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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:25
The Hidden Truth Behind California's Water Rationing | True News
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- Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Shout out to the Friends of Philosophy out in California.
Recently, of course, California braces for its first mandatory water reductions on urban usage, urban consumption.
Now, urban environments consume about 10% of the state's usage.
One of the biggest consumers of fresh water in California is one pea ocean.
Yes, that's right, the Pacific Ocean.
And what happens is 40% of the water gets dumped into the Pacific Ocean largely as a result of environmental concerns or environmental requirements.
The fact that About 96% of the Earth's water is already in oceans would lead one to question the validity and value of dumping water that could be used for human consumption into the ocean, but that is the reality.
And a lot of people are talking about the water shortage in California.
Of course, there's been little rain, but that's the case.
It's largely a desert.
Not a lot of rain in the desert.
Shocking, but true.
But there is a state and federal regulatory framework and massive amounts of environmental litigation that is a massive problem.
No major dams have been built in California since 1979, though the population has soared from 16 million to 40 million.
And the environmentalists, of course, blame agriculture for taking more than its fair share of water.
Bad figure from the California Department of Water Resources.
Boy, that'd be a fun place to work.
Farming accounts for 41% of applied water usage in California. 48%?
is reserved for environmental purposes, which includes improving the health of the Sacramento-San Gokwa Delta and its most famous inhabitant, the Delta smelt.
Sadly, the Delta smelt looks like it's going extinct anyway, but there's no reason why Californians shouldn't go thirsty for the sake of a fish that's going to disappear anyway, to some degree because of the invasion of larger predator species in the area.
And so a lot of people in California are saying, well, look, I mean, is it really about my shower or watering my lawn that is the problem?
Well, there was a, I mean, true, in the realms of massive government mess-ups, this one is quite huge.
There's a huge, ginormous state water project launched in 1960.
For my younger users, this is actually six years before even I was born.
So can you imagine how old it is?
It's older than me.
And the Massive State Water Project remains unfinished.
Unfinished.
Yes, that's right.
Unfinished.
55 years after it started.
As I mentioned, the state hasn't built a major dam since 1979.
California has suffered from droughts forever.
Of course, environmentalists prevent the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades.
And this is a huge problem.
Of course, they're trying to get residents and businesses to reduce overall water usage by 25% over the next nine months.
This does not include the agricultural industry, which is about 80% of all human water use, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Journal.
So, enough water to sustain 2.6 million California families was dumped into the ocean because there's just not enough storage capacity in the north of the state and environmental rules limit the amount of water that can be pumped down to reservoirs in the south of the state.
Somebody pointed out on my last video, hey, why not just build a bunch of pipes to bring the water from the north to the south?
Because environmentalism is a regulatory framework and nothing will happen.
This is the fourth drought in about 50 years.
Of course the most logical thing to do is to store more water.
Of course environmentalists tend to block all efforts to create more reservoirs.
So there's not really been any major water infrastructure investment since the 1960s.
And why not do what Desert countries do in general, like Israel, and create desalination plants.
Well, one of the reasons that you can't build these kinds of plants in California is because there's green energy mandates which lead to electricity costs at about 50% higher than the rest of the country.
So there's an environmental litigation costs that are huge.
The company named Poseidon had to spend six years in court to get permits For a desalination plant in return, they have to restore 60 acres of wetlands, yes, to create fresh water.
They have to waste fresh water creating wetlands and swamps now.
There's another reason why there are water shortages.
And there is some debate about the validity of these numbers, although I think that the ratio is quite important.
So it's supposed to cost a couple hundred gallons to produce almonds, but it's supposed to cost thousands of gallons to produce a pound of beef.
Now, the numbers are arguable, but more than half of the entire US water supply goes to livestock.
The animal foods industry, according to the EPA, is the biggest cause of water pollution in the United States.
And 10% of California's water supply is going to raise those damn pesky thirsty almonds.
And 47% of California's water supply is going to livestock!
So, if you make one meal a week with lentils instead of beef and are willing to survive the World War I-style noxious tunes that result, a family of four can save the equivalent of 17 bathtubs of water.
Livestock is also responsible for at least 51% of human-induced carbon and other greenhouse gases.
If you heard a lot of people say, fight global warming by eating less beef, well, you certainly won't get it from the beef industry.
And replacing livestock products with plant-based products also frees up land to plant trees, which will suck up some of the excess atmospheric carbon.
