environment

California’s Water Woes: More Dangerous Than Trump Realizes

No one can survive for more than four days without water, but California doesn’t seem to care.

You can’t grow food without water either and rainfall alone isn’t reliable enough to sustain major food production. That’s why irrigation, an ancient form of human intervention, is necessary to prevent food shortages and starvation—even in the United States.

In a recent interview with Sean Hannity, President Donald expressed his concern for the intentional water shortages in California. Keep in mind, Big Tech and Hollywood are not the Golden State’s largest industries; that title belongs to Agriculture. California’s farms and ranches do $60 Billion in annual revenue. California’s Central Valley yields more crops and farm-based goods than any other state.

This can’t be done without water.

And yet, the environmentalists and their puppets in government, like Governor Gavin Newsom, are willing to flush the water required to feed the nation into the Pacific Ocean.

President Trump gets it. Now here’s the rest of the story…

I’ve written extensively about this dangerous water situation in my books, Climategate, Eco-Tyranny, and my latest book, Climate Cult. The following is from Eco-Tyranny, which was published back in 2012, exposing what the eco-freaks are up to:

If we are to meet the fundamental needs for survival as a nation, especially as our population increases by 100 million residents by the year 2050, then we need significantly more water, and we need to begin expanding our water supply immediately.  We need more water for drinking, farming, ranching, and manufacturing.

We also need more dams, which can create inexpensive, emission-free electricity.

The problem is that environmentalists are determined to maintain a limited water supply as an effective tool to restrict development, devalue private property, and therefore, better control our lives.  They despise dams and find reservoirs repugnant; in fact, they are using the same tactics they’ve used against the oil and nuclear industries:  junk science, ad hominem arguments, and throwing hissy fits to prevent new dams and reservoirs from being constructed.  Worse yet, they are on a tear to deconstruct as many dams and reservoirs as possible in the name of “restoring the environment.”

Thus far the radicals are winning this water war.  According to federal estimates, at least 36 states are on the verge of experiencing critical water shortages.  Each time a city, county, state or a member of Congress proposes a new water storage plan, the environmentalists leap into battle mode and almost always win.

Add to this discussion something I expand on in Climate Cult: the term ‘ecosystem’ was coined by a disciple of Karl Marx.

A loyal friend of Marx, Edwin Lankester, was a professor at University College, London. Lankester, an ardent communist, described mankind as the “insurgent son” of nature. He, like Marx, believed capitalism was incompatible with the environment. Lankester’s star pupil was Arthur Tansley, an imminent botanist, who stated “the destructive activities of the modern world” could be crushed by employing ecology. “Ecology,” he said, “must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity.” To do this, he coined the term ‘ecosystem,’ which could describe anything from a puddle to an ocean.

Marx, Lankester, and Tansley birthed the junk-science philosophy that influences the modern environmental movement. Everything can be blamed on free market capitalism.

Now back to California, a state being ruined in the name of ecosystems. The last dam to be constructed in the state was the New Melones Reservoir in 1980. That year the population in California was 28 million. There are now 40 million residents. Since 1980 over 150 dams of all sizes have been torn down in California, always in the name of protecting an ecosystem. California desperately needs water.

The most significant destruction of dams has been in the northern part of the state in the Trinity and Klamath River basins.

The Trinity River dams in Northern California, provide invaluable water—and electricity—to the agricultural community in California’s Great Valley.  The dams in question, the Trinity and Lewiston, were completed in 1963, creating one of the largest bodies of water in California.  With 90 percent of the Trinity River basin’s runoff able to be stored and diverted for use in other parts of the state, these dams became a key component of the Central Valley [Water] Project (CVP).  Through a brilliant series of dams, tunnels, canals, and reservoirs, the CVP harnesses waters from the Trinity, Sacramento, and San Joaquin River watersheds to irrigate farmland throughout California’s enormous Great Central Valley.   Besides irrigation, the vast system supplies drinking water to 30 million people and generates hydroelectricity at nine power stations.

However, for years environmentalists, ever scheming to retard development, destroy the agriculture, and reduce population growth in California, sought ways to cut off the flow of water from those dams.  Finally, in 1984, their incessant lobbying began to pay off as they convinced a Democratic-led House and a moderate Republican Senate to send a bill to President Ronald Reagan, which he signed, mandating $35.4 million be used supposedly to “restore fish and wildlife” and save the salmon along the 112-mile-long Trinity River. The “Trinity River Basin Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act” was the first slip down the proverbial slippery slope.  The Act decreased the amount of water supplied to the CVP from 90 percent of the basin’s runoff to 75 percent.
Next came the Clinton-Gore White House and their Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbit who conducted what he called a “Sledgehammer Tour” of California’s dams; he actually visited the dams in his crosshairs with a sledgehammer in his hands.

