In Case San Francisco Doesn’t Disgust You Enough, Human Sewage Runoff Causes Mass Fish Kill in the Bay

By Mary Villareal September 10, 2022

 

It will cost the San Francisco government around $14 billion to upgrade their aging wastewater facilities that are dumping nutrients from treated human sewage into the Bay Area. Currently, wastewater is feeding a giant algae bloom, which has lingered for two months and has killed tens of thousands of fish.  The algae bloom started appearing in late July but have since grown due to the number of nutrients from the urine and feces of the eight million Bay Area residents that are released into the water daily. One plant alone dumps 85 million gallons a day containing around 5.5 tons of nitrogen.

Scientists say the bloom was triggered by climate change, but its size, amount of organisms and how long it has lasted so far are due to human waste. It has resulted in the death of up to 10,000 fish that were suffocated by the algae covering the bay.  No sewage leaks had been found from the 37 plants in the area................To Read More......

 My Take - This is the state that forced farmers out of business by diverting water they needed in order to save the delta smelt.  Imagine that! 

Frogs, scorpions, greens, lies…

By James Delingpole Last updated: June 27th, 2011

James Delingpole’s website is at http://www.jamesdelingpole.com/. 

Editor's Note: I would like to thank James for allowing me to republish his work.  He is a young guy (he calls me dude) who writes with a mature well organized mind.  Everything the greenies say is a lie.  Either lies of commission or lies of omission.  They thrive on logical fallacies.  Everyone is finally waking up to their schemes, who they are and what they are really about.  Articles such as this clearly exposes them.  RK

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology etc this post comes to you courtesy of an American Airlines flight 30,000 odd feet over the US on my journey to the Soviet Socialist Republic of California. I’m going there to address some of the few remaining sane people there who haven’t yet been driven out by the state’s bonkers fiscal and regulatory regime, or been driven to destitution by measures to protect the Snail Darter de nos jours – an obscure fish called the California Delta Smelt.

I’ll try to keep this a short post because laptops play havoc with my neck. And because of where I’m headed, I thought I’d pay tribute in this one to LA resident Phelim McAleer co-author – with Ann McElhinney – of the Not Evil Just Wrong documentary debunking CAGW. McAleer is kind of the anti-Michael Moore: using similar guerilla video techniques but against the liberal-left rather than in support of it.

His most recent coup was to ambush Josh Fox the documentary-maker responsible for an eco-propaganda movie called Gasland, whose key scene is the one where a man in Colorado turns on his tap, strikes a match, and – lo! – it catches fire. We are invited by the film to believe that this is an unfortunate side-effect of the shale gas process known as “fracking.” It is visual short hand for: shale gas is evil. Problem is, the scene is misleading in the extreme.
You’ll find a pretty good summary of the story here:

Last week, well-known Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer showed up to a screening of Gasland in Chicago with a couple of straightforward questions for the film’s star, Josh Fox.

In particular, McAleer was interested in Josh’s take on the by-now famous scene in Gasland of Mike Markham lighting his faucet on fire – you remember the one, right? It’s the scene that enabled Fox to sell his film to HBO in the first place. But it’s also one that has been debunked – flatly and frequently – by regulators in Colorado. Heck, these guys even went so far as to issue an official document on official state letterhead tearing the film to shreds, citing Josh’s distorted representation of the Markham well as exhibit A.

So all McAleer wanted to know is whether Fox is aware of the substance of those rebuttals. Is aware that the vertical shaft of Markham’s water well “penetrated at least four different coal beds” before making contact with potable water. Is aware that a 1976 report from the Colorado Division of Water Resources cites “troublesome amounts” of “hydrogen sulfide, methane, iron, fluoride and sodium” in local water wells in this area, well before oil and gas development commenced. That kind of stuff.

Fox’s response? Sure, he’s aware of all that evidence – how can he not be? So why didn’t he include mention of it anywhere in his film? “I don’t care about the report from 1976,” Fox replied. “There are reports from 1936 that people say they can light their water on fire in New York State. But that [has] no bearing on this situation. At all.” According to Josh, the fact that methane was present in water long before oil and gas activity is “not relevant” to the question at hand.

It also reports on the equally significant aftermath which is that, rather than fess up to his – ahem – error, Fox got his lawyers on the case and did his damnedest to keep footage of McAleer’s ambush off the internet.

