California Governor Order Mandatory Water Cuts

 

 

image credit Zero Hedge

Guest Post by Kevin Moore

The item below indicates the kind of devastation that has occurred, and will increasingly occur, as a consequence of outlandishly high energy consumption and the abject failure throughout most of the world to address energetic and environmental matters.

As long as New Plymouth District Council (NPDC) continues to focus on business-as-usual (economic growth, covering ‘everything’ with concrete and asphalt, tourism, entertainment, boondoggles etc. ) everything in the district will continue to be made worse by NPDC, until everything collapses.

With California (population 40 million and ‘food-basket’ for America going under, we are in for a very ‘interesting’ period 2015 to 2016.

For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid “Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation” (from Zero Hedge)

Amid the “cruelest winter ever,” with the lowest snowpack on record, and with 98.11% of the state currently in drought conditions, California Governor Jerry Brown orders mandatory water cuts in California for the first time in history…

And finally some action…

As ABC reports,

California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced a set of mandatory water conservation measures today, as the state continues to struggle with a prolonged drought that has lasted for more than four years.

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” Brown said in a statement after visiting a manual snow survey in the Sierra Nevadas. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action.”

Read more here

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Kevin David Moore, a fellow New Plymouth resident, is a founding and executive member of ASPO-NZ (The Association for the Study of Peak Oil). He’s New Zealand’s leading energy-environment-economic analyst, and has written five books on the global economic system and its effects on both the global environment and on ordinary people. He is noted for highest-level analysis, for telling truths most people shy away from, and for challenging the dysfunctional policies formulated and implemented by central and local government.

Nestle Enjoys Unlimited Water Despite Sacramento Drought

The city of Sacramento, in their fourth year of severe drought, continues to allow the Nestle water bottling plant to draw unlimited (estimated at up to 80 million gallons a year) from local aquifers. Meanwhile according to IndyMedia reporter Dan Bacher (Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought), Sacramento residents have been slapped with drastic water restrictions.

On March 12, Jay Farniglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory/Caltech, wrote in the LA Times that California has only one year of water left in its reservoirs – while the state’s backup supply, their groundwater aquifers are rapidly depleting.

The city charges Nestle the residential rate, 65 cents, for each 470 gallons it takes. The company then rakes in record profits by selling the water back to Sacramento residents for close to five dollars a gallon.

Under brand names such as Perrier and San Pellegrino, Nestle is currently the world’s largest bottled water supplier. They are notorious for denying that water is a human right at the 2000 World Water Forum

The Crunch Nestle Alliance, a coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other activists, is demanding that the city charge Nestle commercial rates for their water or tax their profits. Or better still that Nestle voluntarily shut down their Sacramento bottling plant.

Bacher’s article also notes that Governor Jerry Brown seeks to further limit Sacramentans access to water by fast tracking his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP). This would involve construction of peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agrobusiness, Southern California water agencies and oil companies that require massive amounts of water for fracking operations. If it goes forward, the BDCP would force vast tracts of Sacramento Delta farmland out of production for the benefit San Joaquin Valley factory farms and the fracking industry.

In the video below Nestle’s CEO Peter Brabeck explains why he believes water should be privatized – after forcefully arguing for Europe to remove their ban on genetically modified foods.

The Crunch Nestle Alliance, which doesn’t have a website, can be contacted through Andy Conn at camphgr55@gmail.com.

photo credit: CalPERS and the Drought via photopin (license)