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.

Cadiz now a “conservation project”

Map from the USGS Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program. Click on the image to be taken to the site.

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.