California Water and Infrastructure Report For January 18, 2024
(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report-January-18-2024.pdf
A Note to Readers
More rain and snow this week has drenched the state, and more is to come this weekend.
But, the snowpack is still well below the level that is average for this time of the year. And while recent storms have helped, but avoiding another drought later in the year, much more will be necessary.
“Seven Billion for What?,” focuses on the price tag to save a bare 400,000 acre feet of water per year by the most unbelievable bureaucratic set of measures proposed in a new law passed by the Legislature. Three articles cover this insanity.
Keeping you updated on the Silicon Valley billionaire-backed plan for a Utopian city to be built in Solano County, is this article: “Billionaire-backed plan for new California city,” to be found under my title: “I Think What They Will Discover Is That Money Cannot Buy Everything.”
On the Colorado River, recent storms, and a building snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, has allowed the two largest reservoirs in the country (Lake Mead and Lake Powell) to bring their water levels up out of the crisis level, but studies and reports from the Bureau of Reclamation forecast that this will only be temporary, and the reservoirs are expected to see the water levels decline significantly over the next two years.
The Feature this week is an article by my colleague Kesha Rogers on the Artemis Space mission, and how the Biden administration, while delaying the next manned mission to the Moon until 2026, ignores a larger problem with space policy, and why California and other regions of the country have continuous crisis with water supply and flooding:
There is no unified national mission. No mission like the Apollo Project during the Kennedy administration, and no national water infrastructure building mission, like that, also proposed during the Kennedy administration, the North American Water and Power Alliance.
Here are the first two paragraphs of Kesha’s article:
“The United States needs to return to a unified national mission, based on the truly Promethean idea of mankind, scientific and technological progress, and creativity. The United States has not seen a return mission to the surface of the Moon in over fifty years, since the landing of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. When President Trump entered the White House, he set forth the bold vision of the Artemis program, calling for sending the first woman and next man to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years. The Artemis program brought in commercial companies and international partners to work with NASA in collaboration towards building out America’s permanent Lunar presence. Through resource utilization on the Moon, Artemis will build a platform for future settlements on the Moon and eventually Mars. As with all manned space missions, the direct benefits to all of humanity will be enormous–up to and including producing fusion power from the Moon’s Helium-3.
“President Trump was not the first President to put forth a program to return America to the Moon, but he was the first in a very long time to understand that it was going to take the best of our skill and talent. He understood that we had to have this grand economic driver in place to build our national industry and make America a manufacturing superpower again.”
