Last Week: February 17-23, 2013

2-19-13
Merced Sun-Star
Our View: Report eyes water jobs of the future
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2013/02/19/v-print/2827639/our-view-report-...
The eggheads at the Oakland based Pacific Institute have produced a report for the people: "Sustainable Water Jobs, A National Assessment of Water- Related Green Job Opportunities," (which) identifies 136 occupations that could emerge or
expand as the country looks to make wiser use of its water, through conservation, recycling, reuse and more.
Most of the job categories already exist -- from engineers to plumbers to landscape architects and landscapers."
Ditch tenders are to be made redundant by hordes of engineers (read UC educated engineers that cannot compete in Silicon Valley with Bombay or Buenos Aires educated engineers)  to take their jobs. Most of them will work for the government unless government loses complete control of water -- the only situation imaginable worse than the present situation. Our favorite new engineer is a type that is reportedly being produced at UC Merced, the "ecological engineer, a term as oxymoronic as UC Merced itself. To raise a little engineer and call it "ecological" without a philosopical reorientation the institution whose scientists brought us the atomic bomb and genetic engineering is incapable of making, is just to add more little monsters to a busy, busy, deteriorating world. The advances that are being made in that philosophical orientation are occurring within the field of biology -- and not the sort of biology that seeks to remake the genetic structure of economically selected organisms with funds provided by corporations that do not give a hoot about the public good, "environmentally sustainable jobs" or anything else but their own profits. Because they are just doing their job -- financial engineering.

Oy-Vey indeed!
Cal Watchdog
NEW: Most East Coast media misjudge CA bullet train…Chris Reed
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2013/02/19/wunderkind-sees-ca-bullet-train-as...
Let us begin somewhere near the beginning on this hatchet job against MSNBC's young talking head, Ezra Klein, whose opinions about the California high speed rail boondoggle differ from those of editorial writer Chris Reed. Reed writes for the U-T San Diego, a rightwing front for the San Diego hotel interests. Before that, he wrote editorials for Freedom Communication's flagship paper, the OC Register. Cal Watch is a creature of the two news organizations. Klein is a blogger columnist for the Washington Post, Bloomberg News and frequently appears on MSNBC. Yet worse than Klein's connections to the "mainstream liberal press" of the rightwing imagination, he is still in his 20's.  Some, like Stephen Colbert, think reality as a liberal bias. Others think reality's bias is totally beyond the American political spectrum.)Klein's view is that one of President Obama's accomplishments in his first term was funding some high speed rail projects.
Rightwing Republicans hate high speed rail projects. It may be the one attractive thing about them. Reed will not tolerate these sins. This whippersnapper, Klein, actually disagreed with his employer, the Washington Post, whose editorial board has panned the California project in scathing detail, even quoting from one of the state's Legislative Analyst's Office reports.
Worse according to Reed, Klein came from Irvine and attended UCLA, but succumbing to the slothful intellectual habits of the East, according to Reed, he came to "adopt the default East Coast media disdain for actually studying how the Golden State works before pretending to understand its twists and turns."
We have a message for Reed, from Hawaii. Yo, Chris, real Californians don't call the state "Cali" as in your incorrect, "But on the East Coast, the extent of Cali’s bullet train folly hasn’t really sunk in." Politicians of your political persuasion, even from California, have made the world aware that rightwing Republicans don't like high speed rail because Obama is for it.
The assumptions of another offering from Cal Watchdog, the screed of an eloquent rightwing real estate developer, are worth quoting in full. He writes as if he is Jupiter Himself hurling thunderbolts down upon something he calls "The Progressive Movement in America."
CalWatch
NEW: Will Blue-State California become Detroit on the Pacific?...Robert J. Cristiano, Ph.D. Robert J Cristiano, Ph.D, is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.; a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, Calif.; and president of the international investment firm, L88 Companies LLC in Washington, D.C., Newport Beach, Denver and Prague. He has been a successful real estate developer for more than 30 years.
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2013/02/18/will-blue-state-california-become-...

Environmentalists have used the allusion of the canary in the mineshaft when describing the importance of protecting the endangered Desert Sand Fly, Stephens Kangaroo Rat or the infamous Delta Smelt. By placing these insignificant creatures on the Endangered Species List, they were able to stop construction of hospitals, schools, roads and homes. And in the case of the Delta Smelt, they turned off water to countless farms in the fertile Central Valley of California. Long ago, the death of a canary in a mineshaft signaled the presence of poisonous gases that would imperil miners. Today, environmentalists argue that the loss of the slightest of creatures is a signal of man’s impending doom. Policies like the Endangered Species Act worked — not to save species, but to slow or stop development. Countless jobs were lost by the imposition of such noble logic. Initially created to protect the American Bald Eagle, according to the Scientific American, only 1 percent of species (20 out of 2,000) under the protection of ESA have recovered to qualify for being taken off the endangered list.
 

The "insignificant creatures" are facing extinction or "extirpation" in the obscuritanist jargon of the US Fish and Wildlife Service bureaucracy. Our response to the narrow logic of this Developer PhD is a few paragraphs from The Ecological Rift, by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. They are also PhDs.

The rate of speciation is caught in a time conflict, as the current rate of extinction is faster than the rate of evolution. The mass extinction being orchestrated today is a unique historic event, given that it is being driven by anthropogenic forces that continue to operate. Since 1600, the extinction rate has been 50 to 100 times the average estimated rate of extinction during previous epochs, but the rate "is expected to rise to between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate." Thus a radical change in the operations of human society and its interactions with nature is necessary to stop the ecological crisis that is taking place...AS Lewontin explains, there is no evidence that organisms are becoming more adapted to the environment. Evolution does not ential a drive toward perfection. All elements of life are changing. Around 99.99 percent of all species that ever existed are extinct. Likewise, there is no evidence for claims of harmony and balance with the external world. Environmental change will continue. Natural and social history are in constant motion. Chance is always present. "What we can do," Lewontin emphasies, "is to try to affect the rate of extinction and direction of environmental change in such a way as to make a decent life for human beings possible. What we cannot do is to keep things as they are." A dialectical materialst approach provides the means to grapple with an emerging world and helps to further our understanding of the human-environmental interaction, pointing the way to a more accurate measure and understaning of nature...

...than we are going to get from lordly thunderbolts of Developer and Rightwing Flak Cristiano, who is utterly committed to keeping things as they are for his personal profit. 

Merced Sun-Star
MID receives an upgrade in bond rating
Moody's cites utility's financial situation…JOSHUA EMERSON SMITH
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2013/02/19/v-print/2829713/mid-receives-an-...

Moody's Investor Services has upgraded the Merced Irrigation District's rating for several infrastructure improvement bonds, representing $13.2 million in debt.The MID's 2003 electric service bond rating has been changed to Baa2 from Baa3. The district provides electrical service to 6,000 residences and 1,500 businesses.
The upgrade, officials said, shows the district's improving financial situation.

So, MID bonds move one step higher but maintain their junk bond status.

Sierra Sun Times
California Farm Bureau Federation: Water Supplies Shrink as Officials Act to Protect Fish

Water supplies shrink as officials act to protect fish…Kate Campbell, California Farm Bureau Federation
http://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/mariposa-daily-news...
 

February 20, 2013 - Curtailed water transfers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have so far translated into an estimated loss of more than 700,000 acre-feet of water that otherwise would have been stored for future use by California farms and families. State and federal officials said last week cutting back the pumps to protect delta smelt, which in past weeks have been drawn into the water transfer equipment, underscores the need for extensive habitat improvements and a new water conveyance system around the delta...
 

The Farm Bureau is gnawing at its own vitals again in paroxyms of ressentiment against the very existence of the Delta smelt and the efforts of state and federal resource officials to avoid the "extirpation" of the species, at least on the watch of this particular crowd of state and federal resource officials. Nobody wants that on their resume, although it would play well in certain circles.
There is nothing funny about it. The dwindling population of the smelt migrated early into the vicinity of the pumps leading from the Delta to the two huge canals the take water south to 25 million citizens and much farmland, possibly triggered into the move by early storms. There is much we don't know about how to adapt to the movements of species who themselves don't sense how to adapt to strange environmental situations. But there are some anchors in an uncertain world. One is that the Farm Bureau, an insurance company pretending to represent farmers, will howl with resentment at anything and anyone between any California farmer and an unlimited amount of water. Another anchor in the California resource situation is Westlands Water District, which can be counted on to lie about how much water God, Nature and the governments of the United States and California owe the Westlands Water District.
The permanent solution that will stop all these pesky changes in environment is the proposed pipes from the Sacramento River that will pass under the Delta, bypass its length to put water directly into the huge north-south canals. The permanent solution is always proposed in these diatribes without any discussion of what will happen to the Delta when, lacking the volume and pressure of water from the Sacramento, it turns into a brackish slough. The only people who seem to consistently speak for the option of strengthening levees are the people who live in the Delta and have through time benefitted the most from farming the best soil in the state with its waters and suffered the most from its floods.
But California's approach to the collapse of its real estate based economy has been to appeal to the wizardry of its technologists: we must have conveyance pipes and channels on the Delta and we must have high speed rail, both immense aids to homeless, hungry people wandering the ditchesm railroad tracks, streets and roads so that the state's bond rating can rise above junk bond status again.    

Sacramento Bee
Flooded rice field is tested as salmon nursery in Yolo Bypass…Matt Weiser
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/20/v-print/5202224/flooded-rice-field-is-t...

Decades of experience have proved that Sacramento Valley rice farmers can use their fields to grow healthy ducks. Now, research under way in the Yolo Bypass aims to find out if they can grow salmon, too.
On Tuesday, researchers from UC Davis, the California Department of Water Resources and a nonprofit fisheries group released 50,000 juvenile salmon into a 20-acre rice field north of Woodland.

This looks somewhat hopeful for the fish and the rice farmers will make out all right, too, although the heart sinks reading the following lines:
"'This area you see here is really a lab experiment writ large,' Jacob Katz, a fishery biologist at the Cal Trout nonprofit and the project leader, said as the 2-inch salmon were removed from a trailer, weighed and sorted into tanks. 'What we're really trying to demonstrate is you can have both fishery benefits and agriculture on the same parcel. All you need to do is get out here and work out the protocols,' he said.'

The situation is likely to be too fluid to establish anything as rigid as "protocols." If the expects one answer and one set of working protocols, he may not be the kind of biologist the program needs to succeed.

CalWatch
NEW: More fracking would increase CA tax revenue…Wayne Lusvardi
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2013/02/19/more-fracking-would-increase-ca-ta...
 

Is California the only state that does not have an oil and gas tax? This is what some politicians and advocates want you to believe and the mainstream media fail to fact check. But is it true?...According to a study conducted by economists William Hamm and Jose Alberro, if California were to add a 9.5 percent tax on its existing oil and gas tax rates, this would result in California having a tax rate 40 percent higher than the state with the highest tax, Wyoming; and more than double California’s existing oil and gas tax-rate structure.
This study also found that, although California has the lowest oil severance tax collections (zero), it has the highest corporate oil tax collections of all states (about 15 percent higher than the next highest state of Louisiana). There is a
reason California has no “oil severance tax.” It is because it collects much, much more in taxes through using a mix of sales and corporate taxes. California already maxes taxes on oil and gas. Here is a chart from the study...

Oops. We forgot another fixed star in the California's economic firmament: oil companies griping about high taxes. This one is heating up because of the speculative boom building around hydraulic fracturing drilling in the Monterey Shale formation, a large, nebulously shaped region sharing only one common geological feature, the San Andreas Fault.
 
SFGate
Industry, environmentalists mull 'fracking' rules...TAMMY WEBBER, Associated Press. Associated Press Writer Regina Garcia Cano in Springfield contributed to this story.
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Industry-environmentalists-mull-fr...
 

CHICAGO (AP) — Leases have been signed on tens of thousands of acres in southern Illinois. Studies have hinted at the potential economic payoff of drilling for oil and gas deposits deep underground. But so far, oil and gas companies have held off on high-volume hydraulic fracturing in Illinois because the state lacks ground rules for the industry.
That could change under a regulatory bill being negotiated by officials from industry and agriculture, environmentalists, lawmakers and Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The bill, which would address everything from chemical disclosure to air and water pollution, could be introduced as soon as this week if the parties agree on the final language.

The question raised by this article has nothing to do with any state's ability to regulate the oil and gas industry governed primarily by the federal Energy Act of 2005. The benchmark that may be established however, is the amount of money the oil and gas industry has to pay to buy a state legislature. Other states already in the fracking business may be somewhat demure or have better laws better enforced. Illinois will give us a look -- however obscurely -- of a state in which the only issue is how big will the bribe be. This will provide California legislators with the measure they will need to regulate the flow of money under the table.

Fracking doesn't include the risks of war…BILL VAN SLYKE, Commentary
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Fracking-doesn-t-include-the-risks...
To the author who frames the issue of hydraulic fracturing of the Monterey Shale Formation in the San Francisco Chronicle as "Frack or Iraq," I have another three-word formulation: San Andreas Fault.

The Coloradoan
2,000 barrels of frack water spilled at oil well east of Fort Collins
Industry experts say the incident was 'no big deal,' but environmentalists say there's reason for worry…Bobby Magill…2-19-13
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20130220/WINDSORBEACON01/302200007/2-0...
It is for these and other reasons that the Fort Collins City Council voted recently to ban fracking in the city limits and to join the fight against the State of Colorado with another city that has banned fracking in its corporate limits. 

Modesto Bee

MID to quit N.M. coal plant; savings could yield rate relief…Garth Stapley
http://www.modbee.com/2013/02/20/v-print/2587201/mid-to-quit-coal-plant-...
 

MODESTO --  Electricity customers eventually could get some sort of rate relief when the Modesto Irrigation District sheds part ownership of a smoke-belching, coal-fired New Mexico energy plant.
The MID expects to save about $25 million a year replacing that power source with less expensive options.
Spokeswoman Melissa Williams said "cost savings will be passed on to our customers," but balked at predicting what form that might take when the change occurs in about 2017. Pressed for details, she said the move might "help keep our rates consistent."
"Other factors go into rates," Williams said Wednesday. Costs of producing power are "the biggest part of our budget, and the budget drives our rates. That's the best I can do," she said.
The MID spends $234 million each year producing electricity, including $50 million at the New Mexico plant and the rest at other facilities burning natural gas or relying on wind, hydropower and solar power.
Transmission lines from New Mexico bring power to the district's 113,000 customers in Modesto, Salida, Empire, Waterford and Mountain House and parts of Oakdale, Riverbank, Escalon and Ripon via Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co...

We learn several things in this story: first, that Modesto Irrigation District, forever proclaiming itself local, clean and somehow wholesome in an agribusiness kind of way, has owned a coal plant dirtying the skies of New Mexico and is only now
dis-investing from it because of cost considerations. We shouldn't be shocked at the narrow minded, bone headed thinking of any irrigation district on any subject regarding its relationship with the environment. It has none. It is there to take and to keep. "The price of a water right is eternal vigilance," sayeth of general managers of irrigation districts. Next, the ordinary member of the public suddenly realizes that MID does not provide all that power from its hydro-electric dam.
We wonder how many citizens of Modesto who pay for MID electricity knew that they were getting part of it from a New Mexico coal powered plant. Then, there is of course the question of how much they would care. That -- the care -- is what must change.

Fresno Bee
CEQA issues hit Fresno, Clovis and Sacramento…George Hostetter
http://news.fresnobeehive.com/archives/1500

Fresno Bee editors get a tour from developers to view projects held up by CEQA lawsuits in Fresno. The story ends with state Sen. Michael Rubio, D-Bakersfield, promising the editors and developer representatives that he would introduce legislation to weaken CEQA. Problem with story: Rubio is leaving the Legislature for a job as a lobbyist for Chevron.

Carolee Krieger: Land retirement solves selenium problem…Carolee Krieger is president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN, online at www.c-win.org). She lives and works in Santa Barbara. 
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/02/20/v-print/3182139/carolee-krieger-land...
 

While The Bee did an admirable job of reporting Feb. 12 on the essential facts of the pilot wastewater-treatment plant under construction near Firebaugh, the story didn't adequately convey the skewed reasoning and colossal waste of taxpayer money that is driving this Rube Goldberg project...

C-WIN cuts to the chase: the only effective way to solve the west side selenium problem is to quit wasting Delta water and retire the selenium laced "farm" land.

New taxes, fees urged to improve water systems…Gosia Wozniacks, Associated Press
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/02/20/v-print/3181693/new-taxes-fees-urged...
 

..,Researchers say a fertilizer tax of approximately $100 to $180 per ton of nitrogen would generate between $20 million and $36 million per year - enough to address current nitrate contamination.
A point-of-sale fee on agricultural commodities or a water-use fee from affected residents would be less desirable, the report said, as they would place an undue burden on low-income communities.

State and federal governments, faced with the reality of widespread and growing nitrate pollution throughout agricultural areas and the incredible expense of providing clean water to some of the poorest people in America who live in villages in those areas, has resulted in three policy directions: raise the money from higher fees on the poor for cleaner water, a point-of-sale fee on agricultural commodities; or a fee on fertilizers.
These choices raise questions beyond the issue of environmental justice, although it is certainly the major issue, and it is getting worse. Who are the people who live in the towns whose water is the worst? How are immigration policy and farm mechanization affecting the populations of these towns? Which of these towns are being looked at as future homes for urban commuters?
But could policy makers and legislators committed to environmental justice prevail politically against the agribusiness lobby whining about the death of agriculture as we know it and the millions of people the world over starved to death for lack of almonds, pomagranites and oranges.
However, the question least likely to be asked is what happens to soil, hopped up annually with great doses of nitrogen, when that nitrogen is curtailed. There is a phenomenon noted in the early days of organic farming when commercially fertilized land was taken off those fertilizers in which the soil fertility just sort of died for a few years.
Much better would be regular fallowing but, argues the farmer -- and his banker could prove it -- you can't afford to fallow much land these days with the price of farmland so high and carrying such a load of debt as well as nitrogen.