Interestingly, the “B” word — Billion — was curiously avoided even though there are surely billions on earth who would move to the prosperous first world if allowed. In fact, Seminara mentioned in his article that a 2008 Gallup poll found one in four people in 82 countries would immigrate if they had the opportunity.
Below, California’s Lake Oroville in September 2014. The state just emerged this year from a harsh several-year drought with a record-breaking rainy season. Leaders in government had no plan of what to do if millions of residents ran out of water. One strategy, trucking it in to individual users, doesn’t seem practical for large communities.
Nobody bothers with trying to fix their own country any more. That’s not a good trend when the world population is around 7 1/2 billion people. The dissatisfied billions on earth cannot all relocate to the US and Europe.
Anyway, isn’t it racist to assume the diverse people need to be rescued by admittance to the white nations? If escape were not made so easy, many more would push for political and social reform at home which would be advantageous for all concerned.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: What’s going on in Oakland right now shows the idea of opening America’s borders to anyone who wants to come here — anyone — is increasingly popular. Within a few years the concept of open borders may even become part of left-wing orthodoxy, in fact it basically already is. But what would that look like if we had open borders? Dave Seminara is a journalist and former diplomat he just wrote a piece on that exact question and he joins us tonight. Dave, thanks a lot for coming on the show.
DAVE SEMINARA: Thanks for having me on the show, Tucker.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you say in this piece that you’re not anti-immigrant, like almost every other American. You like immigrants; I think we all do.
SEMINARA: Of course not. I have immigrants in my own family
CARLSON: You raised the question of what would happen if we actually did what many on the left are calling for, and I pose that question to you — what would happen?
SEMINARA: Well it’d be a really unfortunate situation, especially for working-class America, Tucker, I mean I think as Americans we forget how lucky we are to be born in a country like this and unfortunately you know for every one United States or UK or Germany there are ten Uzbekistans, Venezuelas and Somalias. Unfortunately there’s just very very many countries in the world that are absolutely dysfunctional and poor and corrupt that people are looking to get out of and there’s really only 20 or 30 countries, rich countries like ours, that people want to go to, so it’s a problem of supply and demand.
CARLSON: Right that’s exactly right. That’s an interesting conversation but it’s been stopped in its tracks intentionally by the left throwing around stuff about white supremacy and racism. Is it inherently racist to say I control who comes into my country?
SEMINARA Of course not, but it’s been a very effective tool actually to basically silence dissent, and anyone who says that we need to limit immigration — and no matter the fact that we’re talking about limiting it from white countries, black countries, brown countries, yellow countries — is labeled a xenophobe and a racist, and it’s a very effective way to silence dissent. Unfortunately our president has said some incendiary things about immigrants, and that’s really played right into the left hands in this matter that he’s allowed, I think, the left to sort of equate limiting immigration — which is a very reasonable topic as what we need to do — with racism and xenophobia. It’s it’s been very effective for them, but it’s very unfortunate because it’s not an honest debate, and American people aren’t informed based upon it.
CARLSON: What I find so confusing is that the left traditionally has stood for a pristine environment, conservation, keeping the outdoors beautiful, and I’m for those things by the way. What would happen to the environment if you would open borders?
SEMINARA That’s right, I mean I hate to even think about it, but imagine the air quality in a city like Los Angeles — you’re from California I believe — imagine what the traffic and the air quality — and you know the water shortage situation — would be in a chronic drought area like Southern California if we completely opened the borders. I mean, look, environmental groups 10, 20 years ago used to be willing to admit that we needed to limit immigration, but no longer. And now the left is essentially on message, and anyone who wants to limit immigration is essentially a xenophobe.
We don’t want to talk about what would this country look like with 500 million people, what would it look like with 700 million people. I mean look, there’s hundreds of millions of people around the world who would like to move to a country like the United States, and as much as we might even like to let them in — look most immigrants I think are good people — and I don’t blame them for wanting to come. Look, who wouldn’t want to come to the United States? If I was born in Somalia or Venezuela or Syria would I want to come here? Of course I would. You can’t blame them for wanting to come, but look we need to look out for our own interests and our our interests aren’t in being a country of 500, 700, 900 million people, they just aren’t.
CARLSON: So the left is pushing policies that will wreck the environment and shaft the working class. This is not the liberal group I grew up with at all. Dave, thanks for pointing it out.
Someday [...]]]>
Someday Californians will wish we had that water.
Governor Jerry Brown — a self-proclaimed environmentalist — has nevertheless encouraged diverse immigration and unlimited population growth, despite the state’s history of periodic and severe drought. In 2014, he declared to Mexico (population 125 million) “You’re all welcome in California.”