So, if it takes so much water to produce beef relative to, say, nuts and fruits and vegetables, why is beef so cheap?
Well, because there are massive subsidies going largely to enormous factory farms who wield enormous political clout.
You don't want to be talking about cutting farm subsidies while touring through Iowa.
10% of farmers collect 74% of all the subsidies.
Almost 166 billion dollars over 16 years.
62% of US farmers don't collect subsidy payments at all.
At the bottom, 80% of recipients get only $587 a year.
So you go to the grocery store and you say, why is it so expensive to buy vegetables relative to like a loaf of bread?
Why is it cheaper to buy a loaf of bread than a pound of broccoli?
Or even a pound of ground beef?
Or green peppers?
How on earth can it be cheaper to get a value meal at a fast food restaurant than it is to get a healthy meal with fresh veggies and so on to your family at home.
I mean, it's weird.
Why are vegetables more expensive than bread or meat?
It can't be anything inherent in their growing requirements.
Ah, enter the fabulous world of government farm subsidies, which tend to pay the most for the very foods you should tend to want to eat less of if you want to stay healthy.
Four most heavily subsidized foods.
Bing!
Corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice.
And if you subsidize these, in particular corn and soy, then you're being subsidized to eat foods in their processed form.
High fructose corn syrup, also known as Satan's Sweat, to your future health.
Soybean oil and grain-fed cattle.
And these are all well-known contributors to chronic diseases and obesity.
Also, can you imagine if there was a A gas, an oil and gas front, like an oil and gas industry that got the government to tax oil and gas and give them the profits to promote further consumption of oil and gas.
But that's how it works in the beef industry.
There's National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
The government collects taxes on beef consumption and then hands it over to this group to further agitate for the additional consumption of beef and derail animal rights and other agricultural reform activists.
They don't want meat labeling requirements which a lot of farmers, particularly cattle farmers, support so you can figure out where your meat comes from and this is all a complete mess.
And so the government taxes you in order to pay people who are doing In some ways, some pretty negative things to health and the environment.
And 80% of the meatpacking industry is in the hands of four conglomerates.
Family cattle operations are vanishing at the rate of 1,000 per month.
Over 40% of these family cattle operations have evaporated since 1980.
The percentage of the food dollar received by ranchers has dropped over 25% since 1970.
Some of these are direct quotes from articles that are linked below.
30 billion dollars of taxpayers money every year are given in cash subsidies to farmers and owners of farmland each year.
This is required?
Of course not!
Farm subsidies were ended in New Zealand in the appropriate year of 1984 and the effects on New Zealand agriculture have been overwhelmingly positive.
Of the $200 billion spent to subsidize U.S.
commodity crops from 1995 to 2010, two-thirds went to animal feed crops, tobacco and cotton.
Mmm, don't you just love subsidizing tobacco and then having to pay for Obamacare?
$50 billion went to human food crops, including wheat, peanuts, rice, oilseeds, and other crops that become sweeteners.
12 billion went to crops that were turned into ethanol and that's a big problem as well.
Farmers who grow fruits, vegetables and tree nuts, stuff that's actually quite good for you on the other hand, get no regular direct subsidies.
Yes, that's right!
The government tells you to eat fruits and nuts and vegetables while subsidizing everything that is not in those categories.
But there are some small programs that aid apple farmers and so on.
If you grow fruits and veggies for market on your lands, you're automatically disqualified for direct subsidy payments.
Well, you wouldn't want any of that stuff.
I mean, that's the market and fruits and veggies.
Terrifying and terrible.
Subsidies affect only a few human foods.
Peanut butter, rice and bread are indirectly subsidized, as is high-fructose corn syrup.
And that is a huge problem.
So again, we see massive amounts of government intervention, jiggering and manipulating of the market, the aggregation of power in very large agricultural concerns, the death of smaller farmers who are probably having less of an environmental impact, and the general ill health of a government that attempts to promote good health in eating while subsidizing all the foods.
That are pretty much like vampires on your jugular.
So, again, are we going to solve this by the government adding more power, more harassment, and fining people who water their lawns?
Of course not.
All it is is a giant cover-up for all the colossal intergalactic clusterfracts that have resulted in the current disastrous situation, not only in the California desert, but in your own veins and arteries.
This is Sven Molyneux for Freedom Main Radio.
Thank you so much for watching.
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