Busybody
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Only Liberals could have a water shortage when half the state borders the OCEAN! L.A. County drought plan decried... http://fw.to/A4YCdgY
Only Liberals could have a water shortage when half the state borders the OCEAN
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Setanta84
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I don't know why I'm asking, really, but you are aware that seawater isn't potable or usable for most kinds of industrial uses of water, right?
Busybody
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my point stands
FOOL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/w...ael-overcomes-any-threat-of-drought.html?_r=0
Only Liberals could have a water shortage when half the state borders the OCEAN
FOOL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/w...ael-overcomes-any-threat-of-drought.html?_r=0
Only Liberals could have a water shortage when half the state borders the OCEAN
Busybody
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Aided by the Sea, Israel Overcomes an Old Foe: Drought
By ISABEL KERSHNERMAY 29, 2015
JERUSALEM — At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood.
A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption, penalizing families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many of Mr. Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid climate. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Mr. Zvieli, 56, who has tended people’s yards for about 25 years.
Across the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two minutes. Washing cars with hoses was outlawed and those few wealthy enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water it only at night.
“We were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri Schor, the spokesman and public education director of the government’s Water Authority.
But that was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers. “The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to planting flowers.
By The New York Times
As California and other western areas of the United States grapple with an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.
During the drought years, farmers at Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, took water-economizing measures like uprooting old apple orchards a few years before their time. With the new plenty, water allocations for Israeli farmers that had been slashed have been raised again, though the price has also gone up.
“Now there is no problem of water,” said Shaul Ben-Dov, an agronomist at Ramat Rachel. “The price is higher, but we can live a normal life in a country that is half desert.”
With its part-Mediterranean, part-desert climate, Israel had suffered from chronic shortages and exploitation of its natural water resources for decades.
The natural fresh water at Israel’s disposal in an average year does not cover its total use of roughly 525 billion gallons. The demand for potable water is projected to rise to 515 billion gallons by 2030, from 317 billion gallons this year.
The turnaround came with a seven-year drought, one of the most severe to hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources — the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — were severely depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of the water quality.
Measures to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a powerful interministerial agency established in 2007.
Desalination emerged as one focus of the government’s efforts, with four major plants going into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be ready to operate within months. Together, they will produce a total of more than 130 billion gallons of potable water a year, with a goal of 200 billion gallons by 2020.
Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel, recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1 percent, according to Water Authority data.
Before the establishment of the Water Authority, various ministries were responsible for different aspects of the water issue, each with its own interests and lobbies.
“There was a lot of hydro-politics,” said Eli Feinerman of the faculty of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served for years as a public representative on the authority’s council. “The right hand did not know what the left was doing.”
The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture.
The tax for surplus household use was dropped at the end of 2009 and a two-tiered tariff system was introduced. Regular household water use is now subsidized by a slightly higher rate paid by those who consume more than the basic allotment.
Water Authority representatives went house to house offering to fit free devices on shower heads and taps that inject air into the water stream, saving about a third of the water used while still giving the impression of a strong flow.
Officials say that wiser use of water has led to a reduction in household consumption of up to 18 percent in recent years.
And instead of the municipal authorities being responsible for the maintenance of city pipe networks, local corporations have been formed. The money collected for water is reinvested in the infrastructure.
Mekorot, the national water company, built the national water carrier 50 years ago, a system for transporting water from the Sea of Galilee in the north through the heavily populated center to the arid south. Now it is building new infrastructure to carry water west to east, from the Mediterranean coast inland.
In the parched Middle East, water also has strategic implications. Struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors over water rights in the Jordan River basin contributed to tensions leading to the 1967 Middle East war.
Continue reading the main story
RECENT COMMENTS
Israel, which shares the mountain aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help foster relations with the Palestinians and with Jordan.
Desalination, long shunned by many as a costly energy-guzzler with a heavy carbon footprint, is becoming cheaper, cleaner and more energy efficient as technologies advance. Sidney Loeb, the American scientist who invented the popular reverse osmosis method, came to live in Israel in 1967 and taught the water professionals here.
The Sorek desalination plant rises out of the sandy ground about nine miles south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largest plant of its kind in the world, it produces 40 billion gallons of potable water a year, enough for about a sixth of Israel’s roughly eight million citizens.
