I’ve been reading about the California drought and getting disgusted at the hand wringing and lack of decisive leadership. Instead of attacking the problem they’re talking about rationing. The state’s vital farming business are the current whipping boys for using too much water. No one bothers to mention how many billions of dollars in revenue they generate. How many people they employ. How many secondary businesses all over this country rely on California’s crops for their livelihood. The taxes they pay. It’s easier to just attack them for using water. Destroy California agriculture and the ripples in the economy will be felt in all 50 states. Rationing is a stop gap and futile solution at best. If the drought doesn’t end new water sources have to be explored. Either that or there will have to be a significant population migration like we saw in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years.
Oddly enough the one guy who is talking about a real solution is in his eighties. Bill Shatner. He makes a valid point. California already has pipelines for delivering out of state water. The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct. Why not build another one? Better yet, why not use that ocean along the California coastline? Israel transformed a desert using desalination plants.
I don’t claim to know the solution. But I guarantee you there are people smarter than me that do. Todays defeatist attitude pisses me off . Instead of seeing Shatner’s proposal as a way of opening up a dialog it’s just dismissed out of hand. * It won’t work.* Ok, fine the first idea from one eighty year old actor won’t work. That’s a big surprise. :rolleyes: Why not figure out something that will work? Get the experts together. Engineers, Scientists, and whoever else can help. Figure something out! Can’t do it isn’t an acceptable answer. Find the fucking answer and find it now! We need that kind of take no excuses leadership.
The US has been coasting along for too damn long. Nearly all our infrastructure was built by the sweat and blood of our great-great-grandfathers and great grandfathers. Giants of industry built the railroads. Refined oil, built the dams, the bridges and the roads. Men of vision designed and built the TVA and all the nation’s power plants. That infrastructure is crumbling and our country is too impotent and lazy to do anything about it.
What has happened to this country? Where are todays equivalents of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Rockefellers? These are the determined men that built this country. They let nothing stand in their way. Imagine the task of building the Transcontinental Railroad. Do you think there’s a chance in hell that the TVA could be implemented today? The red tape alone would be insurmountable. I guess the closest equivalents today are Bill Gates and the recently departed,Steve Jobs. They had that same ruthless vision and drive the capitalists and industrialists of yesterday all shared.
The best example I know of problem solving is the Liberty ships. America desperately needed cargo ships to supply the WWII war effort. The traditional shipyards took months to build just one cargo ship. Henry J. Kaiserknew we could do better. He’d never worked in the ship building industry. But he knew how to lead and how to get complicated construction jobs done. One of our country’s best Industrialists. This was a guy that didn’t accept, can’t do it as an answer. Kaiser Shipyards were soon building ships in just a couple weeks. They built one in just 4 days to drive home the point.
We can solve our country’s problems. Or just sit on our complacent asses and say,* it can’t be done. * That defeatist attitude will soon turn the US into a third rate nation. Country’s like China and Japan will leave us behind.
Is it too late to wake this country up? Rebuild our infrastructure? Get new water supplies for California? Basically get this country moving again? Or are we doomed to collapse like Rome?