And the numbers make California priorities clear: state taxpayers are forced to pay over $25 billion annually for services going to illegal aliens and their dependents, according to a 2014 study from FAIR.
Meanwhile, vital infrastructure has been left to rot. Officials were warned a dozen years ago that the Oroville dam could fail because of its weak spillway design, but nothing was done.
Below, the Oroville Dam, under pressure from a full reservoir, released vast amounts of water over days in mid-February to prevent a catastrophic collapse.
Tuesday’s Sacramento Bee gave front-page coverage to the damage to the spillway structure.
Jerry Brown is nearing the end of his governorship, and his legacy is reflected in the Oroville near-disaster. Los Angeles radio guys John and Ken read parts of Joel Kotkin’s critical article on Monday (LISTEN: The True Legacy of Jerry Brown). The governor is very lucky that there wasn’t a massive loss of life caused by his inattention to California infrastructure.
]]>The true legacy of Gov. Jerry Brown: Joel Kotkin, Daily News, February 27, 2017
The cracks in the 50-year-old Oroville Dam, and the massive spillage and massive evacuations that followed, shed light on the true legacy of Jerry Brown. The governor, most recently in Newsweek, has cast himself as both the Subcomandante Zero of the anti-Trump resistance and savior of the planet. But when Brown finally departs Sacramento next year, he will be leaving behind a state that is in danger of falling apart both physically and socially.
Jerry Brown’s California suffers the nation’s highest housing prices, largest percentage of people in or near poverty of any state and an exodus of middle-income, middle-aged people. Job growth is increasingly concentrated in low-wage sectors. By contrast, Brown’s father, Pat, notes his biographer, Ethan Rarick, helped make the 20th century “The California Century,” with our state providing “the template of American life.” There was then an “American Dream” across the nation, but here we called it the “California Dream.” His son is driving a stake through the heart of that very California Dream.
CALIFORNIA CRUMBLING
Nothing so illustrates the gap between the two Browns than infrastructure spending. Oroville Dam’s delayed maintenance, coupled with a lack of major new water storage facilities to serve a growing population, reflects a pattern of neglect. Just this year alone, the massive water losses at Oroville Dam and other storage overflows have almost certainly offset a significant portion of the hard-won drought water savings achieved by our state’s cities. A sensible state policy would have stored more water from before the drought, and would now be maximizing the current bounty.Once a national and global leader in infrastructure, according to a report last year by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, California now spends the least percentage of its state budget on infrastructure of any state. In the critical Sacramento-San Francisco Delta, an ancient levee and dike system is decaying, and ever more stringent environmental regulations limit key state and federal water facility operations. To be sure, Brown has supported a “water fix” — a dual tunnel through the Delta — to address some of these problems, but his efforts have only produced a mountain of paper, rather than real-world improvements. In terms of preparing for the future, California’s current penchant for endless studies and environmental hand-wringing is fostering pre-Katrina Louisiana conditions, rather than the forward-looking capital investments previously the state’s hallmark.
Remarkably, this year’s water system fiasco could have been prevented if Brown had actually heeded his own climate change rhetoric, which anticipates that more rain and less snow will fall in the state. But his climate change obsession failed to spark any rush to modernize or expand water storage to capture the potentially increased rainfall. There has not been a major new dam or reservoir constructed since the first “Moonbeam” era — in large part, due to environmental opposition and Sacramento’s disinterest in basic state services.
You don’t have to be a hard-core climate activist to see the need to expand our storage capacity. Contrary to the prevailing media narrative, droughts and floods have been repeated throughout our history. Back in 1861, it rained for 54 days, flooding much of state and creating lakes in the Central Valley. Yet, Brown, and his immediate predecessors, have not chosen not to invest in this critical infrastructure, leaving us with an aging set of water resources that date, like the Oroville Dam, from the 1960s or earlier.
Nor is the water infrastructure alone in terms of neglect. California’s roads are among the worst maintained in the country. The Los Angeles area has the worst road conditions of all major metropolitan areas, followed closely by the Bay Area. But fixing roads is hardly a Brown priority, given that the state wants to put us all on a “road diet.” Instead, we are faced with the mounting costs for a high-speed choo choo that Brown wants to leave us as his legacy, but solves none of California’s basic transportation problems. Despite paying billions in gas taxes and other levies that are supposed to maintain roads, Californians, as the San Francisco Chronicle recently suggested, will be required to pay new, more regressive taxes if they want fewer potholes and sound bridges.