Miriam Faigon, the director of the solutions department at IDE Technologies, the Israeli company that built three of the plants along the Mediterranean, said that the company had cut energy levels and costs with new technologies and a variety of practical methods.
Under a complex arrangement, the plants will be transferred to state ownership after 25 years. For now, the state buys Sorek’s desalinated water for a relatively cheap 58 cents a cubic meter — more than free rainwater, Ms. Faigon acknowledged, “but that’s only if you have it.”
Israeli environmentalists say the rush to desalination has partly come at the expense of alternatives like treating natural water reserves that have become polluted by industry, particularly the military industries in the coastal plain.
“We definitely felt that Israel did need to move toward desalination,” said Sarit Caspi-Oron, a water expert at the nongovernment Israel Union for Environmental Defense. “But it is a question of how much, and of priorities. Our first priority was conservation and treating and reclaiming our water sources.”
Some environmentalists also say that the open-ocean intake method used by Israel’s desalination plants, in line with local regulations, as opposed to subsurface intakes, has a potentially destructive effect on sea life, sucking in billions of fish eggs and larvae.
But Boaz Mayzel, a marine biologist at the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, said that the effects were not yet known and would have to be checked over time.
Some Israelis are cynical about the water revolution. Tsur Shezaf, an Israeli journalist and the owner of a farm that produces wine and olives in the southern Negev, argues that desalination is essentially a privatization of Israel’s water supply that benefits a few tycoons, while recycling for agriculture allows the state to sell the same water twice.
Mr. Shezaf plants his vines in a way that maximizes the use of natural floodwaters in the area, as in ancient times, and irrigates the rest of the year with a mix of desalinated water and fresh water. He prefers to avoid the cheaper recycled water, he says, because, “You don’t know exactly what you are getting.”
But experts say that the wastewater from Israel’s densely populated Tel Aviv area is treated to such a high level that no harm would come to anyone who accidentally drank it.
By ISABEL KERSHNERMAY 29, 2015
JERUSALEM — At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood.
A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption, penalizing families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many of Mr. Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid climate. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Mr. Zvieli, 56, who has tended people’s yards for about 25 years.
Across the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two minutes. Washing cars with hoses was outlawed and those few wealthy enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water it only at night.
“We were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri Schor, the spokesman and public education director of the government’s Water Authority.
But that was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers. “The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to planting flowers.
By The New York Times
As California and other western areas of the United States grapple with an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.
During the drought years, farmers at Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, took water-economizing measures like uprooting old apple orchards a few years before their time. With the new plenty, water allocations for Israeli farmers that had been slashed have been raised again, though the price has also gone up.
“Now there is no problem of water,” said Shaul Ben-Dov, an agronomist at Ramat Rachel. “The price is higher, but we can live a normal life in a country that is half desert.”
With its part-Mediterranean, part-desert climate, Israel had suffered from chronic shortages and exploitation of its natural water resources for decades.
The natural fresh water at Israel’s disposal in an average year does not cover its total use of roughly 525 billion gallons. The demand for potable water is projected to rise to 515 billion gallons by 2030, from 317 billion gallons this year.
The turnaround came with a seven-year drought, one of the most severe to hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources — the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — were severely depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of the water quality.
Measures to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a powerful interministerial agency established in 2007.
Desalination emerged as one focus of the government’s efforts, with four major plants going into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be ready to operate within months. Together, they will produce a total of more than 130 billion gallons of potable water a year, with a goal of 200 billion gallons by 2020.
Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel, recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1 percent, according to Water Authority data.
Before the establishment of the Water Authority, various ministries were responsible for different aspects of the water issue, each with its own interests and lobbies.
“There was a lot of hydro-politics,” said Eli Feinerman of the faculty of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served for years as a public representative on the authority’s council. “The right hand did not know what the left was doing.”
The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture.
The tax for surplus household use was dropped at the end of 2009 and a two-tiered tariff system was introduced. Regular household water use is now subsidized by a slightly higher rate paid by those who consume more than the basic allotment.
Water Authority representatives went house to house offering to fit free devices on shower heads and taps that inject air into the water stream, saving about a third of the water used while still giving the impression of a strong flow.
Officials say that wiser use of water has led to a reduction in household consumption of up to 18 percent in recent years.