And the question I want to ask here is: Why? It’s a “why” that applies equally well to almost everything to do with the modern environmental movement. Why, if the science is so “settled” and the case for putting the global economy on a war footing to “combat climate change” so strong, do they keep needing to tweak and exaggerate their message?

Why, as Greenpeace’s former head Gerd Leipold once famously excused his organisation when it was caught out telling porkie pies on the extent of the Greenland ice sheet melt, do they have to “emotionalise the issue”?

After all, surely if the issue is really what they say it is it wouldn’t need “emotionalising” with spin and lies and exaggeration and disingenuous camera footage: it would be plain for all to see and we’d all do something about it.

Let me answer my rhetorical question. In almost every case the facts simply do not support the Green movement’s extravagant claims. When, for example, the Prince of Wales jets in with his entourage to Rio to announce that we have 100 months to save the world from Climate Change, he is talking out of his princely posterior. If no action whatsoever were to be taken to deal with “climate change”, does anyone honestly believe that in 83 months time (if my adding up is correct) the world would not be functioning as well as ever? (Better in fact, because there’d be fewer wind farms and fewer eco-regulations hampering the global economic recovery).

Just recently, in case you missed the good news, carbon prices have tanked on the European exchange: (H/T GWPF)

EU carbon prices have slumped 15% in one week, as a slew of bearish news took its toll on the markets. “It’s just been carnage these last few days,” said a trader at an investment bank in London. “There has been a huge amount of liquidation from funds, banks and utilities.” Mark Lewis, a Paris-based analyst at Deutsche Bank, said he does not expect emissions in the ETS to ever return to their 2008 levels of 2.12 billion tCO2e

And there’s a reason for that: you can fool the public some of the time and you can fool the media an awful lot of the time but what you can’t do for very long is fool the markets. Markets deal, ultimately, with reality. The environmental movement is a religion which deals with anything but.

Observations From the Back Row: 5-9-11

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“De Omnibus Dubitandum”

Dr. Bruce Ames (a biochemistry professor at the University of California) pointed out in 1987 that we ingest in our diet about 1.5 grams per day of {natural} pesticides. Those foods contain 10,000 times more, by weight, of {natural} pesticides than of man-made pesticide residues. More than 90% of the pesticides in plants are produced {naturally} by the plants, which help protect them from insects, mites, nematodes, bacteria, and fungi. Those natural pesticides may make up 5% to 10% of a plant's dry weight, and nearly half of them that were tested on experimental animals were carcinogenic. Americans should therefore feel unconcerned about the harmless, infinitesimal traces of synthetic chemicals to which they may be exposed. The highly publicized traces of synthetic pesticides on fruits and vegetables worried some people so much that they began to favor ``organically produced'' foods, thinking that they would not contain any pesticides. Most people are not aware that organic gardeners can legally use a great many pesticides, so long as they are not man-made. They can use nicotine sulfate, rotenone, and pyrethrum (derived from plants), or any poisons that occur naturally, such as lime, sulfur, borax, cyanide, arsenic, and fluorine.

Light Bulb Clarity: New Electric Politics Someone from Ireland named Panta Rei (this is his nom de plume, which I think is a take on the Greek meaning “everything flows”) posted a comment last week on this site regarding the governments of the world losing their minds regarding light bulbs and used the above link. I find this site difficult to read because of their sentence construction, but this site has a lot to offer and is worth the exploration. RK

Oregon Trails: Bucket Brigade Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of what many say is the biggest act of civil disobedience ever in Southern Oregon, and perhaps in the state itself. It was the 2001 "Bucket Brigade" in Klamath Falls, protesting a federal cutoff of irrigation water to Basin farmers in a year of severe water shortage. Ten years ago, veteran Klamath Basin farmer John Prosser dipped water from Klamath Lake as part of a massive protest against what many in the Basin felt was criminal mis-application of the Endangered Species Act. Thousands passed those 51 buckets through town to the "A" Canal, one for each state and the District of Columbia, to symbolize disdain for a shutoff of irrigation water a few weeks earlier. It happened just as many were planting crops.

