CORD BAUER, San Clemente
Turn on the local news, and California seems to be bouncing from one crisis to the next. It’s either Flex Alerts or water rationing, the next version of COVID, or worse. It’s all anxiety, all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider that if we really wanted it, there would be no water crisis, no energy crisis, and (gasp) even more reserves than we need. If we had politicians who cared, we could be exporting our power to other states. We could even have a resurgence of manufacturing in the state because of all the clean, cheap power.
Generations ago, Gerald Brown Sr. (a Democrat) planned for a series of reservoirs up and down the state to feed our growing population and get water to our farmers. And generate power.
While this never happened, eight years ago, a state proposition (Prop 1) mandating the building of more water storage passed by a huge popular margin. Has work started on any reservoirs? No. Instead, four dams along the Klamath River that flows into a reservoir in a Northern California county are set to be removed starting next fall.
What California needs is obvious, and the opposite is being done. That’s because the people in power realize that an anxious, worried, undereducated population will always beg the government for help with the big problems—even those created by government itself.
We are living through a man-made water shortage. We’re living through a man-made energy crisis. It gets worse with the tacit approval of the government.
Does anyone disagree that if the politicians wanted, we could have finished several reservoirs in the past eight years? How about clean power plants for all the mandated electric cars? If the government cared about the citizens, do you think that we’d have half the problems we have now? Are running water and stable electricity partisan issues?
The latest NBC poll shows that 74% of the public says the country is on the wrong track. If the same people who allow these problems to exist are the same people you vote for every election, isn’t it time to try someone else?
