Column: Has Biden moved to finally kill California's worst water project?
Desperation over water scarcity has produced any number of schemes to relieve the crisis. But few are as chuckle-headed as a plan to pump groundwater from beneath the Mojave Desert and transport it 200 miles to urban Southern California.I’ve been following this scheme almost since its inception, starting within 2002 that made the case for the Metropolitan Water District to bail on a proposed partnership with its promoter, Cadiz Inc. The MWD did so, which should have killed the plan.
The Cadiz plan is, if possible, even worse. The proposal has remained alive up to now not because it has any practical value. It doesn’t., the plan always “had a sort of shimmering authenticity, like a desert mirage.” But it didn’t bear close inspection. Furthermore, there’s considerable disagreement over how much groundwater really underlies the Cadiz land, not to mention how much the company is legally permitted to pump out and how much could be pumped before neighboring aquifers become contaminated with carcinogenic minerals.
No, what has kept the scheme alive has been political pull. This was exerted chiefly by Cadiz’s conceiver, an investment promoter named Keith Brackpool, who — as I reported in 2002 — came to the U.S. after pleading guilty to criminal charges relating to securities trading in Britain. In 2005, the company paid then-Public Utilities Commissioner Susan Kennedy, soon to become Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, a $120,000 consulting fee. In 2009, while Kennedy was working for Schwarzenegger, he endorsed the Cadiz scheme as “a path-breaking, new, sustainable groundwater conservation and storage project.”
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