The sun sets over Soberanes Pt., bringing yet another week without rain to an end.
The ground is drying out, there’s no rain in sight, and the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center is calling for drought through at least the end of March. As people use more water in years without plentiful rainfall, Cal-Am could even run into trouble with the pumping limits imposed by the Cease and Desist Order this year … meaning rationing could be months, not years, away. No need to wait for 2016!
Meanwhile, the Regional Desal Project, that blazing sun they said would light our way to a brilliant water future, has collapsed through a cascade of unsavory revelations, investigations, indictments, and adverse court rulings, into an amorphous black hole. A black hole whose crushing gravity devours public money and the credibility of local officials and agencies at ever-increasing rates, and from which no public benefit seems likely ever to escape.
But have no fear. If a way can be found to save the project’s most important attributes … attributes like keeping control of the project out of the hands of the people elected by the ratepayers to represent them on water issues, and sticking the ratepayers of the Monterey Peninsula with the bill, not only for their own ridiculously expensive desalted water, but also for nearly all the cost of desalting water for Marina Coast Water District customers … it will surely be done.
So, while we wait for the conclusion of the secret negotiations over the Regional Project’s fate, let’s get outside and enjoy all this unexpected sunshine … before everything dries out completely.
Xasáuan Today 
Indeed a great tragedy, one now visiting my beloved homeland of Big Sur as well as the rest of Planet Earth, including my current beloved homeland, Switzerland, where I now live as Big Sur is still, since 1849, under the control of the occupying forces of the United States of Insane Government. Quite frankly it’s incomprehensible to me how many Americans, mainly of the extreme right wing frontal-lobe-free pseudo-Christian Tea Party and Creationist – the Earth is 6000 years old – ilk apparently believe that climate change and global warming are some sort of socialist plot. For one thing, these folks don’t have a clue about what socialism, is – it’s not populist nonsense or Soviet-Chinese style autocracy, they might as well be talking about Koco Krisps as a cause for the malaise. There are objective scientific (We’re not talking about God making dinosaur fossils at his workbench and hiding them in the dirt to fool non-believers in Jesus as the unique and only savior here, we’re talking about objective reality, Jesus opted out of returning long ago, but His teachings survive if you look.)) We know here, watching the glaciers melt, that in the long term our way of life is doomed because of climate change – not just gradual warming, an indisputable fact, but more importantly, instability of climate, a far more dangerous phenomena. So what are you going to do, vote for a for a failed gutless wimp like Obama or Weathervane Mitt, every Militant Capitalist’s wet dream, or Rick Sanctimonious, who will be in your bedroom every night to insure you have no pleasure in either sex or relationship – except when he is supervising the next war, against Iran. Or will you rely on the mantra: ” We Americans are the greatest people in the history of the universe and then go shopping? Aside from these minor points, may I reassure you that the Big Sur Nation Embassy to the Helvetian Confederation still fights for your rights. Be well in 2012, Ambassador Dao Te ;-)
Well, I’m a little speechless after reading Ambassador Dao Te above, but one bright spot is rain is forecast for next week!
Yes, Ambassador Dao Te again failed his political correctness test; Praise the Lord! Please note that in the interests of the flora, fauna, dirt, rocks, aquifers, springs, streams, tracks, roads, Blessed Highway One, breathable vapor, sunrises, sunsets, clouds, fog, starfields and other critters inhabiting and composing the Big Sur Nation (not to necessarily exclude those aficionados who claim to be human) the BSN Embassy has appealed to the Tao that Be to throw a gentle storm on the beleaguered place.
Well…the drought has ended with a bang…or should I say, a splash. 10 inches in the backcountry automated rain gauges, and 6 inches here at Pacific Valley School. Life is a river!