Proposition 1 analyzed for voters
A Pacific Institute report shows Proposition 1, California's 2014 water bond, weak on conservationCadiz: Wrong in any Wordle
Faced with a crowd of 500 people* last week, many protestors, the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District postponed certifying the final environmental impact report for its groundwater-mining bid in the Mojave Desert. Rather, the final vote for what is styled as the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery, and Storage Project is scheduled for tomorrow night, July 31st, 2012 at 6pm in Mission Viejo (click here for details), with a video hook up for Joshua Tree protestors who organizers clearly hope won’t have the steam to make another 300-mile return trip. For those of you who missed last week’s meeting, this YouTube video of what appears to be Cadiz lawyers feeding scripts to “public” commenters planted in the audience is a priceless piece of citizen journalism. For more on the project, click here for a Pacific Institute analysis of its shortcomings. The text is even more withering when it hasn’t been …
A genius caught between theft and heroism
Pacific Institute president and MacArthur Foundation fellow Peter Gleick impersonated a board member of an organization dedicated to denying climate change for all the right reasons but it now threatens his distinguished career. Is he a hero or a criminal -- or both?Big water
A report released Wednesday by the Pacific Institute shows how in a relatively modest pass at obvious waste, California could conserve more than one and a half times the amount of water used every year in Los Angeles through improvements in farm irrigation, city landscaping, more efficient appliances and plumbing upgrades. Thirty per cent of the opportunities were found in cities and the remaining seventy per cent in agriculture. The most intriguing part? The cost is a fraction of the allowance for new dams called for in the bills behind the now postponed state water bond. Click here to read the synopsis, and here for the report. Or to read why conservation is the first most universally logical step for Californians to take to insure their water supply in the future, click here to read one of the report’s co-authors, Peter …
Prop 18 analyzed by The Pacific Institute
At the end of 2009, the California Legislature passed a series of water-related bills and at the same time approved a massive $11.14 billion bond [the “Safe, Clean, and Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010”] to fund a wide range of water projects and efforts. This is the largest water bond in 50 years, yet the costs and benefits of the bond have not been fully assessed by an independent organization. Until now, writes Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick in the San Francisco Chronicle.
This bond is to be voted on by California voters in November, as Proposition 18. The Governor recently proposed postponing the bond, but the Legislature has not yet taken the action required to have it pulled off of the November ballot.
Click here to keep …
keep looking »