Sacramento's "tortured middle way"

Thanks to Sacramento’s man on the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Anthony Kennedy, who created the meaningless “significant nexis” to determine the connectivity of waters to navigable streams, federal resource agencies have been up a creek as far as knowing their jurisdiction to enforce the Clean Water Act. The EPA has done nothing about more than 400 CWA enforcement cases since the Supreme Court ruling called the “Rapanos Decision.” Kennedy’s middle ground stood between four conservative justices who wanted CWA enforcement only on permanent streams and four liberals who voted for intermittent streams as well, including wetlands and vernal pools.

Kennedy’s ties with Sacramento developers were so close several years ago that he recused himself on a Galt case that reached the Supreme Court that pitted private property rights directly against the Clean Water Act. In a 4-4 tie, the Army Corps of Engineers prevailed and the Act was upheld … until Rapanos. Unable to vote one way or the other, Kennedy introduced one more meaningless phrase into the legal framework for environmental enforcement, one that delighted the hearts of California developers and the water sophists who advise them on legal matters, and spread the mist of confusion over environmental regulatory agencies. "And what then is an insignificant nexis? And where does significant become insignificant? The difference is left to whose judgment, exactly?" Environmental enforcement is difficult enough with relatively clear law in the swirl of political forces operating constantly on enforcement agencies. "Significant nexis" smacks all too clearly of Sacramento, where environmental policies frequently disappear into a never-never land of cynical sophistry.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-LA) and James Oberstar (D-MN) are now sponsoring a bill to reaffirm the pre-“significant nexis” Clean Water Act.

Another tortured middle way is being crafted in Sacramento today, on the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta. This middle way involves the construction of a peripheral canal around the Delta and two more dams, one in the west Sacramento Valley, the other above the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River. Yet a third tortured middle way is being crafted by the new state Senate pro tem, Darryl Steinberg (D-Sacramento) to further weaken the California Environmental Quality Act. However, Steinberg’s sophistic meanderings will have to await a later article.

Underlying Sacramento’s witless wandering is a faulty definition of the problem. California is in the second year of a drought. In California droughts occur, regularly. This drought does not constitute a water crisis any more than any other drought constituted a water crisis. California is given by Nature so much water, delivered unevenly. California has a population-concentration crisis. The only aspect of nature that is unbalanced is human nature: the infinite greed for wealth, power and domination that had produced such disastrous results. State government, beginning with the Hun, our governor, is in a state of abject denial of reality. To tell the truth about the population crisis is politically impossible. In this confusion, lobbyists and water lawyers live well by inventing weasel phrases for legislators and judges to make them look wise and balanced as 37 million Californians devour the environment.

The problem with the peripheral canal is that it surrenders the richest farmland in the state to intruding salt water, to send fresher water south, a great deal of it to the southwest San Joaquin Valley, where farmers must wash salts below the root zone with an acre-foot of water before they can even plant. Rather than protecting this rich farmland by repairing and strengthening levees, the Capitol would rather build a grand new canal that would provide “water security” to both Southern California, parts of the Bay Area, and Westlands Water District. The latter is now talking about nuclear water-cleaning schemes to rid its water supply of salts and heavy metals. The new nuclear fix falls in a long line of water-cleaning schemes that includes the heavy metal-devouring variety of Eucalyptus, the microbes that lived on selenium, dumping all the drainage in Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, which killed and deformed wildlife, and then creating a thousand Kestersons with drainage sumps on west side farms. Perhaps, even now, UC Merced scientists (except the one recently arrested and charged with meth manufacture whose bail was set at more than $1 million) are busy bioengineering a rabbit that will feed on nuclear waste that has digested the salts and heavy metals of the alkali flats irrigated by Westlands Water District. The waste from these rabbits will glow in the dark and kill absolutely everything, but that will be the new technological challenge for a younger generation of UC scientists.

Yet, at 37 million people and growing every year, as these two drought years have shown, there is no more “water security” in California. There is no more “balance” possible between population, agriculture and the environment. This is the sort of crisis that generally leads to large public works projects. The peripheral canal will eventually doom the richest farmland in the state, destroy the richest ecological area in the state, for the illusion of “water security.”

The proposal for the Temperance Flat Dam on the San Joaquin River above the Friant Dam, out of which flows the Friant-Kern Canal, appears to rest on a common California illusion than more reservoirs make more water. This illusion is corollary to the universal view among California’s political and economic leaders that more population growth is better. This makes absolutely no sense in the case of the San Joaquin, which is primarily an agricultural wastewater ditch from the Mendota Pool north to the Delta that contributes no Sierra water to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, the San Joaquin River Settlement continues to wend its way through Congressional committees. The settlement between environmental groups and Friant water users is a compromise that would take some water from the irrigators to allow the river to flow above ground throughout its course for the first time in 50 years, allowing a return of salmon and other anadromous fish that spawned in the San Joaquin before the Friant Dam was built. The proposal for the dam must be seen in its full political and legal context, including the federal court ruling that, according to law, water must once again flow the length of the San Joaquin River for the benefit of fish.

