Sierra Rayne writes very well on enviro issues.
This one hits home, drought in Texas can be very distracting.
You should see my poor pasture and the level of Lake Brownwood, down 12 feet at the spillway, a mile out my bedroom window.
Drought is about distribution, though, isn’t it, and usage. My goodness, the earth is more than 2/3rds covered in deep water. Pensacola had 15 inches and severe flooding last week, we’ve had 1 inch of rain since January.
There are many lakes created by dams in Texas because we have rivers and spring rains that help with water supply. Texas has only a few small natural lakes and one fairly big but shallow one, Caddo on the northeast at the Louisiana border. Caddo is more like an overgrown pond with swamp on one side and a open water area on the East.
But when you fly over Texas you see water in pasture tanks and plenty of big dam created lakes because we need to store spring rain.
There is no downward trend in precipitation, West Texas is arid. This years promised El Nino may break the drought.
So, as the writer points out–don’t use a crisis to create more bureaucrats and mandarins.
The Dams created drinking and commercial use water reservoirs, along with recreational lake opportunities, but population growth is creating a crunch.
Best not to follow Rahm Emmanuel’s doctrine on what to do with a good crisis, or, as the essayst points out, the Shock Doctrine on policy development and government expansion or you end up with bad ideas that expand a mindless totalitarianism.
Of course these well-meaning elites start out looking for solutions and with well advertised “good intentions” to create more power for themselves, the elites who always suffer from the Fatal Conceit.
Recall HL Mencken’s aphorism about the goal of practical politics, create a crisis so people will be clamorous to be led to safety. Elites and statists follow that strategy all the time, from both ends of the spectrum of political views, to the deteriment of limited government, liberty and property rights.
In this essay Rayne reminds us of another great aphorist, Ronald Reagan, who said “a federal bureaucracy ( but he could have said any federal program started with good intentions) is the closest thing eternal life you will see on this earth.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/05/shock_doctrine_and_water_shortages_in_texas.html