Durham City Councilman Eugene Brown hosted a confab on Durham’s water problems yesterday and every person there, at least according to The Herald-Sun‘s coverage, was a conserve-don’t-increase supply alarmist, including Brown. Nary a word was uttered (at least it wasn’t mentioned in the story) about increasing supply to meet our demands. Why, that’s simply heresy today, engulfed as we are in “green” ideology.
One of the panelists, Cat Warren, who just happens to have written a treatise recently in The Independent Weekly that borders on the hysterical, had this to say:
Warren urged North Carolina’s municipalities and state government to take immediate action on the water supply issue, saying, “I think that complacency at this point is not going to get the job done.”
Durham has reduced water consumption somewhere between 9 to 12 percent compared to this time last year, Warren said.
“And that’s just not good enough,” she said.
The reporter got that wrong. Warren isn’t concerned with supply, but with demand. Her prescription is all conservation all the time, and scolding people for their “profligate” use of water. Government rationing of water is the preferred solution of the Left. Their online snitching about water use has a distinct class bias, and conservation advocates never fail to mention big bad corporations like Coke and Pepsi.
But government’s job is to supply infrastructure and services to its citizens, not wring its hands and bow to Gaia looking for solutions. Sure we’re short of water right now, but I’ve seen Lake Michie look like a golf course many times during my 25 years in Durham. The rains always came, eventually, and filled it and Little River Reservoir. And if our elected leaders think our population growth and our industrial growth have pushed our water supplies to a breaking point, why aren’t they planning for the future instead of sucking up to green zealots and advising everyone to change their standard of living?
One suspects that the left-green coalition is using this “crisis” to soften us up to accept freedom-sucking local legislation, which may explain why they’re not really trying to solve the problem. They hate golf courses anyway. There’s nothing they’d like better than to see Croasdaile Country Club resembling the Mojave Desert.