THE WAGES OF NARCISSISM — AND OPPORTUNISM
Brown’s recent pronunciamentos suggest we will have ever more extreme climate policies, including virtual bans on all greenfield housing, and regulations covering everything from how houses are built to cow farts. Sadly, all this will have no real effect on the global climate, given California’s relatively small footprint; the shift of people, jobs and productive industries to other, less temperate states like Texas all but wipes out whatever might be gained from the state’s increasingly extreme greenhouse gas limitations.Brown’s actions seem rooted in a desire to present himself as the savior of the planet. Yet, while he postures, Brown is leaving a legacy not of salvation, but rather of devastation — at least for everyone but a handful of tech oligarchs and the state’s pensioners. His successors must cope with voter ire over such mundane things as ever more crowded roads, a perennial shortage of secure water supplies and cascading prices for everything from electricity to housing. These realities, not the praise heaped on Brown from the media, will constitute the essence of his legacy.
Below left, Frank Gehrke, [...]]]>
Below left, Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the Department of Water Resource, measured snow depth and moisture content on March 30, 2016. The photo on the right shows the dismal sight of no snow to be measured during last year’s evaluation, reflective of the snowpack’s 500-year low in water content in 2015.
Last fall, the experts forecast the monster El Nino in the Pacific would bring California a huge rainy season over the winter. It did rain nicely for a few months, but turned off in February and never came back. This week’s conclusion: the “nearly average” snowpack won’t end the drought.
Around 80 percent of state water use goes for agriculture. But when drought comes, the government leans on citizen users to cut back severely. The state is partially arid and has way too many people for a region historically afflicted by drought — including mega-droughts occurring only a thousand years ago.
California is environmentally overpopulated with a population of more than 39 million, a sustainability problem exacerbated by continued growth fueled by unrestricted immigration of various legality. California should be the golden brown example that unlimited population growth as a strategy for easy economic expansion has serious underlying flaws
So Californians are still on water conservation — we have to save so Pedro in Los Angeles can wash his lowrider.
]]>Critical Sierra survey finds healthy snowpack – but no ‘drought buster’, Sacramento Bee, March 30, 2016
After years of drought and months of speculation about how much precipitation a strong El Niño weather pattern would bring, the results are in:
We’ve had a roughly average year.
On about this date last year, Gov. Jerry Brown stood in a dry field near Lake Tahoe and announced that he would require California’s urban water districts to cut use by 25 percent. Snowpack on that day was roughly 5 percent of normal.
On Wednesday, standing atop several feet of snow in the same spot, state officials announced that snow water content at the site is 97 percent of average. Sensors across the Sierra show statewide snow water content at 87 percent of average. Snowpack historically reaches its peak around April 1; the date serves as a benchmark when comparing one year’s snowfall to another.
Three of Northern California’s largest reservoirs – Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville and Folsom Lake – have reached flood control stage, triggering water releases. Statewide, reservoir storage is at 85 percent of the historical average.
State officials previously have cited critical benchmarks, in terms of water storage, that could indicate the state’s five-year drought had finally broken. Among them: The major reservoirs in the Sacramento River Basin hit flood control stage; or statewide reservoir storage is at 90 percent of normal.
But no such official proclamation came Wednesday. Instead, Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, downplayed the “March miracle” that has bolstered Northern California water supplies but not substantially changed conditions in the south state.
The snowpack, Gerke said, was “not what we had hoped for. Not enough really.”
The catch centers on California’s complex plumbing network. Southern California, even in average precipitation years, is heavily reliant on water shipped from Northern California for irrigation and drinking water needs. So, one year of average precipitation in the north state is not enough to undo the impacts of five dry years statewide.
Historically, California’s significant multi-year droughts have ended when statewide precipitation totaled about 150 percent of average, according to the Department of Water Resources. So far this year, statewide precipitation is close to average.
Several water experts noted that El Niño has not delivered as much precipitation in Southern California as in the north; that most reservoirs in Southern California remain well below historical averages; and that groundwater aquifers in parts of the south remain depleted.
“We’re still going to be having a drought south of the Delta in the San Joaquin Valley,” said Jeffrey Mount, UC Davis professor emeritus and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center. “An average year, in a portion of the state, is not a drought buster.”
Still, Mount stressed, “there is no doubt that we’re in much better shape than last year … Folsom will fill, Oroville is likely to fill or come close to it. So is Shasta.”
Thanks to the improved snowpack and reservoir conditions, farmers will receive far more surface water this year than in the recent past. The State Water Project, which pumps billions of gallons of water to farms and cities throughout California, estimated this month it would provide customers with 45 percent of their requested allocations this year. That would be the highest since 2012, and the figure could yet be revised upward.
