not a politician interfering with an agency doing their job.
Just because an agency has a job to do doesn’t necessarily mean that the job is worth doing. Water rights in the West are allocated in such a way as to encourage depletion of aquifers. If the BLM is obliged by law to stand up for the rights of people who see this aquifer as something to be exploited and drained, then perhaps there’s room in a liberal society to stand up for other priorities that may come in conflict with the BLM.
The Mojave preserve has interests. Let someone speak for it.
The vast majority of California’s water resources are used for agriculture, not residential purposes. Reducing unnecessary watering for lawns and such is a good idea but not enough to make a significant dent in the problem.
And before you dismiss the drought as a problem for those silly Californians, keep in mind which state grows a huge portion of the food the rest of the country (including Texas) eats.
We are talking about orders of magnitude more in volume with water vs. oil. Also, aside from the environmental damage of the extraction process itself the local ecosystems don’t really seem to suffer from the loss of the oil.
Edit to add: I also don’t think I understand the claim “the concept of moving water seems beyond our grasp” considering that California has a very extensive aqueduct system already. We’re fine with the concept of moving water, we just put certain limits on the practice in the name of environmental concerns.
pardon me if I misconstrued your post but I was under the impression that you were against such oversight and regulation.
Assumptions have been made, tacit a priori knowledge assumed, regarding water, water law, and California. Californian water law, rights, and exploitation are well known enough to be used as plot devices in popular entertainment (c.f. Chinatown and Pacific Edge) and are a byword for corruption and short sightedness. This water is ancient water, if it gets emptied it, by definition, is not coming back. The cascade effects on surrounding water is also an issue, and I would think, less easily knowable than we would hope. But right from the get go your stance is, from my perspective, completely arseways: he needs to justify this one shot use of a non-renewable resource to shore up a regime of overuse and mismanagement. And frankly profit should not cut it as a compelling reason for this.
On top of which I see water as a human right (as do many, and more every day) and if its usage needs to be controlled it must be done municipally, not by hedge funds.
My beef is that she was preventing the very agency that handles this stuff from, you know, handling the stuff. She’s preventing a federal agency from reviewing a local project. Does the tone of that sound familiar? If it were a conservative doing this, some people here would be crying bloody murder.
In general, I’m against this kind of bureaucratic maneuvering. Yeah, it’s a check and balance which is great, but it’s fundamentally dishonest.
I agree that water rights in The West are fucked, that’s what politicians should be fixing, but well, that would be hard. It’s just so much easier to sabotage the process with that most dishonest of legislative tricks, “inserting a rider”.
Actually this comment system is just complete shit and it’s hard to weed through the crap and find posts that provide substance and see who is replying to what and where. Someone did post an article from Bloomberg that seems to provide these crazy little things called “facts”. I’ll read that when I have the time.
Politicians aren’t the only ones that interfere with regulatory bodies, in fact they have been falling behind industry for decades.
One core concept of regulatory capture is "never stop., Be that appealing regulatory agency/government body decisions, re-applying for the same permit for the same purpose as you were previously denied, but with the application jiggled a bit in hopes of a better outcome, suing regulatory bodies for profits lost due to environmental and/or worker and/or consumer safety protections put in place or required by said agency, appealing fine amounts or legislating for lower fines until fines are well below the profit margins possible for activity that incurs fines, if you can think of a way to wimp out on an obligation to larger society, an industry has evolved to help you exploit that weakness in yourself by weakening others.
If the Dept. of the Interior made a decision, it made a decision. All Feinstein likely did was delay a permit review for awhile, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing a previous decision by the Dept to stand for a while, as well as spend that money elsewhere.
She did so on the behalf of all the people that the Cadiz CEO has vowed not to hear any criticism from at all, in support of a Dept of the Interior decision that Cadiz didn’t like, in the interest of protecting a national wildlife refuge from industrialization.
Given the enormous efforts Cadiz and like make to circumvent and undermine any and all regulatory bodies that try and fail to keep them balanced with the interests of greater society, I don’t have a problem with her tactic, except inasmuch as I think it ought not be necessary. If you need a permit in business and your plan is to get around it somehow with bloated appeals and abuse of process or by moving ahead and incurring fines, or anything that isn’t merely complying with the requirements of the permit-issuer then society actually, unfortunately, needs advocates who will deal with you in kind.
While I can sympathise with your snark, it’s a bit awkward when everyone disagrees with you, you have provided no “facts”, merely an ideological position that a guy should be allowed make a profit and we have little right to intervene.
Nor has the guy in question provided any “facts” proving his scheme is necessary, safe, sustainable, a good use of resources for the municipality. He has just given a business argument for him minting money.
Facts are rarely without ideology in a political context.
[quote=“robertmckenna, post:66, topic:71755”]
if it gets emptied it, by definition, is not coming back
[/quote]Not quite, sir or madam. It has been estimated that if it is emptied that it will refill in a little under six thousand years.
So it will come back, you just wait.
And wait.
And wait a little more.
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Great, now expand that to most of the other states x 10. I’m not talking as much about pumping ground water and sending it across the nation as I am about the floods of rain the East coast has had during the same time period the West has been going through a drought. Sure it’s an expensive system to build out, but it could be extremely effective at reducing flood issues in one part of the country while helping another. And yes I realize the scale I’m talking about moving flooding waters at…I didn’t say it was an easy system to design or build, but I think it would be a very useful and conservative approach to a precious resource.
California became the nation’s breadbasket because its natural resources were able to support huge amounts of crops. If you have to invest ungodly amounts of energy and resources to make that happen then you might as well grow that food somewhere else.
The problem isn’t “California doesn’t have enough water to meet its own needs.” The problem is that it doesn’t have enough water to meet everyone else’s.
Which is why in the near future, desalination is going to have to happen in a big way. Do a search on “California desalination” if you want to know how many people are trying to do this, and how many roadblocks are being thrown in their way.
I suspect that most of the roadblocks are being thrown up by people who think their food is grown in magic tanks in Trader Joe’s basement.
To be fair any wait beyond the length of time any human civilisation has existed is not really worth counting on. I should probably have been accurate, but that was what was in my mind.
Surely this is fine as long as he first sinks a waterproof layer around the borders of his land, right until it hits an impermeable layer of rock? Otherwise his libertarian ‘ownership’ bullshit is ignoring what will happen to the availability of water to other landowners around him.
Aided and abetted by those who makes big stacks of cash exploiting existing natural water stores, and who stand to make far, far more money if/when/as water becomes more scarce. Desalinization is the nightmare of Cadiz & company, unless they can control it themselves.
If someone comes up with efficient, low-energy desalinization methods that can provide bountiful amounts of freshwater, exploiting water rights is way less fun for these guys unless they own the technology and can ransom it out.