And instead of the municipal authorities being responsible for the maintenance of city pipe networks, local corporations have been formed. The money collected for water is reinvested in the infrastructure.
Mekorot, the national water company, built the national water carrier 50 years ago, a system for transporting water from the Sea of Galilee in the north through the heavily populated center to the arid south. Now it is building new infrastructure to carry water west to east, from the Mediterranean coast inland.
In the parched Middle East, water also has strategic implications. Struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors over water rights in the Jordan River basin contributed to tensions leading to the 1967 Middle East war.
Continue reading the main story
RECENT COMMENTS
Israel, which shares the mountain aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help foster relations with the Palestinians and with Jordan.
Desalination, long shunned by many as a costly energy-guzzler with a heavy carbon footprint, is becoming cheaper, cleaner and more energy efficient as technologies advance. Sidney Loeb, the American scientist who invented the popular reverse osmosis method, came to live in Israel in 1967 and taught the water professionals here.
The Sorek desalination plant rises out of the sandy ground about nine miles south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largest plant of its kind in the world, it produces 40 billion gallons of potable water a year, enough for about a sixth of Israel’s roughly eight million citizens.
Miriam Faigon, the director of the solutions department at IDE Technologies, the Israeli company that built three of the plants along the Mediterranean, said that the company had cut energy levels and costs with new technologies and a variety of practical methods.
Under a complex arrangement, the plants will be transferred to state ownership after 25 years. For now, the state buys Sorek’s desalinated water for a relatively cheap 58 cents a cubic meter — more than free rainwater, Ms. Faigon acknowledged, “but that’s only if you have it.”
Israeli environmentalists say the rush to desalination has partly come at the expense of alternatives like treating natural water reserves that have become polluted by industry, particularly the military industries in the coastal plain.
“We definitely felt that Israel did need to move toward desalination,” said Sarit Caspi-Oron, a water expert at the nongovernment Israel Union for Environmental Defense. “But it is a question of how much, and of priorities. Our first priority was conservation and treating and reclaiming our water sources.”
Some environmentalists also say that the open-ocean intake method used by Israel’s desalination plants, in line with local regulations, as opposed to subsurface intakes, has a potentially destructive effect on sea life, sucking in billions of fish eggs and larvae.
But Boaz Mayzel, a marine biologist at the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, said that the effects were not yet known and would have to be checked over time.
Some Israelis are cynical about the water revolution. Tsur Shezaf, an Israeli journalist and the owner of a farm that produces wine and olives in the southern Negev, argues that desalination is essentially a privatization of Israel’s water supply that benefits a few tycoons, while recycling for agriculture allows the state to sell the same water twice.
Mr. Shezaf plants his vines in a way that maximizes the use of natural floodwaters in the area, as in ancient times, and irrigates the rest of the year with a mix of desalinated water and fresh water. He prefers to avoid the cheaper recycled water, he says, because, “You don’t know exactly what you are getting.”
But experts say that the wastewater from Israel’s densely populated Tel Aviv area is treated to such a high level that no harm would come to anyone who accidentally drank it.
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
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do u feel like a jackass yet?
Setanta84
Literotica Guru
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my point stands
FOOL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/w...ael-overcomes-any-threat-of-drought.html?_r=0
Only Liberals could have a water shortage when half the state borders the OCEAN
Your "point" is fucking non-sense. This is like blaming Ethiopians for famine by saying "only Niggers could have a FAMINE" while ignoring that most land in Ethiopia is not arable.
Also, liberal policies aren't to blame for CA's water shortage. There's the fact our largest city is basically in the fucking desert, that the hydrology of the entire state is fucked up due to the damming craze of the 20th century and the energy industry fracking and also dumping toxic waste directly into fucking aquifers--corporate abuse of public resources for private gain is basically the leading cause of the water shortage.
Busybody
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Idiot
rosco rathbone
1. f3e5 2. g4??
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lol.
Yeah, liberals decided the agricultural water usage policies of socal.
Yeah, liberals decided the agricultural water usage policies of socal.
BotanyBoy
Fuck Your Safe Space
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All that put together doesn't hold a match to the fact that we farm RICE and CITRUS in the fuckin' desert.....Could NOT be any dumber or more wasteful.
Cut their water permits and suddenly CA will have a water surplus.
But don't expect them to let those water permits go without a fight.
