There’s help for the Bloomingcamp Ranch right here in Merced City, where Safeway has been tapping into our tap water for years and bottling it for sale. We also have a local developer down here who is expert is constructing pipelines apparently to nowhere. So he can certainly build one from Merced City to the outskirts of Oakdale, so customers of Bloomingcamp can have confidence in the ranches water source. From Ranchwood to Bloomingcamp, ranch-to-camp, so to speak.

My melancholic contemplation of the Sixth Extinction (got as far as the White Nose Syndrome wiping out bats) has been rudely interrupted this week by the saber rattling flatulence emanating from the White House. I turned as this site has often turned in the past to Pepe Escobar, the former Roving Eye of Asia Times and the best correspondent in English on subjects like the New Silk Road and a region he calls “Pipelinestan.”

Oil prices are rising again and they’ve passed the $50 break even price for fracked oil. This has given the Monterey Shale play new life. Couple that with the Trump administration’s hatred of any environmental regulation and, Behold, 1.6 million acres of public lands along the San Andreas Fault are opened for oil fracking. The potential for catastrophe is immeasurable.

--blj

5-9-19

Sacramento Bee

Trump plan to allow new fracking on California coast, Central Valley moves forward

This news certainly deserved more than it received in this rewrite of a Bureau of Reclamation press release.  But, the event to which it negligently refers was tremendous and unique, an event which took 18 years in federal court, a fight for funding in Congress that cost one congressman his seat, and may be responsible for the insanity of another still sitting congressman, whose district straddles the Friant-Kern Canal as well as making the San Joaquin River habitable for salmon again.