www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20210318-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
“Generally, this exciting project will transfer 140 million acre feet of water from the far northwest of the North American Continent south to the Southwest, Mexico, and the Midwestern states. It will take 30 years to complete and more than 100,000 workers will be directly employed. In addition, approximately four million more will be employed in the necessary reindustrialization of the U.S. economy. It is without question the largest project ever proposed by mankind. As it was proposed by the Parsons Engineering company of Pasadena, California in the early 1960s, it means that we have lost more than 50 years in creating not only a solution to the continents water questions, but have also lost generations of our workforce to the “cultural revolution” of drugs, violence and wasted lives. It is time to build this project now.”
From the introduction to our Part II (below) on the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA)
A Note To Readers
This week’s report begins with an article by my associate Ben Deniston, “A ‘Builders Party’ Could Fix the West’s Exceptional Drought.” That sets the tone for the rest of the report:
First, the intensifying and spreading megadrought that the entire southwestern region of the U.S. is experiencing, and somewhat less so the entire region west of the Mississippi River. A development that must be addressed now, and in the years and decades to come. Secondly, we continue with our presentation of the great infrastructure projects necessary to solve this “act of nature.”
As always, we stress the approach that has historically been how great leaders and those with a commitment to the principle of human progress have responded. For, droughts may be an act of nature, but it is mankind’s response to such crises that is the test of a culture and a nation.
Adjusting rivers, building dams and more, has a long history, both in the world and in the United States. Water projects began in the U.S. both before and immediately following the Revolution, with Alexander Hamilton and George Washington proposing the construction of canals, many of which were built over the ensuing three decades, as especially President John Quincy Adams did during his term of office (1825-1829), using the financing of the successor bank to Hamilton’s First National Bank of the United States, the Second National Bank of the United States.
For more discussion on this topic, please see “A Very, Very Short History of Water Management,” from last week’s California Water and Infrastructure Report on pages 10 and 11: www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20210311-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
In this week’s report:
Following Ben Deniston’s article, we have a series of articles on what is increasingly being characterized by the term “megadrought,” which cover both California and the broader southwestern region of the country.
While some of the articles are corrupted by claims that it is all due to “man-caused climate change,” even while pointing out that megadroughts have been frequent in the region for the past 2,000 years, there is useful reporting in all of them.
The second section will present more material on the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which we introduced last week. Again here, I will provide links to more extensive written and video resources on the proposed project from the 1960s that died away as the nation degenerated with the shift from productive investments to simply speculation and the rise of irrational environmentalism.