LMFAO ain't that some funny shit?
Last edited:
Busybody
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The End of the Golden State’s Golden Years?
June 11, 2015 7:23 AM From the Thursday Morning Jolt: The End of the Golden State’s Golden Years? As briefly mentioned yesterday, my trip out to the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley couldn’t have gone better. Apparently it was taped for C-SPAN and if and when I know about the airing time, I’ll let you know. But I noticed a strange phenomenon among California conservatives and Republicans. The state, indisputably, is now far around the bend, in a vicious cycle of instituting progressive ideas and then reacting with shock and horror to those ideas, and responding by instituting more progressive ideas. There are unbelievable water restrictions in effect because of the perpetually ongoing drought*; the slogan “brown is the new green.” Despite the enormous problems with the drought, environmentalists are opposing reopening desalination plants because of the carbon footprint. One was built in the 1990s and has been just sitting there, unused, because it wasn’t cost-efficient enough and there hadn’t been enough need. Another new round of tax hikes. Yet construction continues on a much-delayed high-speed rail project that will never have enough riders to make financial sense.
The state is offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants – and is shocked to learn the demand was way higher than their projections: Just months after driver’s licenses became available to immigrants living in California illegally, the product of legislation advocates had pursued fruitlessly for years before prevailing in 2013, 493,998 have sought licenses. The number has surprised officials who spent months bracing for an influx of new customers by hiring staff, opening new DMV offices and extending hours. “The interest in this program is far greater than anyone anticipated,” DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a statement. In preparing to offer the new licenses, the DMV estimated that about 1.4 million immigrants would apply over the course of three years. The new figures show they have handled one third of that expected total in three months, a rate double what the DMV expected, although the official estimate of the total number of eligible applicants remains the same.
Victor Davis Hanson points out that the drought is not an entirely natural phenomenon, but reflects poor planning of the past generation of California political leaders… who are, in fact, still the current generation of California political leaders: Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. Befuddled, half-amused incredulity has become almost a greeting among California conservatives: “Can you believe this?” “No, I can’t believe it. Can you?” As far as I could tell in my short stay in Sunnyvale/Mountain View area, no one in the entire state turned on their air conditioning.
I don’t know whether it was habitual from the usually nice California weather, or some sort of energy-saving approach. (If it was, sorry, Golden Staters. I cranked it up in my hotel room and probably undid all your progress.) I was reminded of the cinematic classic… Predator 2. (Okay, “classic.”) Made in 1990, it depicted a sweltering, chaotic vision of near-future (1997) Los Angeles, where in addition to the city being torn apart by warring drug gangs, the city is enduring a 109 degree heat wave. Late-80s television loudmouth Morton Downey Jr., basically playing himself as a crime scene reporter, declares, “It’s like Dante’s Hell.” I can’t find it online, but I distinctly remember a promotional insert in a comic book about the film back in 1990 that declared that Freon had been banned – and with it, air conditioning – making the city’s maddening heat exacerbated by some well-meaning but intensely consequential environmental regulation.
There have been a lot of hellish forecasts for California from Hollywood over the years: Blade Runner, Escape from L.A., Demolition Man, Southland Tales. Los Angeles blows up in the Terminator series. (I notice that these are mostly depictions of hellish future Los Angeles; future San Francisco seems to look okay in the Star Trek series.) Hollywood’s creative class loves to depict the sudden, violent destruction of its hometown: Independence Day, Volcano, 2012, Battle of Los Angeles, Skyline, the new San Andreas. Even when L.A. isn’t collapsing or blowing up, there’s often a noir atmosphere of slow-motion decay. Just about every big filmmaker has made at least one movie aiming to remind us about the seedy underside, predatory ambitions, and corruption behind the Hollywood glamour, palm trees and sunshine: Michael Mann’s Heat, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive**, Robert Altman’s The Player, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Even the past of Los Angeles is about the hidden ugly side behind the famous beauty, like in L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls. So maybe I’m primed to expect things to look grim when I arrive in California. Or maybe there’s been this steadily-building mood of pre-Apocalyptic dread in the state for years, and the films reflect it.