Even with the higher allocation, many farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere in Southern California will need to pump substantial amounts of groundwater to sustain their crops, several experts said.
The disconnect between conditions in the northern and southern parts of California will be a key issue facing state leaders this year. Cracks in a unified approach to the drought are already apparent.
Earlier this month, the San Juan Water District near Folsom Lake declared its local water supply healthy and said there is no longer a need for its customers to drastically curb water use. Board officials said they no longer would adhere to a mandate from the State Water Resources Control board ordering the district to cut use by 33 percent.
Amy Talbot, water efficiency program manager for the Regional Water Authority, said in a statement Wednesday that current conditions merit relaxing or rescinding emergency conservation mandates in parts of the state with healthy water supplies.
“The reliability of a water provider’s portfolio should be the fundamental element in considering mandatory water conservation during drought,” she said.
Meanwhile, Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said that the “big wish and hope” of a wet winter hadn’t materialized. “We’ve had another drought year in Southern California, even with El Niño,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., speaking to The Sacramento Bee editorial board Wednesday, warned against quickly loosening the mandatory restrictions imposed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year.
“I think it’s premature right now,” she said. “I think we need to see what happens in April … an important month for water.”
The State Water Resources Control Board will revisit its conservation mandates in May. Max Gomberg, climate and conservation manager, said the board likely will move to “a more regional framework” in which different areas face different targets, depending in part on the health of their water supply.
“We’re sensitive to what local water agencies are going through, trying to keep customers conserving when the customers can see how much rain there’s been,” Gomberg said.
But the board is not going to abandon conservation mandates, he said. He noted that when Brown called for voluntary conservation in 2014, “It wasn’t sufficient.”
“We don’t want to tell people to ‘go back to your profligate water use and don’t worry,’” he said. “Part of why we’re being so painstaking about this next set of rules is we do want to acknowledge that the drought has been eased in some places more than others.”
The disparate conditions at state reservoirs underscore the need for improvements in California’s water delivery system, said Maury Roos, chief hydrologist at the Department of Water Resources. He pointed to the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County, the fifth-largest reservoir in the state, which stood at 57 percent of its historical depth Wednesday. If California had better ways of moving water, San Luis would, like the northern reservoirs, be nearly full, he said.
“The state has, generally speaking, an abundance of water in the north, and the large demands are in the southern part of the state,” Roos said. “There is a natural imbalance. You have to find a way to transfer and store it.”
The good news is [...]]]>
The good news is the rains came in the fall and early winter, but the faucet went dry in February. The rainfall was decent, but nothing like the biblical stuff forecast that prompted many homeowners to schedule roof repairs in preparation.
Still, there is snow in the Sierras where a lot of water supply is naturally stored. Last year’s snowpack amounted to just 5 percent of its normal water content, the lowest in 500 years according to tree ring data. The situation was dire, with no Plan B forthcoming from Sacramento. But Nature was semi-kind this year, which is good because prolonged drought can be a civilization killer.
Below, a water survey is performed at Echo Summit in the Sierras in February 2016.
Meanwhile, California continues to be a magnet for immigrants, and the foreign-born are the major source of the state’s population growth. Unfortunately, too many people residing in a largely low-rainfall state is a drought disaster waiting to happen. Granted, the majority of water use is for agriculture, but when drought hits, the government hectors average city dwellers to cut their usage.
The Sacramento Bee had a front-page feature article on Friday bemoaning the general disappointment in the highly touted El Nino.
]]>Is this El Niño a dud?, Sacramento Bee, February 25, 2016
Sacramento is in the peak of its rainy season, but there is no substantial rain in the forecast for the next two weeks. The Sierra snowpack has fallen below normal levels for this time of year. The state’s three largest reservoirs remain far below capacity.
Whither El Niño?
Throughout the summer and fall of 2015, California residents waited in anticipation as they heard about the strong El Niño weather pattern brewing in the Pacific Ocean. We remembered the winters of 1997-98 and 1982-83, when such strong El Niños corresponded with deluges. And we hoped for relief from our long, brutal drought.
But through Feb. 20, Sacramento has seen half the precipitation that occurred by this point in 1997-98 and 1982-83.
Bill Patzert, climate expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said a dry February doesn’t mean El Niño has run its course, however. In the 1983 El Niño winter, “the big show really didn’t happen until March and April. I’m still holding out hope.”
Patzert said the timing of the precipitation varies with the intensity of the El Niño pattern, which is a function of warmer-than-usual water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. In 1998, the water temperatures peaked in November and much of the rain fell in February. In 1983, it peaked in January – as it did this year – and the bulk of the rain came in March and April.