Lester Snow, director of the state Department of Water Resources, is quoted in the Stockton Record as saying in reply to Delta residents’ complaints that nobody can understand what the state is doing about the Delta, "There are too many processes going on, there's no question about that … for a working man or woman to keep up is extremely difficult." The problem with “media-savvy” Snow’s remark is that no one speaks with more authority about the Delta than Snow. He was director of CalFed, formed to “fix” the Delta more than a decade ago. He has been involved with Delta policy for years, longer than anyone in a comparable position in state government. If Snow cannot make a clear statement about what the state is doing about the Delta, it could be because the state doesn’t have a rational leg to stand on and so it has retreated behind closed doors into backrooms where special interests are making a deal.

The Delta cannot supply drinking water to 25 million people without collapsing. “Water security” is a special interest slogan, a power-point presentation “goal,” part of a lethal “planning process” by all levels of government in California, utterly captured by one set of business institutions – finance, insurance and real estate, the people that just brought us the speculative real estate bust, which is causing such tragedy all around us in places like Merced, Modesto and Stockton. There is something disastrously wrong with this political economic model and yet the same interests, the same lobbyists and the same government officials are still calling the shots. 

The institutions of finance, insurance and real estate are, in themselves, vital economic forces in any society. The problem in California, as in the rest of the nation at the moment, is not the existence or functions of these institutions; but their overwhelming political influence, which led to the wholesale sacking of vital regulations installed during the Great Depression, which led in turn to the speculative real estate bust and the global credit crisis. The rightwing revolution had no ideas except to let the “free market” run its course, unencumbered by government regulation. The combined forces of the infinite greed for money within finance, insurance and real estate and the infinite greed for power among elected government officials, crash against the limits of nature to support such extravagance.

Absurdity in government can get dangerous, even in the Golden State, if it is allowed to go on indefinitely. California government does not possess the legal means to correct itself at this point. All that was stripped away years ago and the state’s overriding policy since statehood has been population growth. Only a very serious political challenge from grassroots could do it and that must be accomplished against daunting odds in a society where every citizen that shows an inkling of genuine political activity is instantly identified and given “leadership training” by accommodating local NGOs so that the citizen can learn to babble slogans like “smart growth,” “sustainable development,”  “green,” etc. until they have lost the use of their minds and been rendered safe enough to special interests for a seat on the planning commission or at least to get a pat on the head by a county supervisor.

The state is well beyond its resource-carrying capacity. Growth-inducing public works projects, as a rule of thumb, ought to be viewed with the greatest skepticism within the context of a policy to rid itself of the undue influence of the special interests that brought us the speculative real estate bust and within the context of a policy that limits and even reverses population growth. Leaving this to the invisible middle finger of the market, which produces the terrible social disruption of mass foreclosures, is cowardly, corrupt, anti-social as well as anti-environmental government. Despite water shortages in some farming districts, agriculture will have a good year overall, its floor set by historically high grain prices, and the Delta will be among the economic leading districts, as finance, insurance and real estate continue to lose billions by the month.

Nevertheless, the outlines of the newest speculative boom, in industrial and commercial real estate, are clear. What is also clear is that commercial space is going vacant daily as businesses are swallowed by recession and that the US has been losing millions of manufacturing jobs for 30 years. So, where is the real demand for all the proposed commercial and industrial development? It would appear that the demand lies almost solely within the finance, insurance and real estate sector, and in the need of politicians to look like they are doing something for the unemployed. In the last speculative bubble in real estate, the barely employed were convinced they could afford to own homes at ridiculously inflated prices.

And this large group of financial incompetents will now be given government loans to start small businesses and manufacturing plants in new commercial and industrial space, to be built on the only land left in the state for such ventures, good farm and ranch land? We would not even have asked the question if it had not been for the spectacle of lies, fraud and political corruption surrounding the last real estate bubble.

Badlands Journal editorial board

Stockton Record

Delta residents fight to be heard on peripheral canal...Alex Breitler

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080818/A_NEWS/808180317 [1]

Get involved

Two upcoming Delta meetings are scheduled in Stockton:

• The state Department of Water Resources hosts a meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium, 525 N. Center St. Discussion includes flood protection, levees, water quality, environment and conveyance (peripheral canal).

• Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision comes to Stockton from 4 to 7 p.m. Aug. 28 at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center, 33 W. Alpine Avenue. The Delta Vision task force, set to issue recommendations on the Delta's future by October, is seeking comment on its draft plan, which can be found at www.deltavision.ca.gov [2].

New York Times

Clearer Rules, Cleaner Waters...Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/opinion/18mon3.html?_r=1&sq=wetlands&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print [3]

8-19-08

Planning and Conservation League

HELP KEEP A WASTEFUL WATER BOND OFF OF THE NOVEMBER BALLOT!

http://bl148w.blu148.mail.live.com/mail/InboxLight.aspx?FolderID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001&InboxSortAscending=False&InboxSortBy=Date&n=1675721060 [4]

KSEE News

Fresno One Step Closer to Going Nuclear

http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/27155599.html [5]