“Man’s dependency on an adequate supply of fresh water is an indisputable fact. It is equally a fact that there is an insufficiency of such water and that this insufficiency has been particularly felt in the Western United States. Many efforts have been and are continuing to be made to solve the problem of limited water supply, and although great strides have been achieved, so great is the problem and so important its solution that it now has become imperative that consideration be given to what at one time seemed unachievable proposals. The time has passed during which this problem can be solved through traditional local or piecemeal approaches. The solution must be equal in magnitude to the problem.”
Frank E. Moss, Chairman, Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development 1964
A Note To Readers
Note the date of the words of U.S. Senator Frank E. Moss in the quotation above. More than 50 years ago we did have members of Congress who thought BIG. It is time to once again think big. Perhaps a couple of examples of thinking big from the early 1960s will remind us that we should emulate such leaders today.
As I promised last week, this week’s report would provide a couple of examples from that era– the era of the Apollo Project, great water projects and much more.
The two projects are first, the project that Senator Moss was the national leader of, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), and secondly, President John Kennedy’s policy of building very large nuclear-powered desalination plants. A policy that not only saw national legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President, but also the first contract to build such a plant was signed by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in 1964.
That both projects died in the wake of the assassination of President John Kennedy, along with the beginning shut down of the Apollo Project, is testament to the suicidal course the nation has been on since.
If we are to revive such great projects today, and President Trump is the only President since Kennedy that even has an inclination to do so, then the crucial issue, in addition to the obvious cultural and political revolution, requires a reorganization of the financial system to fund it. That is the subject of our Feature this week– reviving the “American System” of economics that in the past built the nation’s greatest infrastructure projects. The report begins by quotations from President Trump’s speeches in 2017 in which he explicitly cites the great American leaders of that “American System” of the 19th Century as the model for his administration today.
And in the Rest of This Week’s Report:
The U.S. Drought Monitor indicates Severe and Extreme drought continues to dominate the southern part of the state– about 22% of the state to be precise.
Over last weekend PG&E shuts off power in parts of Northern California to pre-empt wildfires due to high winds. The company is to pay $2.5 billion in damages from the October, 2017 fires in northern California. That amount would have buried a lot of utility lines preventing those fires. Again we see another example of the preventable damage occurring because of the non-investment in another area of the nation’s infrastructure.
Our Oroville Dam Update this week has one new video showing progress in construction of the new spillways.
That is followed by the Colorado River Update, reporting on how as early as 2019, rationing of the waters of the Colorado shall begin.
