Thursday, September 24, 2009

Are Desalination Plants Are the 21st Century's Coal Slurry Pipelines?


Several times, the House of Representatives defeated legislation that would have encouraged coal slurry pipelines by granting them eminent domain. Some 1000 miles of water wasting, energy wasting and polluting coal pipelines would have tapped into the Madison Formation in Wyoming, wasting massive quantities of energy and polluting the environment in Arkansas to hexavalent chromium.

I wrote an 11,500 word article on coal pipelines, which was excerpted and reprinted in the Congressional Record. Farmers, ranchers, hunters, fishermen, small business people, environmentalists and conservationists defeated the pipeline interests.

Now we are faced with the possibility of a "water war," in which wasteful South FLorida special interests plug for desalination plants (not in their backyard, but in ours) hooked up to big pipes sending water to South Florida, ruining our area as SOuth Florida has already been ruined by bad planning.

My mother had a sign in her office for many years -- "Poor planning on your part does not necessarily create an emergency on my part."

North FLorida needs to tell South Florida (and Orlando) to srart conserving their water, instead of attempting to steal our water (like something out of the true-life experience of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the Owens Valley and elsewhere in California, dramatized by the movie, "Chinatown," with Jack Nicholson.

We've already seen what secretive planning by Walt Disney Company did to Orlando, as documented by Carl Hiassen in "Team Rodent -- How Disney Devours the World."

We don't need bad planning, energy waste and ugliness inflicted on our coasts here.

Thus the desalination plant requires the most intense public scrutiny, public picketing, and public protest -- we don't need to destroy our coast (and our chances of getting a St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and National Scenic Coastal Parkway here).

Let 'em build a desalination plant in South Florida if they want, but not here.

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