Manufacturing a mirage
Source: The Weather Doctor. Click on the image to be taken to a tutorial on, for want of a better word, "real" mirages.
No news is no news, unless you’re selling water in the desert, in which case, you’re probably pretty good at making it up. Hats off to Cadiz, Inc for today announcing the name of the drilling company that they will prefer for a groundwater mining project that hasn’t undergone environmental review yet. Making premature announcements is one way to make the project look further along than it is for shareholders, but the main intent seems to be to stoke local political support for the project by dangling the promise of jobs.
The more Cadiz changes…
… the more it remains the same. At a meeting in Ontario, CA, today of the Association of Ground Water Agencies, the speculator Cadiz, Inc will present a privately-commissioned study showing that the Mojave aquifer it proposes to pump can yield 50,000 acre feet of water a year, or enough for 400,000 people.
Business Week* and the Cadiz website have the stories, which in the case of Cadiz’s version is just that — a story.
Brackpool in the horse race
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES reports today that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed British-born water speculator Keith Brackpool to the state horse-racing board.
Brackpool, a horse-racing aficionado and country club owner, is better known for pursuit of a controversial groundwater project in the Mojave, which was rejected by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in 2002 as economically and environmentally unfeasible.
Since then, Brackpool has been pursuing other backers for his groundwater pumping operation in the Cadiz basin in San Bernardino County. On June 5th, 2009, Brackpool’s company, Cadiz Inc, released an endorsement by Governor Schwarzenegger for the project.
Months later, a spokesman for the governor confirmed that the endorsement was genuine, although its release by Brackpool’s company direct to the business wires with no trace of it from the governor’s office raised questions in this website, the Los Angeles Times and Aguanomics, the blog of UC Berkeley water economist David Zetland. Zetland estimated that soaring stock prices after the governor’s endorsement had positioned Brackpool,…
Cadiz now a “conservation project”
Cadiz marked in red
To hear Scott Slater, General Counsel of Cadiz Inc, Emily Green of Chance of Rain, Elden Hughes of the Sierra Club and Richard Sierra of the San Bernardino Union of Carriers, Building & Construction Laborers, Local 783 discuss the Cadiz groundwater project in the Mojave Desert on today’s KPCC AirTalk, click here. Slater claims that harvesting groundwater from the desert is now a “conservation” project. Green and Hughes don’t buy it. Sierra wants jobs.
Interior appropriations chair questions legality of Cadiz pipeline right-of-way
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US SENATOR Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Interior appropriations committee, has challenged Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to certify the legality of plans by Cadiz Inc to use a 42-mile-long stretch of a Mojave railway line for part of a groundwater project in San Bernardino County.
Meanwhile, lobbyists for the speculators behind the project, Cadiz Inc, have been courting Southland public utilities to sign on to the project, possibly including a lucrative groundwater contract with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.
UPDATE: 8/31/2009, 4.02pm – Cadiz reply after the jump
FURTHER UPDATE: 9/2/2009 — LADWP update after the jump
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