(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20230413-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
Two topics make up the report this week.
First, after the U.S. Drought Monitor, which essentially shows the present drought in California is gone.
Secondly, the Interior Department of the Biden administration and its agency the Bureau of Reclamation, have released its plan for the Colorado River. As has been their practice for months now, they do not actually announce a plan, but present three options to be debated and commented on until about May 20. Then later in the Summer will announce what plan they will dictate to the seven states of the Colorado River Basin.
I have a lengthy introduction to the coverage of the plan and commentaries on it, so I will not comment more here. Except to say this:
While the deputy secretary of the Interior Department of the Biden administration commented that “failure is not an option,” the U.S. government and state governments have failed for decades in building the necessary infrastructure that would have made the present crisis on the Colorado River and the recurring crisis in California of drought, water shortages and flooding.
When we had real leaders, like Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, and state leaders like California governor Pat Brown, the nation built infrastructure that, as President Kennedy often said, “this project is not for us. It is for those 40 years from now.”
Kennedy, especially, and those of his generation planned the projects that by the 1990s would have avoided both the crises in California and that on the Colorado River today. Those projects included building nuclear-powered desalination plants and the North American Water and Power Alliance.
It is time that we have a president and other leaders who think and act like those of the 1960s.
The Feature this week demonstrates that we have such a leader ready to enter the White House in 2025. The article is “President Trump’s First Term Leap Into the Future” by my colleague Kesha Rogers. Here is the first paragraph, which makes the point that the President did more for the space program and reviving nuclear power than any in decades:
“Very few people know what President Trump accomplished for posterity in his first term. Major accomplishments involved restarting the manned space program and bringing nuclear energy back into development. Trump’s Project Artemis is sending men and women to the Moon to colonize and work there, preparatory to exploration and colonization of Mars. And work for a nuclear power renaissance which began in Trump’s first term is now beginning to bear fruit.”