There certainly seems to be enough reasons for pessimism: The report of the Los Angeles 2020 Commission should serve as a stark reality check for those Angelenos who believe that with the end of the financial downturn, L.A. is poised for a healthy, happy recovery. The city, according to the report, is afflicted with weak job growth; high poverty; bad traffic; underperforming schools; weak, inactive government; red tape that stifles economic development; crumbling infrastructure; unfunded pensions; budget gimmicks and a disaffected electorate. As recently as Steve Martin’s L.A. Story in 1991, a filmmaker could plausibly tout California and specifically Los Angeles as a sort of libertarian paradise, where everyone is free to pursue his American dream as he sees fit: Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think – I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of L.A. and I think it’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is lookinag to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right. In an era when California cities are attempting to ban fireplaces, plastic bags are banned, when Fresno banned permanent markers, San Francisco makes armed self-defense legally impossible, and campus speech codes, could a character plausibly describe the state that way today? * Naturally, it drizzled while I was there. ** I originally mixed up Mulholland Drive and Mulholland Falls.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419614/end-golden-states-golden-years-jim-geraghty
June 11, 2015 7:23 AM From the Thursday Morning Jolt: The End of the Golden State’s Golden Years? As briefly mentioned yesterday, my trip out to the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley couldn’t have gone better. Apparently it was taped for C-SPAN and if and when I know about the airing time, I’ll let you know. But I noticed a strange phenomenon among California conservatives and Republicans. The state, indisputably, is now far around the bend, in a vicious cycle of instituting progressive ideas and then reacting with shock and horror to those ideas, and responding by instituting more progressive ideas. There are unbelievable water restrictions in effect because of the perpetually ongoing drought*; the slogan “brown is the new green.” Despite the enormous problems with the drought, environmentalists are opposing reopening desalination plants because of the carbon footprint. One was built in the 1990s and has been just sitting there, unused, because it wasn’t cost-efficient enough and there hadn’t been enough need. Another new round of tax hikes. Yet construction continues on a much-delayed high-speed rail project that will never have enough riders to make financial sense.
The state is offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants – and is shocked to learn the demand was way higher than their projections: Just months after driver’s licenses became available to immigrants living in California illegally, the product of legislation advocates had pursued fruitlessly for years before prevailing in 2013, 493,998 have sought licenses. The number has surprised officials who spent months bracing for an influx of new customers by hiring staff, opening new DMV offices and extending hours. “The interest in this program is far greater than anyone anticipated,” DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a statement. In preparing to offer the new licenses, the DMV estimated that about 1.4 million immigrants would apply over the course of three years. The new figures show they have handled one third of that expected total in three months, a rate double what the DMV expected, although the official estimate of the total number of eligible applicants remains the same.
Victor Davis Hanson points out that the drought is not an entirely natural phenomenon, but reflects poor planning of the past generation of California political leaders… who are, in fact, still the current generation of California political leaders: Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. Befuddled, half-amused incredulity has become almost a greeting among California conservatives: “Can you believe this?” “No, I can’t believe it. Can you?” As far as I could tell in my short stay in Sunnyvale/Mountain View area, no one in the entire state turned on their air conditioning.
I don’t know whether it was habitual from the usually nice California weather, or some sort of energy-saving approach. (If it was, sorry, Golden Staters. I cranked it up in my hotel room and probably undid all your progress.) I was reminded of the cinematic classic… Predator 2. (Okay, “classic.”) Made in 1990, it depicted a sweltering, chaotic vision of near-future (1997) Los Angeles, where in addition to the city being torn apart by warring drug gangs, the city is enduring a 109 degree heat wave. Late-80s television loudmouth Morton Downey Jr., basically playing himself as a crime scene reporter, declares, “It’s like Dante’s Hell.” I can’t find it online, but I distinctly remember a promotional insert in a comic book about the film back in 1990 that declared that Freon had been banned – and with it, air conditioning – making the city’s maddening heat exacerbated by some well-meaning but intensely consequential environmental regulation.
