A Special Issue for the California Republican Party State Convention
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20230309-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
With the thousands of California Republicans meeting this weekend in Sacramento, this report is addressed to them– to orient the party, and thus our state and nation, to understand what must be done to begin to build and rebuild the necessary water infrastructure that a serious re-industrialization of the nation requires.
President Trump, in his first presidency made clear: The Republican Party is no longer a party of the globalists, environmentalists, and the Bushies and their wars. He said the party is now the party of the working class, the producers. And he fought in his first administration to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., but was significantly blocked from carrying out his vision of building modern infrastructure that would make possible that re-industrialization.
In California we have had a deluge of rain and snow thus far this winter, significantly ending the current three-year drought. Yet, all the rain and snow has had no where to go except out to the ocean as we have built almost no water infrastructure in the state for over 50 years. What was built over 50 years ago worked for a population of 20 million, but today with 40 million we have a perpetual water shortage, especially for agriculture.
The climate of the state, over the past 2,000 years has always been one of alternating megadroughts and megafloods. It is only when we humans, use our creative powers given to us by the Creator, are we able to tame nature’s volatility. We used to do that, and those who built the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, and more, created the largest and most complex water management system in the world– admired and used as a model in many nations.
During the 1960s, those who built those projects looked decades ahead to what California would need by 2021. President Kennedy proposed the building of nuclear-powered desalination plants, and even after he was assassinated, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California signed the first contract with the Atomic Energy Commission to build it at Huntington Beach in 1964.
The Parsons company of Pasadena proposed the North American Water and Power Project (NAWAPA) in the early 1960s, a continental water management system that would bring 100 million acre feet of water from Alaska and northern Canada down to the U.S. Midwest and Southwest. It had support in Congress, including that of Robert Kennedy.
Both the Nuclear-powered desalination project and NAWAPA died as the U.S. shifted away from production to financial speculation accompanied by the rise of environmentalism.
As President Trump recently said in his Agenda47 report, and as he told the globalists at Davos in 2020, it is time to think big and bold once again. The future belongs to the sovereign nation states, dedicated to their own populations and determined to create a future in which one income can support an entire family. Last week President Donald Trump distinguished himself by pledging to launch “a quantum leap to revolutionize the American standard of living” when he becomes President again in 2025.
The drought may be over now, but still the Colorado River and Lake Mead and Lake Powell are at less than 30% capacity and 40 million people who depend upon its water in seven states and Mexico will be rationed beyond anything they have ever experienced. It is time to build NAWAPA.
There is work to do, and it begins with electing Donald Trump president in 2024. That campaign must begin now and every patriot must throw everything they can muster into this fight. We all know what is wrong with the nation’s policies, but the future does belong to those with solutions.
