More than Nature is at work

 
Throwing in the towel: In this graphic of the Sacramento Delta region, light blue indicates low-lying land masses--mostly farmland--that research suggests should be surrendered to the sea the next time the levees protecting them break. Yellow indicates borderline cases.
Credit: Jay Lund  -- Technology Review (MIT), Sept. 11, 2008

The map above is the essence of a recent article by the MIT's Technology Review:

Technology Review (MIT)
A Strategy for Coping with Climate Change
Amid rising seas, a California modeling effort recommends abandoning land tracts in the Sacramento Delta...David Talbot...9-11-08
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/21363/page1/ [1]

The study to which the MIT journal refers is the Public Policy Institute of California's already infamous "Comparing Futures for the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta," http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_708EHR.pdf [2], which provides the University of California's technological justification for a peripheral canal.

One comment on the MIT article, unusually literate and sensible for a technological journal, struck our eye, in part because it was written by a frequent contributor to Badlands Journal, Dan Essman:

More than Nature is at work.
danielessman on 09/11/2008 at 6:56 PM
Posts:
1Avg Rating:
 I trust none of it.

Dollar-value is not a reliable metric. This article asserts that the levee repair cost was 75 million dollars to protect land "worth" 22 million dollars. The methodology used for determining the "value" of land expressed in dollars is going to be flawed because the "value" of land in dollars varies. For example, when dollars are the metric, prime agricultural land is of lower "value" than land zoned for houses or Walmarts. Acreage covered with government offices is of a higher dollar value than acreage producing wheat, rice, tomatoes, celery, onions or cattle. The Delta land in this article is probably the finest farmland in California which means it equals or surpasses the finest farmland in the nation. Levees can be rebuilt, ag land cannot.

Money and politics trump science. That's the way it is in California.

Economic forces dominate Sacramento. Over-development south of the Tehachapi mountains from Los Angeles County to San Diego County is an under-reported disaster. Thus, the objectivity of the University report is shadowed by money and politics and the need in this faltering economy for large public works projects.The Governor, Westlands Water District and Metropolitan Water of Los Angeles want a peripheral canal in the Delta, they are pushing for it with an ongoing propaganda campaign which one hears every day on the major AM radio stations out of San Francisco.

The Pacific salmon runs are failing, the Delta Smelt are nearly extinct, but this is a water war. The southern half of the state wants the northern half's water and will destroy the Delta and its habitat to get it. Studies which support that destruction must be considered suspect.

Essman's comment earned a five-star rating in the MIT journal. The reply below returned to the illiteracy of most technological commentary unless it was a deliberate effort by a flak of the Hydraulic Brotherhood to disguise the origins of the expression of the sentiments the comment contains: 

Re: More than Nature is at work.
shomas on 09/12/2008 at 1:51 PM
Posts:
21Avg Rating:
 suppose you tripple the value of the land and you'll have something like 75 million spent to protect 66 million in private property payed for by people that do not own that private property. An alternative is for the localities to decide how much they tax them selfs to prepare for disasters ware a levee breaks. Each levee protects certain tracks of land and land owners pay for the maintenance of those levees. If the land  isn't of enough value then the land owners would decide that the levee isn't worth protecting.
 

This reply, not to the article but to Essman's comment, earned a 4-star rating. In fact, shornus brings up a good point about how levees are paid for and, in turn, the screwy economy of agriculture, the spoiled and abused step-child of the American economy (as opposed to Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, the proper heirs of the Republic).  But Essman makes the larger point: Delta land is so rich that they had to invent a new tractor to farm it, the track-laying Caterpillar. The question of the value of the land in Jones Tract is not what it might be sold for today but value of the crops it has produced and will continue to produce if adequately protected.

Technologists and engineers always want to build something to solve a problem -- like the Delta pumps and much of the water-delivery system of California that they created. As Dan Bacher pointed out on CounterPunch.com, the PPIC study was funded by the S.D. Bechtel Jr. and the David and Lucille Packard foundations, charitable non-profit corporations representing two California-based world leaders in technology and engineering. It's as fine an example of corporate 'green-washing" as you can find.

Once again, UC is tasked with making politicians look good on enormously expensive, tax-paid public works projects that destroy good things -- the environment and agriculture of the Delta -- to make rich corporations richer.

Repair, maintenance and the principle of Doing No Harm apply to this situation. We should not be led to abandon the Delta's natural environment -- as rich and diverse as its soils -- or its superbly productive agriculture by a potential feeding frenzy at the public trough led by politicians, engineering and technology corporations and their handmaiden, UC. 

Read more by Bacher on the indispensible FishSniffer.com, http://www.fishsniffer.com/dbachere/index.html [3]