There have been a lot of hellish forecasts for California from Hollywood over the years: Blade Runner, Escape from L.A., Demolition Man, Southland Tales. Los Angeles blows up in the Terminator series. (I notice that these are mostly depictions of hellish future Los Angeles; future San Francisco seems to look okay in the Star Trek series.) Hollywood’s creative class loves to depict the sudden, violent destruction of its hometown: Independence Day, Volcano, 2012, Battle of Los Angeles, Skyline, the new San Andreas. Even when L.A. isn’t collapsing or blowing up, there’s often a noir atmosphere of slow-motion decay. Just about every big filmmaker has made at least one movie aiming to remind us about the seedy underside, predatory ambitions, and corruption behind the Hollywood glamour, palm trees and sunshine: Michael Mann’s Heat, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive**, Robert Altman’s The Player, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Even the past of Los Angeles is about the hidden ugly side behind the famous beauty, like in L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls. So maybe I’m primed to expect things to look grim when I arrive in California. Or maybe there’s been this steadily-building mood of pre-Apocalyptic dread in the state for years, and the films reflect it.
There certainly seems to be enough reasons for pessimism: The report of the Los Angeles 2020 Commission should serve as a stark reality check for those Angelenos who believe that with the end of the financial downturn, L.A. is poised for a healthy, happy recovery. The city, according to the report, is afflicted with weak job growth; high poverty; bad traffic; underperforming schools; weak, inactive government; red tape that stifles economic development; crumbling infrastructure; unfunded pensions; budget gimmicks and a disaffected electorate. As recently as Steve Martin’s L.A. Story in 1991, a filmmaker could plausibly tout California and specifically Los Angeles as a sort of libertarian paradise, where everyone is free to pursue his American dream as he sees fit: Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think – I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of L.A. and I think it’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is lookinag to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right. In an era when California cities are attempting to ban fireplaces, plastic bags are banned, when Fresno banned permanent markers, San Francisco makes armed self-defense legally impossible, and campus speech codes, could a character plausibly describe the state that way today? * Naturally, it drizzled while I was there. ** I originally mixed up Mulholland Drive and Mulholland Falls.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419614/end-golden-states-golden-years-jim-geraghty
Busybody
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2007: MAN MADE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT!!!
http://naturalresources.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=5921 …
Judge ordered water diverted to save 2 inch fish.
http://naturalresources.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=5921 …
Judge ordered water diverted to save 2 inch fish.
rosco rathbone
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Move the Jews to California and give the former holy land back to it's indigenous inhabitants.
hashtag45
badass 2nd rate Litizen
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Busybody
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move whites back to EuroPUKE and give America back to the Indians
BotanyBoy
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Man made drought? LMFAO~~~!!! Just when I thought you couldn't get any loonier.
That's right BB, we aren't going to destroy our natural habitats so a farmer can grow rice in the fuckin' desert. You can keep giving them welfare to sit on empty fields (yup that's a point blank RW welfare program for uber AgraBiz) but at some point we the people of CA will be forced to pull their permits to water the Redwoods/make sure salmon have a place to fuck and they can move the fuck to another state that has shit loads of water to farm rice. Like the entire SE of the US....makes not the tiniest bit of difference to the hippies who slapped the environmental protections on them. IF that's not enough citrus then nuts are next on the chopping block. Why? We got more money (by an astronomically huge proportion) and resources than the central valley farmers.....they loose plain and simple.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lpQvoHDEkrs/hqdefault.jpg
If I were a central valley farmer I'd wait till this winter to see if the super el nino event going on in the pacific sends us a torrential winter, if not I'd be packing my shit for WA or back east and throwing a for sale sign in the yard.
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Colonel Hogan
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You're the one being foolish and disingenuous at that. You are criticizing California for some of the very same conservation measures that Israel took as prefatory to its desalinization program.
And you'll be the one screaming the loudest when the drought is over and taxpayers are still subsidizing desalinated water over cheaper supplies from re-filled reservoirs.
I can just hear you carping about the "liberal boondoggle, desalinization pork projects" that spent hundreds of millions of dollars solving a temporary problematic blip in the weather cycle.
Busybody
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Skiddles2015
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Smelly camel jockeys?
Colonel Hogan
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In its over 20-year history, Santa Barbara's $34 million Charles E. Meyer Desalination Plant has only operated for the four month period between March and June of 1992.
Thank God the city fathers got out in front on this one.
http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/sources/desalination.asp
Thank God the city fathers got out in front on this one.
http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/sources/desalination.asp
Setanta84
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This. People in the US, particularly people belonging to that most loathsome generation of the "Baby Boomers," waste water like mad. It's a particular problem with Baby Boomers. It's like that whole generation is sexually attracted to wastefulness.
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