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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What California is doing that Techno doesn't want to admit.

Quote:
y PAUL ROGERS | progers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: April 28, 2021 at 2:53 p.m. | UPDATED: April 28, 2021 at 6:35 p.m.
After a winter of misery during the worst pandemic in a century, California is now seeing a major surge of hope this spring.

Buoyed by a steady pace of vaccinations and the immunity of people who already have had the disease, California now has the lowest rate of COVID-19 cases anywhere in the United States.

“The worst of it is behind us,” said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco.

California’s rate of 33 cases per 100,000 people Wednesday morning was less than a third of the U.S. average of 116 cases. By comparison, Texas had more than double California’s rate, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while Illinois and New York were four times higher, Florida five times and Michigan 10 times.


Why?

Quote:
California’s fortunes have turned around for three main reasons, all of which continue to protect the state from new spikes.

First are vaccines. After federal delivery of vaccines has increased with more streamlined systems, every day a larger number of Americans are getting vaccinated. On Tuesday, 337,000 more Californians became vaccinated. Overall, 61% of adults 18 and older in California — 18.5 million people — have received at least one dose, according to the CDC. And that number is growing by 1% every day. More important: 87% of people over age 65 in California have received at least one dose, the group that was most at risk of dying.


SANTA CLARA, CA – APRIL 16: People walk in line to enter the mass COVID-19 vaccination site at Levi’s Stadium on Friday, April 16, 2021, in Santa Clara, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
“You can mask and social distance until the cows come home,” Gandhi said. “But the only way to get out of pandemic is to create immunity in the population to that pathogen. Because of mass vaccination rates, we are going to stay at low case rates.”

The second big reason for California’s reversal is natural immunity. Officially, 3.6 million people have gotten COVID-19 in California since the pandemic began 14 months ago. But in some communities, particularly in Southern California, that number is much higher. When people survive the disease, they build up antibodies and T cells that help fight off future infections. That resistance lasts at least eight months, research shows, and probably longer. California had more infections than other states before and now is better protected.

Third is the lack of variants. Other states, such as Michigan, have been hard hit by the so-called “U.K. variant” of COVID-19, which is 50% to 70% more contagious than the main strain. But California hasn’t seen a significant outbreak of that type. Instead, two “West Coast” variants, which are only about 20% more contagious, prevailed. Researchers aren’t sure why, although they say Californians’ general willingness to wear masks, wash their hands, social distance and follow the state’s tier rules for business reopenings has helped.
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some more history of the Delta's water supply issues. What's changed since this article? No easy solutions, but the environmentalists seem to be running the show. It seems that the salmon and smelt get more water to shower with than the bay area population.

Quote:
Man-Made Drought: A Guide To California's Water Wars

REP. DEVIN NUNES05:33 PM ET 06/12/2015
In the summer of 2002, shortly before I was elected to Congress, I sat through an eye-opening meeting with representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council and several local environmental activist groups. Hoping to convince me to support various water restrictions, they argued that San Joaquin Valley farmers should stop growing alfalfa and cotton in order to save water — though they allowed that the planting of high-value crops such as almonds could continue.

Then, as our discussion turned to the groups' overall vision for the San Joaquin Valley, they told me something astonishing:

Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production. They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan: From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature. I was stunned by the vicious audacity of their goal — and I quickly learned how dedicated they were to realizing it.

How To Steal Water And Get Away With It

For decades, extreme environmentalists have pursued this goal in California with relentless determination. The method they have used to depopulate the targeted land — water deprivation — has been ruthless and effective.

Much of the media and many politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley's water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor. From my experience representing California's agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a long-term campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.

Working in cooperation with sympathetic judges and friendly federal and state officials, environmental groups have gone to extreme lengths to deprive the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of much of the U.S. agricultural production, of much-needed water. Consider the following actions they took:

The Central Valley Project Improvement Act: Backed by the NRDC, Sierra Club and other extreme environmental groups, large Democratic majorities in Congress passed the CVPIA in 1992 after attaching it to a must-pass public lands bill. The act stipulated that 800,000 acre-feet of water — or 260 billion gallons — on the Valley's west side had to be diverted annually to environmental causes, with an additional 400,000 acre-feet later being diverted annually to wildlife refuges.

