Western Drought: There Is No Vision, and California Is Perishing

As ominous signs have multiplied that California may be depopulated by the years-long intensifying western drought, and is abandoned by the Obama White House to its fate, the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, has taken drastic but fruitless action. Brown’s order mandating a 25% cutback in all non-agricultural uses of water, followed warnings from NASA that California’s water supplies had fallen to a single year’s worth. In addition, the state’s annual Sierra Nevada Mountain snowpack report found the fifth straight year of decline, and snowpack now equaling just 6% of the 30-year average — effectively, nothing to melt and provide water this Spring and Summer.

The western and southwestern drought is becoming an existential threat to the United States, choking economic life out of its most productive regions; yet Obama and his administration completely ignore it. The only hope for tackling it is by a very large-scale Pacific Rim infrastructure plan together with China, which is taking the international lead in nuclear plant construction and thermonuclear fusion research and development. This starts with nuclear desalination plants, and eventually goes to a new water management plan for all of North America which redistributes untouched precipitation in the continent’s northwest. The China-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other “Silk Road” credit mechanisms could be doubled by the United States to take on this vital project to save U.S. economic capacity. But Obama has scorned these international development credit institutions, even while virtually all major nations have joined China in them.

See: New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis

California is thus left in the intensifying agony of the drought. Governor Brown accompanied his austere rationing plan with a “package of anti-drought measures.” But none of them has the intention of providing any more water for Californians to use. Two-thirds of the $1 billion package is for local flood-control, reflecting Brown’s view that the state is actually confronted by global warming which will make rainstorms that do come, more severe.