“America overshot the mark in our dam building frenzy,” he said in a 1998 speech to the Ecological Society of America. “For most of this century, politicians have eagerly rushed in, amidst cheering crowds, to claim credit for the construction of 75,000 dams all across America. Think about that number. That means we have been building, on average, one large dam a day, every single day, since the Declaration of Independence. Many of these dams have become monuments, expected to last forever. You could say forever just got a lot shorter.”

Immediately Babbitt unilaterally instituted a plan to further decrease the water flowing into the CVP to 52 percent, with the goal if eventually reducing the discharge to 25 percent.

Babbit’s mission was eventually handed over to Governor Newsom in 2019. A year before, plans to destroy the Klamath River dam system were released by American Rivers, a radical non-profit which claimed, “up to 85% of the dams in this country are unnecessary, harmful and even dangerous.” The removal of seven dams, built over 100-years ago, was sold as necessary to “save the salmon.” $250 Million was provided by a water bond approved by voters in 2015 to drain the reservoirs, even though the initiative was aimed at “increasing the supply of clean, safe, and reliable water and restoring habitat”—not the destruction of dams and the draining of giant reservoirs, which has now finally occurred.

The result is a monumental human-caused environmental disaster.

In January 2024, the Klamath River dams were unplugged, allowing millions of tons of polluted sediments formerly deposited on the lake bottoms to spew forth, killing virtually all life in its path. The massive samples of sediment contain high levels of heavy metals including chromium, aluminum, arsenic and lead.  Adding to this tragedy is the fact that this sediment was supposed to have been removed before the floodgates were opened. Somewhere along the line, the $450 million set aside to remove the toxic sediment was deemed either too expensive or not crucial.

You see, when sediments are disturbed, concentrated pollutants can form a deadly cocktail for all forms of life. 

The very idiots who claimed the salmon were endangered virtually killed all the salmon in the Klamath River.

President Trump is moving in the proper direction. Eco-tyranny is ruining California and too many other states. Finally, we have a White House administration that sees this as a major plank in Making America Great Again.

Green College Degrees and Phony Climate Calamities

This article was originally posted at American Thinker.

Last week an Associated Press headline declared, “Graduating seniors seek degrees in climate change and more US universities deliver.”   Keep in mind the AP, which feeds stories to news publications around the world, was given an $8 million grant in 2022 to promote the theory of human-caused climate change in its daily coverage. The media giant’s funding came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. In announcing the gift, the AP said it would be hiring twenty environmental reporters to “enhance the global understanding of climate change and its impact across the world.”

The AP’s climate desk isn’t staffed by journalists. These are activists bent on shaping opinions that are short on science and long on instilling fear.

The story includes an interview with Professor Megan Latshaw, who runs Johns Hopkins University’s Environmental Health and Engineering department.  “It’s the flooding. It’s the heat waves. It’s the wildfires,” she says. “It’s the air pollution that’s generated when we’re burning fossil fuels. It’s allergies. It’s water scarcity, and people who may have to flee where they’ve lived for their entire life.”

The professor provided the AP with a typical phony climate calamity talk track.

In my new book Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their Was on Life, Liberty, and Property, I accurately address all of the phenomena highlighted by Latshaw.

First there has always been flooding. Traditional history from ancient Greece, China, Siberia, and even the Pawnee Tribe in Nebraska, all speak of a cataclysmic flood taking place about the same time as Noah’s deluge in the book of Genesis. In modern times, the worst flood on record occurred in 1931 in China, when torrential rains caused the Yangtze River to overflow, resulting in an estimated death toll of up to four million.

As for Latshaw’s heat waves, those too have always been. In fact, the decade of the 1930s was the hottest on record for many regions around the world, including China and the United States. In fact, record high temperatures for nineteen states were established in the Thirties, including 121ºF at Steele, North Dakota, on July 6, 1936.

You can’t blame the Yangtze flood and those temperature records on industrialization and carbon dioxide emissions.