Smelt and salmon biological opinions: Lawsuits filed by the NRDC and similar organizations forced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to issue, respectively, biological opinions on smelt (in 2008) and on salmon (in 2009). These opinions virtually ended operation of the Jones and Banks pumping plants — the two major pumping stations that move San Joaquin River Delta water — and resulted in massive diversions of water for environmental purposes.

The San Joaquin River Settlement: After nearly two decades of litigation related to a lawsuit filed in 1988 by the National Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and other environmental groups, San Joaquin Valley agriculture organizations agreed to a settlement in 2006, later approved by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Obama. The settlement created the San Joaquin River Restoration Program. The program, which aims to create salmon runs along the San Joaquin River, required major new water diversions from Valley communities. Despite warnings from me and other California Republicans, agriculture groups naively approved the settlement based on false promises by the settlement's supporters that Valley water supplies would eventually be restored at some future, unspecified date.

Groundwater regulation: In September 2014, California Gov. Jerry Brown approved regulations requiring that water basins implement plans to achieve "groundwater sustainability" — essentially limiting how much water locals can use from underground storage supplies. But these pumping restrictions, slated to take effect over the next decade, will reduce access to what has become the final water source for many Valley communities, which have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping as their surface water supplies were drastically cut.

A Litany Of Hypocrisy

As radical groups have pursued this campaign to dry up the San Joaquin Valley, it's worth noting some of their stunning contradictions, hypocrisies, fallacies and failures:

"There's not enough water in California": Environmentalists often claim that the California water crisis stems from the state not having enough water to satisfy its rapidly growing population, especially during a drought.

However, the state in fact has abundant water flowing into the Delta, which is the heart of California's irrigation structure. Water that originates in the snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains runs off into the Delta, which has two pumping stations that help distribute the water throughout the state.

But on average, due to environmental regulations as well as a lack of water storage capacity (attributable, in large part, to activist groups' opposition to new storage projects), 70% of the water that enters the Delta is simply flushed into the ocean. California's water infrastructure was designed to withstand five years of drought, so the current crisis, which began about three years ago, should not be a crisis at all. During those three years, the state has flushed more than 2 million acre-feet of water — or 652 billion gallons — into the ocean due to the aforementioned biological opinions, which have prevented the irrigation infrastructure from operating at full capacity.

"Farmers use 80% of California's water": Having deliberately reduced the California water supply through decades of litigation, the radicals now need a scapegoat for the resulting crisis. So they blame farmers ("big agriculture," as they call them) for using 80% of the state's water.

This statistic, widely parroted by the media and some politicians, is a gross distortion. Of the water that is captured for use, farmers get 40%, cities get 10% and a full 50% goes to environmental purposes — that is, it gets flushed into the ocean. By arbitrarily excluding the huge environmental water diversion from their calculations — as if it is somehow irrelevant to the water crisis — environmentalists deceptively double the farmers' usage from 40% to 80%.

If at first you don't succeed, do the exact same thing: Many of the Delta water cuts stem from the radicals' litigation meant to protect salmon and smelt. Yet after decades of water reductions, the salmon population fluctuates wildly, while the smelt population has fallen to historic lows. The radicals' solution, however, is always to dump even more water from the Delta into the ocean, even though this approach has failed time and again.


Read more at: https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/california-drought-caused-by-environmental-activists/
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J64TWB



Joined: 24 Dec 2013
Posts: 1685

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Self described “Commentary” from investors Daily? Come on Techno. At least point us to some actual science or regulations from NOAA or the EPA if you are concerned about fish.

There are plenty of scientific institutions whose only concern is the California watershed. Some guy from Investors Daily isn’t one of them. Start the debate with an accredited presentation and maybe you will make some points.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Anyone who uses Devin Nunes for a source is completely unconcerned about facts. I could provide Techno with a point by point rebuttal—but he didn’t pay attention to the last one.

