By Michael L. Grable
A long story in The Desert Sun
(a Palm Springs daily) recently manufactured a lake out of a puddle in
California's perennial water problems. Maybe it's just Governor
Moonbeam's gang feeding propaganda to the fourth estate, but it's a good
example of how government regulation and media indoctrination so often
contrive to strain at capitalist gnats and swallow collectivist camels.
The
story's complicated (like everything concerning California water), but
it's basically about the Morongo Band of Mission Indians selling its
Millard-Canyon water rights to Nestlé S.A., a Swiss food and beverage
giant which annually bottles about 200 million gallons of the Band's
water as Arrowhead 100% Pure Mountain Water. Although that sounds like a
lot of water, it's only about the amount 400 homes or a single golf
course would annually use.
Anyway,
the Cabazon Water District, the State of California, and maybe even the
federal government are trying to muscle a sovereign nation (the Morongo
Band) out of its right to sell its water to a private company (Nestlé),
which, after all, only processes the stuff for its highest and best use
– drinking.
Meanwhile,
Governor Moonbeam's gang has dumped one-third of a trillion gallons of
California mountain water into the Pacific Ocean in its ecological
crusade to "save" a two-inch smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
That sounds like a lot of water, too, and it is – enough, apparently,
to service the annual needs of 666,400 homes or 1,666 golf courses.
So
– unless my arithmetic fails me – Californians donating their
California water for delta smelts to swim in is 1,666 times more
critical than the Morongo Indians selling their California water for
Californians to drink. This seems a perverse priority in the midst of
an historic California drought. After all, Californians don't drink
delta smelts. Neither do Californians flush their toilets with delta
smelts, nor bathe in delta smelts, nor water their lawns with delta
smelts, nor wash their dishes, clothes, or cars with delta smelts. In
fact, Californians don't do anything with delta smelts. The same goes
for vernal pool fairy shrimp, Santa Cruz long-toed salamanders, Sierra
Nevada yellow-legged frogs, Colorado pikeminnows, unarmored three spine
sticklebacks, desert pupfish, tidewater gobies, and Modoc suckers. So
why would parched Californians prefer the water needs of delta smelts
over the water needs of 666,400 California home owners or 1,666
California golf courses and their patrons?
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment