by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20211216-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf?_t=1639763320
A Note to Readers
“Weather Disasters Evoke More Hysterics From the Climate Change Fanatics” is the title of one section of this week’s report. Following some examples of recent headlines, like “A ‘bomb cyclone’ is battering much of California,” I state: “Inevitably, most, but not all, of the stories discussing the disasters will have a sentence or two stating that it is climate change that either caused the disaster, or made it worse. The word ‘unprecedented’ is also sometimes used to describe the event.”
Here is a short quote from one of the articles that I link in the section, which begins on page 10.
“For 43 days, the heavens opened up from December 1861 to January 1862 and poured rain and snow down from moisture-laden air streams high above, drowning huge areas of the American West from British Columbia to Mexico.
“The rain melted the snow and the water roared down the Sierra Nevada Mountains, filling rivers, lakes and valleys.
“In California’s fertile Central Valley a huge inland sea — 300 miles long, twenty miles wide and up to thirty feet deep — was created; swamping farmlands and towns, drowning people, some 800,000 horses and cattle, and washing away houses, buildings, fences and bridges.”
I must thank my wife Carol for suggesting that this be included in this week’s report.
The rest of this week’s report:
The U.S. Drought Monitor for California shows no change from one week ago. The text of the Monitor does provide a good overview of both the status of the drought and some of the precipitation events of the last week.
That is followed by articles on the storms and their impact. They are useful, but it will take many more like them this winter to kill this drought.
Reporting on the Colorado River and Lake Mead is an article that begins with this: “To help stave off another round of mandatory cutbacks, water leaders for Arizona, Nevada and California are preparing to sign an agreement that would voluntarily reduce Colorado River water to the lower basin states by 500,000 acre-feet — enough to supply about 750,000 households for a year — for both 2022 and 2023”.
Remember Proposition 1 in 2014? Finally, Some of the $2.7 Billion for Building Water Storage is Going to be Spent. Sites Reservoir is one of the projects that will receive $800 million from Proposition 1 money.
As we have reported recently, a fight to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open and not allow it to be closed in 2025, which would eliminate about 10% of the state’s electrical power production, has been joined by citizens of the state writing letters to the editor. Two such letters are included in this section.
The report concludes with our Feature:
We will never build the necessary water infrastructure to prevent water crises like that we are presently experiencing, unless we completely reverse the past 50 years of turning our once productive, industry, science and infrastructure building into a casino crap table. The Feature this week addresses that necessity with a resolution from LaRouche PAC: Globalization has failed. We are calling for a return to the American System of Political Economy. The resolution in full is presented, along with supplemental material.
