeling for nature." "We sat and talked for half an hour," said Attenborough. "He wanted to make it clear that he was not a philistine in this matter. He is on the side of the natural world and that's what he wanted to be clear. And that's against some very powerful voices that are in the U.S. which are not in favor of the natural world." Attenborough said Obama was "very much in favor of dealing with climate change" but that "of course, as we also know, he is coming to the end of his last Presidency." "I got the sense that he is wondering what he is going to do next," he said, and that he could imagine Obama working on environmental issues after he leaves the White House. A number of human beings can help him leave the White House, and take his finger off the nuclear button, which would be of great benefit to animals, too.
