{"id":8493,"date":"2015-06-23T01:16:42","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T08:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8493"},"modified":"2015-06-23T01:16:42","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T08:16:42","slug":"california-running-on-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-running-on-empty\/","title":{"rendered":"California: Running On Empty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

\"In
In this June 3, 2015 photo provided by the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, juvenile coho salmon, or fry, rescued from Green Valley Creek, a tributary of the Russian River, wait in a container to be relocated to suitable habitat in Santa Rosa, Calif. State water regulators want vineyards in Northern California\u2019s Wine Country to start reporting how much groundwater they are pumping up, saying excessive withdrawals to irrigate grapes are draining creeks that host an endangered population of coho salmon. (Eric Larson\/California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife via AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one\u2019s cough still lingered for weeks and even months. Antibiotics did not seem to faze it. Allergy clinics were full. Almost every valley resident notices that when orchards and vineyards are less watered, when row cropland lies fallow, when lawns die and blow away, when highway landscaping dries up, nature takes over and the air becomes even filthier. Green elites lecture that agriculture is unnatural, without any idea why pre-civilized, pre-irrigated, and \u201cnatural\u201d California was an empty place, whose dry, hazy climate and dusty winds made life almost impossible. The state is running on empty.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Domestic and agricultural wells are going dry all over Central California, especially in the corridors south of Fresno to the Grapevine, along the Sierra Nevada foothills, and out west of the 99 Freeway \u2014 anywhere there is not a deep aquifer. I have never seen anything quite like this water madness in 60 years, as families scrimp and borrow to drill, or simply move to town to take advantage of municipal wells. I have developed a habit as I drive to work to Stanford of counting the abandoned homes I see west of Highway 41 (sort of like counting those who sit in Wal-Mart not to shop, but to enjoy the air conditioning they cannot afford). \u00a0The number increases each week.\u00a0 Retired couples \u2014 or families in general \u2014 apparently do not have tens of thousands of dollars to drill a deeper well, especially given the uncertainty of how fast the dropping water table will soon make their investment superfluous. Without water, there is nothing.<\/p>\n

Some dry farmland is turning into vacant parcels. Many rural homes must have potable water trucked in. Hispanics who recently immigrated to California and bought or rented older homes with shallow wells in these areas of the valley countryside have no money to drill deeper $30,000 domestic wells. Nor do many poor whites, who often live in isolated communities in the foothills. Who has the capital to gamble on finding scarce water in dicey granite seams? \u00a0There is no water in the reservoirs left to recharge the water table or to fill canals that can be tapped for domestic use.<\/p>\n

Along the vast West Side of the Central Valley thousands of acres lie fallow \u2014 a euphemism that does not reflect the dust that arises from neglected fields. Thousands of acres of West Side nut orchards seem like they are beginning to wither, as insufficient and brackish water from 1,000-foot wells after four years has fatally taxed the trees. The idea that in such crisis times of the last four years anyone would have released millions of acre-feet of precious stored fresh water to the ocean is profoundly immoral. The thought that anyone would oppose the creation of more reservoirs to accommodate a thirsty state population of 40 million is morally bankrupt.<\/p>\n

\"california_needs_water_6-21-15-1\"<\/p>\n

We suffer in California from a particular form of progressive immorality predicated on insular selfishness. The water supplies of Los Angeles and the Bay Area are still for a year longer in good shape, despite the four-year drought. Neither area is self-sufficient in water; their aquifers are marginal and only supply a fraction of their daily needs. Instead these megalopolises depend on intricate and expensive water transfer systems \u2014 from Northern California, from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and from the Colorado River \u2014 that bring water and life to quite unnatural habitats and thereby allow a MGM or Facebook to thrive in an arid landscape that otherwise would not support such commerce and population. Without them, Atherton would look like Porterville<\/a> [1]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Quiet engineers in the shadows make it all work; the loud activists in the media seek to make it unwind. These transfers have sterling legal authority and first claims on mountain and northern state water. If Latinos in Lemon Cove are going without household water, Pyramid Lake on I-5 or Crystal Springs Reservoir on 280 are still full to the brim.<\/p>\n

Why then do those who have access to water delivered in a most unnatural way seek to curtail supplies to others? In a word, because they are either ignorant of where their own water comes from or they have not a shred of concern for others less blessed, or both. We will confirm this ethical schizophrenia should a fifth year of drought ensue. Then even the most sacrosanct rights of transferred water will not be sufficient to accommodate the San Francisco and Los Angeles basins. Mass panic and outrage will probably follow, and no one will care a bit about the delta smelt, or a few hundred salmon artificially planted into the San Joaquin River watershed, or a spotted toad that holds up construction of an urgently needed reservoir.<\/p>\n

The greens who pontificate about the need to return the San Joaquin watershed to its 19th<\/sup>-century ecosystem will become pariahs. When the taps run dry in Hillsborough and Bel-Air, very powerful people will demand water for their desert environs, which will in fact begin to return to the deserts that they always were as the thin veneer of civilization is scraped away.<\/p>\n

