Thanks to Gretchen Pfaff of CAPS for this editorial.

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OP-ED FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contact:

Rick Oltman

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)

415- 215-9550, 805-564-6626

www.CAPSweb.org

Crazy From The Heat

An overcrowded California is running out of water and leadership

By Mark Cromer

As California heads into high summer, those sweltering weeks that burn like a fever from mid-July well into September, there is no indication that our state or federal leadership has yet to truly grasp the environmental catastrophe the Golden State now faces.

Perhaps, as the saying goes, they are “crazy from the heat.”

Consider that less than two months ago, Sen. Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor and introduced a so-called farm bill—known as AgJOBS—that would legalize millions of illegal immigrant field workers and their families and, even more amazingly, set the stage to import millions more exploitable laborers to work in grueling conditions.



“There is a farm emergency in this country,” Feinstein said in May. “Some of it is caused by drought, including out West where California has had, for three years, a very serious drought. But most of it is caused by an absence of farm labor.”

Yet just six weeks later, detailed news reports from California’s fertile Central Valley have confirmed that thousands of farm workers are now unemployed and driving hundreds of miles each day as they crisscross the state desperately looking for jobs in fields that are simply drying up.

A shortage of water has led to an abundance—not an absence— of cheap labor.

California’s severe drought—a water shortage that has loomed large across the American Southwest for far more than three years—has turned farmers’ fields into a dusty tundra that may foreshadow a West Coast dustbowl.

Ominously, hydrologists reported that this spring layers of dust coated the upper reaches of the Sierra snowpack which accelerated its rate of melt and increased the pace of runoff—leading water managers to either release water early or risk flooding.

That’s hardly a problem based on an abundance of water arriving in our reservoirs too early, but rather the prospect of losing precious little runoff too soon.

“It creates a high-pressured game of Twister for water managers,” Thomas Painter, director of the Snow Optics Lab at the University of Utah, told the Los Angeles Times just two weeks after Feinstein introduced her bill. “They’re having to make decisions quickly to hold on to water [and risk flooding] or release water.”

Either way it is a loss—and one we cannot afford.

California’s water supplies continue to dwindle even as its population grows, with only half of the expected runoff from the Sierra snowpack materializing in 2007. By last year, just as Los Angeles County closed in on 10 million people, the Sierra runoff was only 40% of normal.

Yet as our critical water supplies in California literally evaporate before our eyes, our elected officials tout more growth, increased immigration and an expanded consumer-driven economy with all the zeal of men and women cocktailing at a Prozac party.

It is so politically incorrect to candidly assess the link between population growth (and the runaway development it fuels) and our water crisis that even much of academia has not only joined the party, but has actually cried for the band to play on.

Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser unleashed his figurative pen to declare the solution to America’s environmental problems was not less people, but more—moving to California. Glaeser tore into the few Californian environmentalists that have dared to speak against further population growth in the face of a shrinking water supply.

“They…emphasize that California’s water crisis makes further expansion impossible,” Glaeser wrote. “But today, the overwhelming majority of water in California is directed to farms, not people. Using 10% of the state’s agricultural water for new households could address the water needs of a massive increase in state population.”

Written like a true Harvard wonk ensconced in an ivy-covered tower that’s safely removed from the hard realities of an overcrowded California; its crumbling infrastructure, gridlocked traffic and bankrupt treasury.

This summer California stands at 40 million people and is on track to hit 60 million water-drinking bodies by mid-century, possibly sooner. We have progressively less water, but we’re growing people like there’s no tomorrow.

There will indeed be a tomorrow. But thanks to Sen. Feinstein, Professor Glaeser and every other bon vivant whistling Dixie past our dry well, we may not wish it so.

Mark Cromer is a senior writing fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization.

Gretchen Pfaff

Director of Communications and Legislation

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)

1129 State Street, Suite 3D

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

(805) 564-6626

www.CAPSweb.org