“NAWAPA XXI is a resource development plan for a continental water management system, built in collaboration with Canada and Mexico. This proposal will launch the greatest development of North America in history; it will double irrigated agricultural farmland, provide ample hydroelectric power, mitigate or eliminate the risk of floods and droughts, balance the continent’s water distribution, and create 7 million highly skilled and highly productive jobs.”
—–It Shall be NAWAPA That Will Provide Water to the Southwest
A Note To Readers
The President in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday made clear that in every area of policy the administrations of both Democrats and Republicans had failed the American people. He held back very little in his attacks on the previous administrations for nearly 20 years of wars in the Middle-east that have killed more than 7,000 American soldiers and wounded more than 50,000. He once again has said that the Iraq war of the Bush-Cheney administration was the greatest foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.
He made it clear that it was Republicans and Democrats that created the disaster of our immigration policy and southern border problem.
He did not blame China for the problems with trade with that country, but previous administrations that did not protect our nation, its trade, its industry and its living standards of the American people.
What the President did not do in his State of the Union Address is to present a concrete policy that will guide the nation to be able to achieve what he proposed to achieve, especially on the topic of infrastructure.
That has been and will continue to be the mission of these reports.
As recent weeks’ reports have emphasized, the developing crisis on the Colorado River, and its ability to continue to supply more than 40 million people of the southwest with the water they require, is upon the nation now. Rationing plans, as being negotiated and established by the water authorities of the federal government and seven states and innumerable water districts in those states, will merely delay, but never prevent a water supply disaster sooner or later, and most likely sooner.
Only thinking big and acting big will do that. The Feature this week is Part I of a series on the 1960s project of those who used to lead our nation in thinking big. That project is the North American Water and Power Alliance. Had that project been built beginning when it was both on the drawing boards and legislation in the U.S. Congress in the 1960s, then there would be no crisis on the Colorado River today.
And to use the image the President painted on the genesis of the problems he is attempting to deal with, it has been 50 years of damn wrong policies that created this looming disaster on the Colorado– wrong policies by both Democrats and Republicans, sucked into anti-growth and anti-government ideologies. They may pretend to oppose one another, but the result is the same.
In This Week’s Report
The drought is gone in California. The end of January and the first week of February ended it. So, the reservoirs are full, precipitation levels and the snowpack are above average, and we are freezing our butts off even here in the Bay Area. Oregon remains in drought, but that is a reflection of how El Ninos behave sometimes: California will be wet in the Winter, but the northwest states will be drier than normal.
But, the Colorado River crisis remains with us and shall do so. An update on the status of the Drought Contingency Plan and more background is found in the section on the region below.
We have not reported on California’s “Water Wars” over the past few weeks, as there was little new. Actually that really has not changed much. More and more, as predicted, cities and water districts are suing the state to stop the “water- grab,” over the State Water Board decision in December to reduce water diversions for farms and cities from the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers. So, this week we update the readers.
The financial damage from the bankruptcy filing by PG&E is listed by category in a report on that topic.
Under the title of “Infrastructure,” is a reminder of just how decrepit it is in the country. A decent summary of the 2017 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers on U.S. infrastructure is linked. The reminder: A minimum of $4.5 trillion is required to just to fix the existing infrastructure.
The report concludes with the Feature summarized above.