The pretensions and vanity of postmodern civilization will do no good. What value is the ubiquity of transgendered restrooms, when there is no water in the toilet or sink? Who needs a reservoir on the back nine, when there is no water for putting greens? Who cares whether plastic grocery bags are outlawed, when one cannot afford the tomatoes or peaches to put in a paper bag? What does it matter whether the homeless or ex-felons are ensured a job on the high-speed rail project, when there is no money or water to build it? Who cares about a new Apple watch, when he stinks to high heaven without a shower?<\/p>\n

Let us face elemental reality. A 40-million person California is an iffy place. It is entirely dependent on a sophisticated, man-created infrastructure of dams, reservoirs, canals, pumps, freeways, rail lines, airports, and schools and universities. Given that the population continues to rise, and given that one in four Californians was not born in the United States and is often poor (California has the largest population in real and relative numbers below the poverty line; one sixth of the nation on welfare payments of some sort lives in California), there is no margin of safety. A drought is but a metaphor about the collapse of an entire way of living.<\/p>\n

Years ago the state should have ensured that its north-south state and federal laterals \u2014 I-5, the 99, and 101 \u2014 were completely three-lane freeways, if road carnage and bottlenecks were to be averted. Years ago, we should have added 20 million acre-feet of reservoir storage as our forefathers warned. We should have not released a single gallon of water for theoretical fish restoration, unless the reservoirs had at least a five-year supply of water, insurance for a drought like the present catastrophe.<\/p>\n

There should have been direct, non-stop freight rail lines from Oregon to San Diego, before we even dreamed of high-speed rail, whose engineering and operational requirements seem beyond the expertise of the present state. We should have not instituted any \u201c-studies\u201d courses in our state universities until entering students met all math and English requirements and passed an exit exam upon graduation. What good does it do to be politically sensitive when one cannot read or compute at a college level?<\/p>\n

We should have either curbed immigration into the state, or ensured adequate affordable housing projects for those whom we welcomed in. Instead, we ignored immigration law and then adopted a \u201cI got mine, Jack\u201d attitude of selfishness, of forbidding new housing construction on the logic that the Silicon Valley grandee would rather have his landscaper live in a Winnebago parked behind a Redwood City cottage than in an affordable condo in the vast empty 280 corridor expanse.<\/p>\n

If our biologists and environmentalist were honest folk, they would have said to the public, \u201cPlease do not come into California; we instead prefer to restore salmon in our rivers than to provide jobs and drinking water for you. We like looking at open spaces from our backyard decks, not at new housing tracts. And we like a state of the well-heeled in clean-fueled, gas-less Priuses, not the poor puttering around in smoggy used Crown Victorias. The more costly we make gasoline and electrical power, the less we will use of it \u2014 even if that hurts you far more than it hurts us.\u201d<\/p>\n

But they were not especially veracious sorts, and so they went ahead to turn California into a state fit for 20 million, even as it grew to 40 million \u2014 while doing their best to be shielded from the ramifications of their own ideologies. \u00a0The logical result of the Bay Area grandee\u2019s world view is East Porterville<\/a> [2]<\/sup>, not the Berkeley foothills. If those who run the state would just live where the poor do, we would have reservoirs galore, futuristic freeways, and affordable housing.\u00a0 If the children of the elite fought for a slot at Cal State Stanislaus rather than Stanford, California would be quite a different place.<\/p>\n

If it does not rain or snow soon, we are going to see things unimaginable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

URLs in this post:<\/p>\n

[1] Porterville: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Porterville,_California<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[2] East Porterville: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/East_Porterville,_California<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one\u2019s cough still lingered for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[976,994,928],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2cZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11778,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":0},"title":"California Has Become America\u2019s Cannibal State","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 11, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax. The state\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8742,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-california-be-saved\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":1},"title":"Can California Be Saved?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Crime is back up in California. Los Angeles reported a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes over the first half of 2015 and nearly an 11 percent increase in property crimes. Last year, cash-strapped California taxpayers voted for Proposition 47, which so far\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"www.femtalks.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/bay-area-traffic-move-over-law.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10472,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-california-cracking-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":2},"title":"Is California Cracking Up?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 With poor education, a budget deficit, and crumbling infrastructure, Californians shouldn\u2019t be focused on idealistic social programs. \u00a0 Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and Google are hitting record highs. \u00a0 California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8915,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-leading-from-behind\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":3},"title":"California, Leading from Behind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse\u00a0state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/california-leading-from-behind.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11206,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-and-conservatism\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":4},"title":"California and Conservatism","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review I share some of the sentiments of Jay Nordlinger\u2019s Corner post expressing\u00a0confidence\u00a0that some day in the future there may be hope for California conservatism. That\u2019s why I continue to live in the house that I grew up in, despite vast changes in the nature\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ronald Reagan"","block_context":{"text":"Ronald Reagan","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/ronald-reagan\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":748,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-california-be-fixed\/","url_meta":{"origin":8493,"position":5},"title":"Can California Be Fixed?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's The Corner Recently, I was driving down pot-holed, two-lane, non-freeway 101 near Monterey (unchanged since the 1960s) when the radio blared that on a recent science test administered to public schools, California scored 47th in the nation. As I looked at the congested traffic on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8496,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8493\/revisions\/8496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}