Then there are the wildfires. They are more numerous than ever, but not because of fossil fuels and global warming. Fires have become frequent because of the predominant “earth first” attitude embraced by the federal government and most state agencies. No longer are our forests and wildlands provided with proper care and stewardship. Instead, a preservationist philosophy has been put in place allowing our natural habitat to grow wildly out of control, providing insane amounts of fuel when fires do occur.

Pollution from fossil fuels is troublesome, but not in the United States. We are the poster child for cleaning our skies. Was Latshaw implying carbon dioxide is a pollutant? Shame on her if she was, as CO2 is a necessary component for life on Earth.

Throwing allergies into the list of woes is a plain laugher. Will dry skin be next?

As for water scarcities, this too is the result of the preservationist mentality. Environmentalists despise dams and reservoirs because they are not natural. This is why so many dams are being torn down in the US. As a result, growing population centers have less water available for residents. These water shortages are the byproduct of environmental activists getting a seat at the municipal planning table.

As for the high school seniors looking to get degrees in climate change related fields, there actually is a growing job market for such academic diplomas. The federal government and the blue states employ thousands of well-indoctrinated green citizens for their climate offices, departments, and agencies, with much of the new funding coming from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act which provides $250 billion greenbacks to deliver subversive propaganda.

Their plan to get you into an EV

This article was originally posted at World Net Daily

Here’s the nitty-gritty on electric vehicles: they are extremely fast, quite luxurious, and loaded with enhanced technology. But they are also expensive, highly impractical, environmentally unsound, and possess the potential to stretch the grid to the breaking point. President Biden can claim, as he did earlier this week from outside the Rose Garden, that Americans can “buy any kind of car they want,” but he failed to disclose his actual intentions. The Environmental Protection Agency’s new emissions standards are designed to limit the availability of new gas cars and trucks and push the cost of traditional vehicles out of reach for most Americans. This would coerce many into purchasing electric contraptions they clearly do not want.

Why are Biden and the Democrats so beholden to this plan?

As I disclose in my new book Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property, this is all part of the global climate agenda, which has nothing to do with a pristine environment. Birthed in the bowels of the United Nations and aimed at deposing America from its preeminent status in the world, it’s a scheme that demands zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. In fact, Biden’s Executive Order 14057 precisely mandates this standard. According to a press release from the administration’s Chief Sustainability Officer, “By leveraging its power of procurement, the Federal Government will accelerate the country’s transition to a clean energy economy…”

This strongarmed government energy plan will make our grid as reliable as North Korea’s.

As I reveal in the book, electric vehicles are hardly green. Manufacturing your average sedan with an internal combustion engine creates about six metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, while manufacturing an electric sedan creates more than ten metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The reason for the sharp contrast is because of the mining, refining, transportation, and manufacturing of raw materials required to make the batteries for these vehicles. The chassis of a Tesla X consists of 7,104 lithium batteries—that amounts to loads of emissions along the production chain.

Charging an electric vehicle also requires fossil fuels. Currently, over half the electricity in the United States (59.3 percent) is derived from the use of natural gas and coal. Thus, when an EV plugs-in, most of its charge is coming fossil-based fuel. Wind accounts for 10.2 percent of the energy mix, solar just 3.4 percent. Nuclear power (which the left loathes) accounts for 18.2 percent of our grid’s power, and most of those plants are nearing the end of their lifecycles.

Currently, only one percent of all registered vehicles are electric, and our grid is already overstretched. On a hot summer day in California, it is not uncommon to see signs above the highways warning, “POWER ALERT. DO NOT CHARGE EVS BETWEEN 4PM AND 9PM.”

The median household in the US uses 886 kWh of electricity per month. Based on the standard of fourteen thousand driving miles per year, the average EV needs to be charged with 408 kWh/month. That’s almost half of an entire household’s electricity demand for the same period. If there are two EVs in the driveway, it’s like adding the electricity requirements of another home on the block.

But, as I share in Climate Cult, the green masterminds at Princeton have a plan. By their calculations, in 2050, when net zero is forecast to be running at full strength, a region equaling the size of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and southern Indiana is envisioned to be one humongous 250-million-acre wind farm. Solar energy would occupy 17.5 million acres, about all of northern Indiana.

And when the sun is not shining or the wind not blowing, MIT has come up with plans for a massive battery backup. Price tag? More than $2.5 trillion.

Americans, not Biden and his elite clique, deserve the freedom to determine what they would like to drive.