I doubt we can afford to ignore it. We need the oil to keep the water flowing, the lights on, and pay for installing cheap solar everywhere. Cheap solar isn't FREE after all. Were I the governor, I would be insisting on first repairing levies, so we don't have a flood disaster of Biblical proportions, intentional flooding of certain areas as a stopgap measure, then start deliberate clearing of sediment from reservoirs so they will work as flood control, during late summer when water levels are lower. I would insist on restoring the campgrounds and plant sport fish (trout) into rivers and lakes so California would be a good fishing spot again (there's a LOT of tourism associated with that and resorts are a better occupation than Welfare).
I would also get projects to inject clean water into salt infiltrated coastal ground water and using cheap solar and cheap desalination so the coasts recover from a century of abuse by all the rich jacka55e5. And I'd make sure the idiots living there paid for it. Coastal living is very expensive. Nobody who enjoys the benefits should get a free ride on my tax dollar. But they'll find a way not to. The work still needs to be done. I'm sick to death of people in govt who can't think beyond their next election. Protecting the state for future generations is going to be hard, not easy. Most of this recovery could be paid for with oil money from the Monterey Shale.
We have to boost tourism for the long run, and that means you have to keep the state clean and pretty. Nobody wants to stay in a dirty Motel room with noise and no view. People who want that go to Vegas. Here in California, pretty motels in scenic towns means jobs cleaning them in rural scenic towns. Pretty motels also means cute restaurants next door and down the street, and jobs at those restaurants. But you have to have a reason to stay there.
Before the Pike, Hwy 70 through the Northern Sierra was Trout fishing heaven. It's still listed that way in older books. My family used to go up there in the summertime, for a good long week of rest and recuperation. I still have a fishing pole, somewhere, that we bought at the local sporting goods and grocery store in Portola. You were sure to catch trout in Lake Davis, and any section of the Feather river, right up until around 1990. It was a great place to go for vacation. Very safe, very clean, anywhere you stopped would treat you well and the food was good. Most restaurants would cook your trout for you for a modest fee, and provide the first class restaurant experience as well. Trout Almondine is delicious. So is cornmeal crusted. Good times, good memories. So why am I talking about it like its past tense?
Around 1990, Nothern Pike got planted by some eco-terrorist, and not the defending but the destructive kind, they ate the trout, bred like crazy, and the last 25 years of attempts to kill them off, with poison, shocks, explosions, gas poisoning, draining the lake: none of it worked. Their eggs are lodged in the mud and nothing kills them off. The Feather River was a success story that went very wrong thanks to one evil bastard who wanted to catch Northern Pike instead of trout. Around 70,000 people lost their jobs and homes. Its not like a Fire, where you can rebuild. There's no insurance coverage for eco terrorism. All the resorts closed, with the exception of the ones focused on Golf. Most of the hotels, the restaurants followed. Lots of people moved up to there to retire in the late 1980's. Before the pike, it was a lovely place with happy families, the train moving through along the river, and thousands of fishing resorts and campground. Its very safe with clean water, clean air, and peace.
With no trout, the resorts closed. With no fishermen, the campgrounds fell apart. With no trout, there were no tourists. This is something which must be fixed. And not just there, but elsewhere. Killing off the pike eggs in the sediments at the bottom of Lake Davis will require a lot more brute force. Maybe even permanently drain the lake, just to be sure. Its going to cost a lot of money. There are other places in California where things went really wrong and cleanup is needed. The North Coast, dependent on Salmon Fishing, destroyed when the Peripheral Canal was built, killing the newly hatched salmon, but supplying water to San Jose and Los Angeles, freeing them up from using Colorado River water whose demand was violating a treaty with Mexico. They built a nuclear powerplant just to desalinate water so it would reach the legal requirement when the river hit the border. Even so, it was mostly underground by that point and illegals could cross the river without getting their feet wet. And whom did that water help? American farmers who owned the Mexican land. All that money spent to make them richer. Getting LA out of the Colorado river, required NorCal's water supply, and killing off the salmon didn't matter to the movie stars who benefitted from it. They've never been short of hypocrisy. Woody Harrelson stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge 20 years ago to protest for Earth First, an anti-logging hate group that killed loggers and destroyed families in order to "save" trees which ended up cut down anyway. The logging was increasingly mechanized and eventually the jobs were lost, at which point the hate group of eco-terrorists found someone else to harm. The families on the North Coast? Terribly wronged. LA took their fish, so they lost their boats and went bankrupt. Some suicided. Are lives only important when those dying aren't poor white people? They turned to logging, and terrorists from Berkeley killed them with impugnity, ignoring the harm they caused and pretended they were "warriors". I felt glad when that b17ch0 died in her own bombed out car in SF. Would have been better to get shredded by a saw blade like most of her victims, but her cultists liked to pretend she never gave that speech on local TV about how it was justified to kill loggers to save the trees. Which grow back.
Do those eco terrorists plant trees and stop erosion? Do they help the salmon return so the coastal population can have legal jobs? Do they really care about anything but their own narrow violence? NOPE. They found other people to attack and murder.
I do not like Earth First. I went to college with the surviving children of the murdered. They like Earth First even less. Will Earth First blow up frakking rigs once this starts? Yep. There's no shortage of arrogant haters at Berkeley. They don't see the big picture. They see a chance to piss off Mommy and Daddy and get negative attention. That's how they were in the 90's. They'll be the same pricks today.
I've done basic lab research on the Monterey Shale back in college. Its an oil shale. You can smell it. Runs up and down the California coast, but turns underground, gets cut through by volcanoes and faults, and runs across the Central Valley well underground. There's a lot of oil in there. Trapped. A pretty ideal example of where Frakking would do some good, assuming it can be done safely with just water, no contaminants left underground.
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