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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 14 2019, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the water-water-everywhere... dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

California is close to adopting strict Obama-era federal environmental and worker safety rules that the Trump administration is dismantling. But as the legislative session draws to a close, the proposal faces fierce opposition from the state's largest water agencies.

To shield California from Trump administration policies, lawmakers are considering legislation that would allow state agencies to lock in protections under the federal Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Fair Labor Standards Act and other bulwark environmental and labor laws that were in place before President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.

Written by one of the most powerful politicians in Sacramento, state Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, Senate Bill 1 has strong support from some of California's most influential environmental and labor organizations, including some that helped get Gov. Gavin Newsom elected.

But several of California's water suppliers and agricultural interests, which also flex ample political muscle, oppose the measure. This coalition includes the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has made SB 1 a top lobbying priority.

The water agencies fear the state would cement into law endangered species protections and pumping restrictions that would add to uncertainties about pumping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:03AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @10:03AM (#894021)

    Seems a lot easier to not pollute the water you want to drink in the first place???

    Anything SEEMS easy to an incompetent who expects someone else to do it for him.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @11:27AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @11:27AM (#894030)

    Anything SEEMS easy to an incompetent who expects someone else to do it for him.

    I was expecting an AC to agree with "don't poison the water", yet here we are. Do you miss /.?

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @01:43PM (#894058)

      Constant redefinition of what "poison" is, what "warming" is, what "harm" is, what anything is, no holds barred to support the agenda du jour, makes it extra naive to agree to any proposition from the word-games side. However reasonable and innocuous it might read at first glance, it can and will be twisted into some utter craziness further along.

      Besides, in this non-platonic-ideal reality, time and again it is really easier and cheaper to fix things as you need them, than to go out of your way to leave them lying fallow for you. Like, for one extreme example, on a submarine you scrub CO2 out of air instead of trying not to breathe out, and desalinate seawater instead of never washing.

      As to the water, your city dweller's body is too weak to drink unprocessed natural water with all its natural microbes and natural parasites and natural sediment anyway; or did you believe that natural beasts don't piss or crap, or get sick, or die and decompose, near the streams and right in them? To keep you alive, a large and expensive water cleaning station is indispensable in any case, human-added pollutants of whatever definition notwithstanding. And when you already have that station, for some kinds of pollutants it is much cheaper, or even totally free, to scrub them out of water there than go into contortions to keep them out in the first place.

      A proper definition of "poison the water", in this case, would be "add something that the station cannot easily take out". Not the "breathe wrongly in the water's direction" that it instantly gets redefined as whenever it suits someone.