http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/pdf/20170119-California-Drought-Update.pdf
This is the last day of Obama, finally bringing to a close not just an eight-year nightmare, but a 16-year nightmare of regime change wars and bank bailouts, just to name the most damaging of crimes by Bush and Obama. What has it produced? Ninety-five million Americans not in the labor force; a tripling of drug deaths, record levels of suicides and, for the first time in U.S. history, we have a falling life-expectancy.
A new Presidency will give us what we make it give us. Ours is not to sit back to “see what Trump will do,” but to ensure he does what the nation requires. That begins, as I have said before, with the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall banking law. The “Feature” in this report over the past several weeks, and this week, have and do present the required policy. It is up to you to make sure the new President does it.
Meanwhile, Governor Brown’s train can’t get on track; his other “signature” project, the Delta tunnels, may never get a shovel in the ground; and the nation’s infrastructure badly needs some vision. To the rescue, potentially, comes China (as reported on January 16 by the South China Morning Post) with the proposal from Ding Xuedong, the head of the China Investment Corporation (CIC). Ding said his company wants to invest in a big U.S. infrastructure buildup. The CIC now holds $50 billion in U.S. Treasuries, and wants alternatives in U.S. holdings to the low returns on these treasuries. Ding said true U.S. rebuilding will take $8 trillion in investments, needs to have Chinese investments and CIC would go above $50 billion into it.
Now, what does all this have to do with the drought? I hope you are not asking that question, but just in case some are, here is my answer. Actually, my answer is a question back to you: What could we do with unlimited and free (or nearly free) electricity? That was the idea from the scientists of the early 1950s as they began serious research into realizing fusion power. With new breakthroughs in several nations recently, fusion is not quite just around the corner, but not that too distant either. And instead of worrying our little heads off trying to use less, we shall use a lot more, or as perhaps the new President would say it, it will be a huge amount more.
Then the plan by President John Kennedy for nuclear-powered desalination plants up and down the coast of California will become a reality. And not just on the coast. We can put a few in the San Francisco Bay and pump water directly into the aqueducts heading south to the Central Valley.
Here is the history of the Kennedy plan: Nuclear-Powered Desalination in California– Parts I-IV
As advertised, this weekly report is not merely about the drought, but about solutions. Perhaps with an easing of the drought over the past few weeks, we can focus our reports more on the solutions side. To kick it off, I suggest a reading of the 2014 article by Benjamin Deniston, “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis,” published in Executive Intelligence Review.
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2015/eirv42n14-20150403/41-47_EIR14.pdf
As for the drought, the cup is neither half-full, nor half-empty, but it is filling. As I have over the past two weeks, I shall again raise the question, shall we go from mega-droughts to mega-floods? As you can read below, the atmospheric rivers just keep coming, and they are producing some scenes that have not been seen in the state for many years. Photos and videos are linked below.
Included in the report below is an item in which the following is included. I place it here to call attention to what the “academics” are talking about and planning: The end of agriculture in the Central Valley:
Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech stated in an interview:
We will probably never get back what we’ve lost from the groundwater, because that’s been going on for a century. This is a difficult message to get across— we use so much groundwater, the depletion of our groundwater resources, especially in the Central Valley, has been going on for a century. During wet periods like this, even if this were to persist for a few years, we’d get some recovery, but unless we shift away from an agricultural economy, we’ll likely never get it back what we’ve lost. (emphasis added)