Trolls troll, they don’t think.
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boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dev Nunes, a Central Valley Farmer talking WRONGLY about Sierra snowpack. He should stick to carrying Trump's water.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The funniest thing about Techno is his absolutely incoherent viewpoint about the Federal government. In one posting just this morning he rants about Federal debt, regarding Biden proposals not yet law. Of course, after utter silence on the budget busting Trump tax cuts which added hugely to the Federal debt. Then he turns around and wants the government to build new water reservoirs, for water that the farmers can't afford to use.

When one of his right wing sources pings him to jump, he only asks, "how high?"
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 12:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Techno's sources are just unhappy that someone put an end to some of their cheating:

Quote:
On the way out the door, the Trump administration committed many environmental and financial scandals. One can cost low-income water users while lining the pockets of one of California’s largest and most powerful water districts.

The focus of one scandal was the failure of the Trump administration to collect required fish and wildlife mitigation costs set out in the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. Passed by Congress in 1992, it established new financing rules.

First, it made environmental restoration a reimbursable purpose of the CVP. Second, it mandated a comprehensive suite of environmental restoration actions. Third, it required the water contractors, not the taxpayers, to pay for restoration as their cost of doing business.

Among other things, the law included a fishery restoration mandate for the Hoopa Tribe, whose fishery on the Trinity River had been nearly decimated by irrigators’ exports and other water diversions. It also included mitigations for fishery resources and wildlife refuges throughout the Central Valley.

Significantly, the law specified that water contractors, not taxpayers, would pay for restoration and maintenance of the fishery and wildlife refuge damages. After a very long fight leading up to 1992, the Hoopa, fishing groups and conservationists thought we had won.

Then President Donald Trump entered the picture.

He brought into his administration a raft of appointees and advisers who were focused on derailing anything that required big water users to follow the spirit and content of the law. These folks, led by then Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt, rewrote the Central Valley Project water financing rules to override environmental protections guaranteed by the law.

These new rules, through new water contracts, would shift millions of dollars in environmental restoration costs from water contractors to U.S. taxpayers.

For example, roughly twice the amount of water used by Los Angeles in a year would be allocated to Westlands Water District – Bernhardt’s old client. That water district is now free to charge exorbitant water rates to low-income communities within their reach, including El Porvenir and Cantua Creek.


I was involved in the legislative compromises that went into the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. https://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvpia/ carried by Bill Bradley. Techno and his buddies are scofflaws.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

In my view, Rep. Devin Nunes has no credibility at all. He's just a willful tool and shill for right wing nonsense and dishonest characters like Donald Trump.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
Bard’s all in on a Qanon group taking ballots and “counting” them again with no oversight. But with Republican funding.


The Water Education Foundation is a pretty good source, although pretty ag-oriented. A couple of facts.

1. In California, all of the new reservoirs that have been evaluated will develop only a pittance of new water. That’s because there are already reservoirs on virtually all of the streams.

2. California’s a hot place in the summer, and getting hotter. Most of the new reservoir ideas will evaporate a huge amount of water.

3. California gets a huge amount of storage in the snow pack. That is being reduced by global warming.

4. The only place to store the volumes lost with the erosion of the snow pack, without losing most of it to evaporation, is the ground. But that is complicated. It has to be retained over porous soils long enough to infiltrate into the ground. That requires either public ownership of the areas to infiltrate the water, or a system to allow private landowners to monetize that infiltration. Far from simple. California was the last of the western states to regulate groundwater. Corporate agriculture fought that regulation to the bitter end. We are not yet in a place where we have a system to get us through this drought—much less the loss of storage in the snow pack.

Simpletons think the world is simple, and simple nostrums from right wing sources will fix complex problems. Adults know the world is complicated.


You've really lost your mind. There are 100 DEMOCRAT LAWYERS, and hundreds of Democrat volunteers verifying this Mac.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17743
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bard--you've got nothing there to lose.
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