Green Hell Blog

In response to the Pacific Institute’s new report calling for California farmers to pay more for less water, the farmers are saying that the water crisis is green-made and that the solution is more water.

According to ClimateWire:

Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, called the current drought “man-made” and the Pacific Institute’s recommendations “nonsensical.”

The group’s recommendation to raise water rates, Wade said, “isn’t based on water being more expensive, or it costing more to get it to consumer, or some use for this added cost. It’s simply raising the cost so that fewer people can afford it, and therefore less water is going to be used and it will be reallocated to some other use. We think that’s gaming the California water market to the disadvantage of people who grow fresh fruit and vegetables and nut products and things we’ve grown accustomed to.”

Pumping restrictions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are also not needed, Wade said. “We are facing a man-made drought, a regulatory drought and a situation where water is reprioritized away from its historic use to a point where tens of thousands of acres have been fallowed in the Central Valley and 40,000 people are out of work.”

Another farm group, the California Farm Bureau Federation, said increasing the water supply through recycling and desalination would obviate the need to cut usage or raise prices. “Certainly, improved water efficiency will be one of the ways that California solves its water crisis, but that water crisis is too severe to be solved in a one-dimensional way,” said group spokesman Dave Kranz.

“To sustain food production here in California and accommodate the growing population we have and environmental values we’re trying to maintain, we have to develop a package of water solutions that includes new storage, recycling, desalination — all of those strategies have to be part of the mix.”

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water…

Government agencies have opposed desalination because of the process’s energy consumption. The desalination plant would use nearly twice as much energy as a wastewater-treatment plant available in Orange County. Environmental groups also object because fish and other organisms are likely to be sucked into the facility.

“Eventually, people will have to realize, it’s either fish or children,” Mr. Lewis said…

Officials in Carlsbad began discussing desalination in 1998 and planned to open the plant this year. But opposition was fierce.

The Surfrider Foundation and San Diego Coastkeeper — two local environmental groups — argue the plant would be disastrous for marine life, “killing everything that floats” near the plant’s intake, said Surfrider’s Joe Geever.

The permitting process continued for six years, and included 14 public hearings that ran a total of 170 hours and included five revisions to the plan…

March 22 is the green-contrived World Water Day. It should be re-labeled World No-Water Day since the greens are really only interested in controlling (read “reducing”) water use — even though water is the most abundant substance on Earth.

Instead of figuring out ways of producing more freshwater (like through desalination and water exporting), the greens are interested in “water management,” as described, for example, in this media release from German researchers. “Water management” is a euphemism for global dehydration.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them discusses how the greens are working toward a thirstier world.