It’s Like Environmentalists Are Trying to Drive People Out of California
In 13 of the last 16 years, California has experienced at least some level of water shortage. This year, the wet season was so dry that 95% of the state was classified as under severe drought.
As a result, Gov. Gavin Newsom has pleaded with Californians to cut consumption by 15%. But his constituents have largely ignored him, cutting water use by just 3%. State officials have told local water agencies to expect just 5% of what they have requested from state water projects, and farmers in the nation’s most productive agricultural region, California’s Central Valley, are set to let millions of acres lie fallow.
Considering the state’s severe need for more water, a reasonable person might think that California would be doing everything possible to increase the production and storage of water. But there is nothing reasonable about the environmentalists that have total control of the bureaucratic agencies needed to sign off on development projects.
The California Coastal Commission, an entity that went all the way to the Supreme Court (and won) to stop the construction of new housing on California’s coast, is yet again making it more expensive for humans to live in California.
This time, the Coastal Commission has blocked the construction of a $1.4 billion seawater desalination plant near Los Angeles in Huntington Beach. Foreign countries, such as Israel, have warmly embraced desalination plants to make life easier for them in their dry climate, and the red state of Florida has a number of desalination plants as well.
But desalination isn’t eco-friendly enough for the California Coastal Commission. Apparently, the tiny marine organisms that would die from the salty discharge from the plant are more important than the water needs of humans.
“I am a plankton — please do not kill me!” read a sign carried by a woman wearing a plankton costume at one of the commission’s recent meetings.
The proposed plant would only add about 50 million gallons of water per day, which is enough for about 250,000 homes. But in a state where no major water project has been completed since the 1980s, every little bit of new water could help.
—By Conn Caroll