Governor declares statewide drought

Comment 1 by Anneliese Agren  on  Jun 04  at  6:47pm  •  All my comments • 

Good! I’ve been waiting for something to be “official.”

Lawns should be banned for starters. Office park landscaping must rip out lawns, residences too.

I’ll make a bumper sticker: “I’m for a Lawn-Free California.”

Choose California Native Plants - many amazing landscaping options.

Try any of our local nurseries, or make it a day-trip to: http://www.yerbabuenanursery.com/.

Dams don’t make water. Droughts are caused by less than “normal” precipitation, not by a lack of storage infrastructure. One way to deal with drought is to plan for water usage no greater than what was available in the driest historic (drought) years.

The easiest “found” water is to be had from conservation. Beyond that, you simply have to limit human population, agriculture, industry, and other big factors in water usage to what the water supply can cover without killing off more of our natural life support systems. In California, for more than a hundred years, them’s fighting words.

Comment 3 by Kevin Barron  on  Jun 05  at  9:09am  •  All my comments • 

Right Carl… and lack of energy isn’t caused from voting against every/any piece of legislature to create power, it’s from overuse and overpopulation.

This is lame, as there was so much resource that could of been tapped, but decades of (lack of) legislation leads us to situations such as this.

Last I checked, we did NOT have a dry winter… what we’ve had (ongoing) is dry action. Curious how many reservoirs have been created in the last 2 decades, vs the 2 decades prior.

I think we should mandate the cactus as the state plant/flower, next.

Comment 4 by Kevin Barron  on  Jun 05  at  9:12am  •  All my comments • 

Annelise… you think we should outlaw golf courses, country clubs, football fields, baseball diamonds… while we’re at it, return Golden Gate Park back to it’s natural state… sand dunes, right on. Minature golf courses too, yes they are fake, but they espose the ideals of lawn’age. (rollseyes)

Comment 5 by Anneliese Agren  on  Jun 05  at  9:14am  •  All my comments • 

Kevin:
Yes.

Why not?

*Anneliese.

It’s been the worst possible year in California for earth science deniers. A couple of big winter storms to bolster their happy illusion rainfall concerns are just a fabrication of worry warts, then virtually nothing. Nature pulled a misdirection move on them, and they fell for it.

It has been a high precipitation year for the central Rockies and parts of the Northwest. Quite a bit of stormy weather from the south-central Oregon coast on north, to the point that people were complaining when we were up there a month ago. This just a skip north from a relatively mild spring on the northern California coast, where places are drying out weeks ahead of average. Being one year’s weather, none of it can be used to draw conclusions altering the dominant patterns and direction of climate change that are emerging in the American West. People can do their own investigation of weather phenomena in the West over the past year by exploring the extensive data on the NOAA website.

When one discusses energy sources and uses, one needs to have an overall picture of existing and alternative resources and the economics applied to them. For starters, if one cannot see the evidence for and implications of peak oil, then you are (probably without recognizing it) whistling past the graveyard or advocating a quick orgasmic burnout before everyone goes down together.

The time it took to get to peak oil in the mindless cornucopian binge led by the U.S. in the last century was, by all petroleum usage trends, probably much longer than the time it will take to come down, now that China and India are rushing to follow the U.S. example. Desperately building more refineries and power plants won’t create a single extra drop of oil for the world market. Some not-so-crazy petroleum geologists are already suggesting the future of critical, irreplaceable petroleum chemical feedstocks is a significantly more important consideration than where fuel for vehicles will come from.

Peak exploration for oil occurred many decades ago, meaning fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller petroleum finds are being made worldwide. (And the technology for finding petroleum has become astoundingly sophisticated.) The U.S. has gone from the dominant producer of petroleum in the world to one that now supplies only a fraction of what its misdirected vehicle-oriented society requires. We have only a couple of percent of the world’s diminishing oil reserves, piddle for trying to continue our way of life into the future. No amount of legislation or abandonment of attempts to restore a healthy environment can change our internal resource status. Anyone who thinks shale or Canada’s tar sands will be the bail-out doesn’t understand the concept of net energy, in which energy going in must be subtracted from energy produced to calculate how much energy is actually obtained from a resource. Multiple alternative energy sources and more efficient use of energy are the future. The more people there are drawing the energy, the quicker, more clever, and more lavish with expenditures we will have to be with alternatives (each with its own challenges and peaks).

Hubbert, the Shell Oil employee who came up with the peak concept that has been playing out very close to his projections is looking more and more like Wegener, the geologist who was ridiculed for decades for his plate tectonics theories. Shell even tried to stifle presentation of Hubbert’s work at academic meetings. And so it goes for any scientific information “inconvenient” to our hedonistic sense of entitlement.