Babbitt aide choice for Bureau of Land Management
THE Salt Lake Tribune reports, “Bob Abbey, who helped former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt complete a Utah wilderness inventory 10 years ago, is President Barack Obama’s nominee to head up the US Bureau of Land Management. Full story here and June 10 follow up here. Background on Federal West here.
Via Great Basin Water Network.
From the Las Vegas Sun, June 10, “Abbey was the choice of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who personally recommended him to Interior Secretary Ken Salzar for the job.”
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Dry gardening column begins in LA Times
No, it wasn’t Saturday’s chorus of boos over the interview with the landscapers of the new Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters. It is the beginning of a weekly column, The Dry Garden, dedicated to ways to conserve water in the garden, whether that garden has lawn or a saintly collection of Mediterranean and native plants.…
Solar power plants may drain Western deserts
“CONGRESS’S rush to embrace solar power is having some unintended consequences. It will turn over a large chunk of federal land to private energy companies, and it may involve withdrawing billions of gallons of water from sensitive desert habitat,” writes Robert Glennon, author of “Unquenchable” and “Water Follies” in the Washington Post. Via the Great Basin Water Network
The rich are different
“HIGH net worth individuals, non-profit organizations and corporations often have different needs when it comes to their philanthropy,” begins the “What We Do” section of the Andy Spahn & Associates website.
Indeed. The rich are different. Few appreciate how different so acutely as the Universal City-based lobbyist Spahn. On Thursday June 25th, the former Dreamworks executive will be hosting a fundraiser for Darrell Steinberg, President pro Tempore of the California State Senate. It’s a bring your own wallet affair. A gift of $1,000 qualifies a guest as a “supporter,” of $3,900 a “friend,” and $7,800 a “co-chair.”
This being in California, nearly half of the “co-chairs” listed on the invitation are key figures in water.
There are Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the Beverly Hills billionaires and Central Valley land owners who the Contra Costa Times reports have gleaned approximately 20 cents of every dollar of a roughly $200m environmental water …
Cadiz, Inc boondoggle is back
CALIFORNIA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has endorsed plans by private speculator Cadiz, Inc to tap Mojave ground water, reports the Los Angeles Business Journal. The Cadiz plan, according to a statement from the governor, “will sustainably recover more than one million acre feet of water that would otherwise be lost to evaporation and make it available to help provide a reliable source of water for Southern California.”
The Cadiz project proposes storing Colorado River Water in a Mojave aquifer in wet years and pumping it to Southern Californian communities in dry ones. Among its problems are that it involves taking out far more water from the desert than naturally refills every year and that, cost-wise, experts say it’s a boondoggle.
The Cadiz self-styled “dry year supply project” is best known, however, as a synonym for croneyism. As a succession of Los Angeles Times stories during the last nine …
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