FORGET THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY; LET'S JUST HAVE FUN
A surf resort in the Mojave Desert? There's something so spectacularly tone deaf about a plan for a seven-hectare lake that would need 68 million litres of water that it's weirdly fascinating to watch the developers try to convince local politicians to approve it.
The resort is being proposed in La Quinta, one of the cities lining the highways south from Palm Springs through California's Coachella Valley.
You have to hand it to the Americans. They've spent most of the last century being particularly great at weaving fantastical dreams in Hollywood, building cartoon castles, golf courses in the sand around Palm Springs, Venice-style canals in Vegas and condos on Florida swamp land.
It's a hard habit to break, even with a climate emergency that is devastating communities — there and around the world — with droughts, heat domes, wildfires, floods, freak storms with hail and thunder and two-metre snow drifts in April.
As usual, the hook is money — potentially US$4.23 million a year in taxes. And, of course, there is a catch. Coral Mountain Wave Development says construction of its surf resort will be phased over 23 years.
No vote was taken when it went to a public hearing this week because one of the planning commissioners was absent. It will be revisited next week.
Yet, it seems pretty extraordinary that it wasn't killed at the outset and is still being considered.
On the day of the public hearing and just two days after Palm Springs hit a record temperature of 38 C, the top story in the local paper was about California's year-long drought emergency.
With mountain snowpack once again at critically low levels, farmers will not be getting their usual water allotments.
For homeowners, it means early imposition of watering restrictions and increased payouts for those reverting to desert planting from lawns.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order late last month asking people to take “common sense” measures to reduce their water use. But common sense seems to be lacking.
The governor declared a statewide water emergency more than a year ago and urged people to voluntarily cut their usage. But urban water use rose 2.6 per cent between January 2020 and January 2022.
So much for common sense, especially among Coachella Valley residents who are already among the top 10 water users in the state in a country with the second-highest water use in the world — second only to China whose population dwarfs America's.
In the last decade, the valley has sunk by as much as a metre in some places as groundwater in this pretend oasis is pumped out to keep golf courses green and pools full.
To be fair, some of the opposition to the plan is because of the water use. The developer, Coral Mountain, has countered that, saying it will use no more water annually than the golf course that was originally in the plan.
But at this week's hearing, the most reported opposition was from residents who don't want short-term vacation rentals in their neighbourhood, don't want more traffic and don't want the floodlights that would allow nighttime surfing.
If this all seems a bit California wack-a-doodle, let's just pause for a moment and consider what Vancouver city council didn't do this week. No one would even second Colleen Hardwick's motion to hold a plebiscite vote on whether to support a bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics.
Why bring this up? Well, in 2010 at what was touted as “the greenest Olympics ever,” the weather was too unseasonably warm for artificial snowmakers to work, so a fleet of dump trucks and helicopters transported snow to Cypress from as far as 240 kilometres away in order for freestyle skiing and snowboarding competitions to be held.
There was also a spike in CO2 emissions with all those folks coming and going to Vancouver and back and forth to Whistler.
Earlier this year at the Beijing Winter Games, warm weather meant most of the snow was manufactured requiring what the International Olympic Committee estimated was close to 223 million litres of water. That's enough to fill 90 Olympic swimming pools or, as CNN put it, provide a day's worth of drinking water for nearly 100 million people.
So, what's in it for local politicians to pay little more than lip service to the climate emergency? Money.
For La Quinta, that $4.23 million annually in transient occupancy and hotel taxes would more than cover the development's $1.6-million estimated annual servicing costs. But that's only if the site is fully developed and every house is used as a short-term rental.
For a one-shot deal like the Olympics, cost-benefit analyses are much muddier and loaded with intangibles like national pride and fun.
So far, there hasn't been one done for the 2030 Olympics.
But, consider the B.C. government's claim Thursday that if FIFA chooses Vancouver as one of the 2026 World Cup hosts, it could bring in “more than $1 billion” in new tourism revenue from 2026 to 2032.
Great! But the cost of hosting three to five games at B.C. Place? The news release neglected to mention that or how much it will cost to rip up the recently installed artificial turf and replace it with real grass.