Posted on 10/07/2014 11:24:48 AM PDT by Starman417
Liberals often live in a fantasy world that ignores the real world right in front of them. They continue to pour trillions of dollars into poverty programs despite the fact that poverty persists and grows. Their go to solution for failing and failed government schools is always spend more money rather than embrace solutions that actually work such as charter schools or voucher programs. It’s no surprise then that their tired solutions rarely ever solve the problems they are ostensibly focused on.
Strangely, that dynamic exists even when the problem itself is fiction. The perfect example of this is the state of California. In an effort to address congestion on California roads (which is a real problem) and to fight man-made global warming (which is a fiction) California is planning on spending anywhere from an estimated $68 to $98 billion taxpayer dollars to build a high speed rail link from Los Angeles and San Francisco. This, despite the fact that most traffic in California is from people traveling within metro areas, not between them. Think about it, LA’s worst traffic is usually 10-15 miles on the 405 or I-10 during rush hour, not on I-5 north of the city. A high speed rail ticket between LA and San Francisco that was originally projected to cost $50 is now expected to cost more than $81. That’s a round trip cost of either $100 or $162. Today you can get a round trip plane ticket between the same two cities for $135. What’s more, the line will likely require additional hundreds of millions of taxpayer subsidies annually just to maintain operations... and it will increase carbon emissions!
So there we have it, California plans to spend what will likely be in excess of $100 billion to build a rail system to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and another that can’t be solved by such a system. This, while the state is facing a real problem that it actually can solve: a shortage of water. The state has been gripped in a drought for years, but even in non-drought years water is a problem in California. In addition to families with no water, in the San Joaquin Valley, dubbed “America’s salad bowl” vegetable farms are left idle as there is no water for irrigation. (The drought is not the only cause there…) The $100 billion that the state is wasting building the rail boondoggle could be spent instead on desalinization plants up and down the Pacific coast. Recently the nation’s largest desalinization plant opened in San Diego… but it almost didn’t as years were wasted fighting litigation by environmental groups. That $1 billion facility will produce enough drinking water for approximately 250,000 people annually. Using that metric, for the amount of money California is wasting on the rail system it could desalinate enough water for 26 million people, more than 65% of its population.
The reality is however that the state doesn’t need to build desalinization plants to support 65% of its population. It’s likely that building the capacity necessary to provide water to 20% would be more than sufficient to address most water issues, and that could be done for approximately $30 billion. But that’s not on the books. Given that California is the epicenter of liberalism in the US, that’s not a surprise.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
BM
Commented the other day on desal plats on FR.
They have had ample time....they just want to fritter away money on useless projects instead....
Remember about 5-10 years ago when all the greenies were pushing “breaching dams” and “restoring wild rivers”? They were even pushing for breaching Hetch Hetchy Dam to create a “2nd Yosemite”, despite the fact that it supplies 100% of San Francisco’s water. I love to remind lefties of all that when they start whining about the normal cyclical drought.
It needs to be stated that taking away California farmers’ water and NY jobs were the actual intended goal,
and Global Warming was just the excuse.
Convince the pols that they can reap at least as much from graft on a DeSal project as they can from a High Speed Rail project and you may see a shift.
California is a microcosm of why policy changes based on the “climate change” hoax won’t work. Here we have in CA the purportedly greenest state in the union, but nothing changes in terms of heat and precipitation.
So.. expanding that to the expanse of the entire country, even if there were some shred of truth about “climate change” (which there isn’t), when China and Russia are putting economic expansion over “climate” concerns (not to mention picking up the industrial slack from the U.S.), how in the hell would policy changes in this country affect climate on a global scale?
Of course, we know the answer... they won’t.
But "greater good" and all that rot.
Exactly! Don't the enviro-whackos also have a concern with "rising oceans?" Well hell.. kill two birds with one stone with desalination! It also seems to me that an aggressive reengineering of rivers would serve to feed more of the ocean water into the interior, filtering itself in the process.
The only “greater good” that most sheeperals are concerned with is how they feel about themselves.
“I’m a good person” trumps “greater good”, even though they’ll use the latter to justify their belief in the former.
One might hope the Commifornia and Neu Yuk voters will suffer sufficiently to stop voting for collectivists
One might also buy pork belly futures in anticipation of flying pigs driving the price of bacon sky high.
I have said that for years! Desalination Plants! Excellent!
Now THAT is an idea!
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