Thompson, Wolk agree with delta panel Two Yolo County-area politicians agree with a panel of national scientists who reported this past week that a sweeping plan to restore California's ailing freshwater delta and build a pipeline or canal to carry water to the south is missing critical information. The National Academy of Sciences found in its review that the draft plan to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta lacks clear goals and a scientific analysis of the plan's potential impact on the delta's diverse plant and animal species. ….. Estimates for building a canal around the delta range as high as $9 billion, while an underground pipeline/tunnel could cost as much as $11.7 billion, according to the state Department of Water Resources. Environmental groups said Thursday the review confirmed problems with the planning process. To date, about $150 million has been spent in developing the plan, a process which started in 2006 and has involved hundreds of meetings among state and federal agencies, local water districts, and environmental and conservation groups.

My Take - All for a bunch of smelt that as far as I can tell vary only slightly from other smelt….and live in the Delta. Is this the only species of smelt in the world? The answer is; there are a lot of smelt in the world. So since there are a lot of smelt, then I still want to know this; what is so different from this smelt and any other smelt? If they are so biologically incompetent that this delta is the only place in the world they can survive?   Then that can only mean one of two things; either they don’t matter because they are biologically incompetent and will disappear anyway, or the difference between them and other smelt is genetically meaningless except to those who embrace the irrational concepts of the ESA.  In the meanwhile farmers will go out of business and food will cost more.

This seems to be much like the issue regarding the snail darter. They only difference between them and the other darters in that river were that they liked eating snails. I have one more point. What did they have against snails anyway? Since the only darter in the river the greenies wanted to protect was the one that ate snails, I have to ask; did anyone ever ask the snails how they felt about it? After all, there was a lady that talked to the honeybees to try and determine why the nests were dying, do I am surprised they didn’t find someone to try and contact the snails to see if they wanted protection from the snail darter. As for the delta smelt; I think that is an inappropriate name. I think bait would be more appropriate.

House looks at Endangered Species Review By National Association of Wheat Growers, A bureaucratic process meant to ensure pesticides will not harm endangered species is broken and in need of reform, witnesses and Members of Congress concluded at a Tuesday hearing. The hearing was held jointly by the House Agriculture Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee, prompted by concern over pending lawsuits that allege the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) didn’t properly consult on pesticide registrations with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), EPA is required to complete a consultation process with wildlife agencies in addition to its review under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which itself takes seven to 10 years and considers the effects of new chemistries on wildlife. EPA hasn’t completed a consultation since 1999, because, while NMF is completing biological opinions, its scientists and EPA’s can’t agree on the underlying scientific data needed to reach the standard for a full consultation. This has created an opening in which pesticide opponents can sue based on the consultation process itself versus alleging harm to the endangered species.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax -

Of cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot,

And whether pigs have wings."

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Observations From the Back Row - 4/3/11

By Rich Kozlovich

“De Omnibus Dubitandum” - Alas, the internet has cost them the trust of the people.

In 2007 the average number of google hits for a news search for “global warming” was around 20,000 stories. It then steadily declined until just before climategate it was around the 10,000+ news articles…….. I have kept a personal tab on the number of global warming stories and 6600 really now is the dross at the bottom of the barrel: eco-lunatics whose idea of a perfect world is one without anyone else in it; tired out-of-date journalists who still think it is fashionable to go on about “global warming”; young wet-behind-the-ears journalists who heard about climate “science” at school and still believe their teachers, and yes … the boring old sods who go on about global warming being an utter load of twaddle!

My Take - If the internet had been in existence in the 1970’s the Montreal Protocol would have been recognized and exposed for the junk science that it is, just as the Kyoto Accords has been. RK

Rep. Jim Costa introduced legislation on March 30 that would eliminate vital Endangered Species Act protections for imperiled fish and other wildlife in California's struggling Bay Delta ecosystem.

The following is a statement from Kim Delfino, California director for Defenders of Wildlife:

This legislation will only further destroy the Bay Delta, the hundreds of species that call it home, and the livelihoods of thousands of people who once made a living off its bounty……..Rep. Costa would like to blame the state's economic woes on essential environmental safeguards. But the high unemployment rate in the Central Valley is the result of a severe nationwide recession and a three-year drought in California, not the Endangered Species Act…... We need real solutions to ongoing resource challenges, not politically-motivated hyperbole.