Jan Null, former National Weather Service forecaster, now a private consultant with Golden Gate Weather Services in Saratoga, also isn’t quite ready to label this El Niño a dud.
“It’s possible there’s another shoe to drop. There is still a lot of warm water out in the Pacific,” Null said. Water temperatures are still considerably warmer than normal.
But during the next seven days, the only rain in the forecast is a mild system arriving Friday night that likely will bring less than one-tenth of an inch of precipitation to Sacramento.
The 8-14 day outlook from the federal Climate Prediction Center also is discouraging. It predicts a strong chance of below-average precipitation throughout California for March 3-8.
Null said this year’s winter is yet another example that El Niños are unpredictable and any long-range weather forecast is suspect. The nexus of warm water in the Pacific is further west than usual this year. That is a big factor in determining where the rain will fall. Often El Niño brings heavy rain to Southern California; this year it’s been rainier in Northern California, and portions of the Pacific Northwest have gotten record precipitation.
It’s not clear why the warm water is so far west this year, and it’s not clear why that’s creating such unusual weather patterns.
“We don’t know all the answers,” Null said. “This has sort of become the poster child that all El Niños are different.”
Even if the rains return with a vengeance, Patzert doesn’t expect El Niño to end the drought.
“Everybody expected this El Niño to be the great…drought-buster, but that was never going to happen. It took us 15 years to get into this drought. No matter how successful the rainfall might (be) in February and March, we were still going to be in a drought when it was all over…Lake Mead has never been this low before. Lake Oroville and Lake Shasta are not going to fill up no matter what.”
Governor Jerry Brown has dawdled, hoping to get lucky with rain, while the drought has reached a crisis point where last month a NASA water scientist warned there was only a year of water left. While Brown now bemoans climate change as “not a hoax” and is the cause of the drought, just last August he told all of Mexico (population nearly 125 million) that they were all welcome to come live in sanctuary state California.
Below, the vital snowpack is practically non-existent while reservoirs are low, particularly in the south.
A San Francisco TV station reported on the situation of Porterville in the central valley, where wells have been dry for two years and water is trucked in weekly. At the end, it remarks, “this could be the stark future for California’s 38 million residents.” But how will that work if water has to come by truck for hundreds of miles for millions of residents? Is that Plan B if the drought continues for years or decades?
Brown still isn’t serious. Eighty percent of state water goes to agriculture but farmers aren’t required to cut back, even though agriculture is only two percent of the state’s economy.
History tells us that drought is a civilization killer, while California’s governor is dinking around with half-hearted conservation measures.
]]>Gov. Brown Defends Drought Restrictions That Spare Farmers, Associated Press, April 5, 2015
SACRAMENTO (CBS/AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday defended his order requiring Californians statewide to cut back on their water use in a historic mandate that spares those who consume the most — farmers.
As California endures a fourth year of drought, Brown’s order this week requires towns and cities statewide to draw down water use by 25 percent compared with 2013 levels. While past reductions were voluntary, Brown said he is using his emergency powers to make the cuts mandatory.
Martha Raddatz, host of ABC’s “This Week” public affairs program, asked Brown why the order doesn’t extend to California farmers, who consume 80 percent of the state’s water supply but make up less than 2 percent of the state’s economy. Brown said farmers aren’t using water frivolously on their lawns or taking long showers.
“They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world,” he said.
Brown said that before the cutbacks, some California farmers had already been denied irrigation water from federal surface supplies, forcing them to leave hundreds of thousands of acres unplanted. Many vulnerable farm laborers are without work, he said. Farmers who don’t have access to surface water have increased the amount of water pumped from limited groundwater supplies.
Brown announced the mandate on April 1 standing in the Sierra Nevada, where the snowpack measures at 5 percent of historical average, the lowest in 65 years of record-keeping.
Addressing agriculture, Brown said on the broadcast that farmers asserting century-old water rights deeply rooted in state law that allows them access to more water than others “are probably going to be examined.”
After declaring a drought emergency in January 2014, Brown urged Californians to voluntarily cut their water use by 20 percent from the previous year. That resulted in great variations among communities and an overall reduction of about 10 percent statewide. Brown did the same as governor in 1977, during another severe drought, asking for a voluntary reduction of 25 percent.
The mandatory order will also require campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to curb their water use.
“It is a wakeup call,” Brown said. “It’s requiring action and changes in behavior from the Oregon border all the way to the Mexican border. It affects lawns. It affects people’s — how long they stay in the shower, how businesses use water.”