JOHN MOORE: WE NEED TO CAPTURE MORE OF CALIFORNIA’S RAINFALL
Q:From wildfires to sea level rise, the climate emergency is increasingly affecting California. What immediate steps should California lawmakers be taking to address it?
A:
Wildfires can be
handled more directly. In Washington and Oregon a couple of summers ago there were many wildfires.
Law enforcement in each county captured several firebugs. They were caught, arrested and charged with arson. Some used delayed ignition devices which gave a few minutes for escape before the fire began.
In California, we think all wildfires are caused by downed power lines. It is very rare that we consider firebugs.
Q:
The governor’s pleas
to reduce water use have been widely met with indifference. What, if anything, should state lawmakers be doing to address drought conditions?
A:
Researchers Mary
Kang and Rob Jackson in their Stanford University study of 2016 showed that California has plenty of water.
In their groundbreaking discovery of the large aquifer in Central California, they measured 2,700 cubic kilometers of water underground.
Much of it is drinkable under California law. Some is brackish, needing filtering before drinking. Still, it is much cheaper to purify than seawater.
We don’t take advantage of our odd but regular rainfall cycle. It is divided between a long drought followed by a short deluge.
If we captured just part of the excess deluge in additional storage, we wouldn’t go through shortage crises
in the drought cycle. There is plenty of water in the deluge to cover the consumption during the drought.
At 100 gallons per day per resident, assuming 39 million California residents, total individual water consumption per year is only about 5.25 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is equal to a football field with 1 foot of water evenly spread across the top which is equal to 326,000 gallons of water.
Residential customers are our lowest consumers of water.
Q:
What would you do to
address the surging gas prices in California?
A:
I would temporarily
suspend the $1.20 in state taxes per gallon and discard the metered mileage tax on individual automobiles.
Q:
How do you strike a
balance between reducing the state’s dependency on fossil fuels and addressing energy affordability issues, including the high cost of gasoline?
A:
“Fossil fuels” are a
misnomer, according to Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table of the elements. He made this observation long ago in the 1880s. It’s taken a century or more for word to reach the U.S.
It still hasn’t taken hold here or in lots of other parts of the world, though the Russians are convinced of it. Mendeleev thought that petroleum was the product of processes deep in the Earth under tremendous heat and pressure for eons.
John D. Rockefeller, president of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in the world, needed an oil depletion allowance (sort of like depreciation expense on real estate). This way he could recover some of his losses on oil fields that had gone dry (empty).
In the early 1890s in New York, he held a big conference on oil and made mention that he wanted an academic paper proving that petroleum was the product of organic decay thus limited in supply and worthy of an oil depletion tax deduction, despite Mendeleev’s opinion to the contrary.
In the end, Rockefeller got his tax deduction, the cooperative academics got the cash they wanted, and Mendeleev turns in his grave. American geologist Thomas Gold carried the banner for Mendeleev in the 1950s through the 1970s but has since passed away, and we are still in a standoff on the issue.
Q:
How would you bring
down the high cost of housing, both for homeowners and renters?
A:
It is estimated that
almost half the cost of building homes in San Diego is from regulations. Cut the regulatory overhead by 50 percent. That will reduce total cost by 25 percent.
Q:
Should taxes in California be increased? If so, which ones?
A:
No, we are going into a
recession, probably the worst since the 1930s. Lower taxes.