My Take - One of the things that she fails to mention in this article is that this fight to save the delta smelt, which is as far as I can see isn’t much different than any other smelt other than it lives in the delta, has been going on for years, and for years they have diverted water from the farms of the Central Valley. She claims that “we” can restore the Bay Delta (which is code for eliminating anything that benefits mankind, and in spite of the claims in this article….they could care less about jobs and people, that is merely a red herring fallacy) and still provide enough water for the Delta and farmers, yet historically that hasn’t been the case; so by use of what magic is this to happen? It is the same of rhetoric that gives the impression of moderation and accommodation, but when the greenies have had their way they have destroyed enterprise and industry everywhere else in their world. Why should we believe it is different in California? We shouldn’t! The Endangered Species Act has done more to destroy farmers, ranchers and loggers and industry as a whole in the west than any economic downturn has ever done since the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl drought of that time.

GOP-Sponsored Bill Would Bar Groups from Enforcing Our Nation's Environmental Laws - Natural Resources Defense Council (blog)

Yesterday, Senator Vitter (R-LA) and Congressman Bishop (R-UT) introduced 2 companion bills that, among other harmful policies, would prevent environmental non-profit organizations from recovering legal fees when they successfully sue under the Equal Access to Justice Act or the Endangered Species Act In February, Rep. Lummis (R-WY) introduced similar language in an amendment to H.R. 1(amendment no. 195).

This bill would bar environmental groups from recovering attorney’s fees in the vast majority of situations, thus hindering their ability to bring cases protecting our nation’s environmental laws—laws that ensure we have clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and protected public lands on which to hunt and fish, among other benefits.

My Take - This is long overdue. The ESA has been a means of enriching activists groups, and in point of fact some of them exist only because of the funds they raise under this ridiculous provision. What about the poor defendant? Whether they win or lose, they have to pay up…. or capitulate, and that is what happens most of the time. They can’t afford the legal fees and end up giving up their property without compensation or recourse; although they can still own the property and pay taxes on it….they just can’t use it. This outrageous scheme is nothing more than a criminal shakedown by the environmental movement sanctioned by the federal government.

ESA Outrages, Part I
By Rich Kozlovich

Last week I told everyone that I would be running a section dealing with ESA outrages. Here is the first installment. I first want to make sure we had some historical background for what is to come.

Between 1962 and 1972 the U.S. Congress got all wrapped up in passing bills that couldn’t help but make the greenie heart beat fast and furious and take their breaths away.

• Wilderness Act, 1964
• Clean Water Act, 1965
• Endangered Species Act, 1966
• Clean Air Act, 1967
• Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 1968
• Endangered Species Conservation Act, 1969
• Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, 1971
• Marine Mammal Protection Act, 1972

Most of us would think that this would satisfy the most jaded greenie. They wanted more, and it was decided that the 1969 ESA was inadequate and in 1972 they “upgraded” ESA with some significant changes. Section 4 and Section 7 contained poisoned pills and no one realized it.

Section 4 required the Secretary of the Interior to list any species that was endangered or threatened and defined species as “fish or wildlife or plants” and further refined that definition as “any mammal, fish, bird, amphibian, reptile, mollusk, crustacean, arthropod or other invertebrate.” This will take on greater significance in coming weeks.

Section 7 “prohibited the “take” of any listed species. A “take” means to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, dill, trap, capture or collect” a listed species. Friends of the Earth stated that the degradation of a listed species habitat would fit the definition of a “take” under the bills.” Everyone seems to have been caught up in the warm and fuzzy feeling because the thinking was clearly fuzzy…no one hardly whispered an objection. One reason is that they were primarily thinking of what is called the “charismatic” species, such as bald eagles, bears, wolves, etc.

Shannon Peterson noted that; "Few at the time opposed the ESA because no one anticipated how it might interfere significantly with economic development or personal property interests. …..The timber industry, other natural resource industries, and private property groups declined to fight the law in 1973 because they failed to see how it might affect them." That lack of insight would come back to haunt every one of these groups, especially the timber industry.

ESA Outrages, Part II
The environmentalist’s victory regarding DDT gave them unprecedented power and influence, but the decision in TVA v. Hill gave them regulatory authority. Never before have individuals outside of the government been able to “not only advance, but to enforce, wildlife preservation without restraint.”

New Congress targets eco indulgences
U.S. subsidies to environmental causes have become expensive to maintain over the last 30 years. The U.S. government regulatory workforce has grown 16% in the first two years of President Obama. U.S. government services have increased by 41% from 2000 to 2008 in contrast to private sector services which grew by only 27% (The Economist, Jan. 8, 2011). Much of the regulatory and government environmental programs have only promoted gratuitous green symbolism, without any measurable long term environmental or economic benefit. These programs have also become a playground for eco-group litigation and propaganda.


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