IS SMALLER BETTER, OR IS IT REALLY BIGGER?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “IS SMALLER BETTER, OR IS IT REALLY BIGGER?”

          Bigger, California has learned through long experience, isn’t always better. In fact, it can be downright destructive, as when a city outgrows its water or freeway system.

          The question of whether bigger can actually be better, more responsive and cost-effective arises again this spring, in a pair of proposals that could fundamentally change politics both statewide and in California’s largest county.

          One of these plans, purveyed in a proposed 2018 initiative now circulating in some areas, would essentially make the Legislature 100 times bigger than it is today, while cutting its pay and reducing the size of Assembly and Senate districts to about 1 percent of their current dimensions.

          The other would expand county boards of supervisors from five members to seven where population tops 5 million, which today means only Los Angeles County, which would also get an elected chief executive similar to a mayor.

This one is aimed to improve government in L.A., sponsors saying it would modernize the state’s most powerful local government, where open county board seats can attract sitting members of Congress who already occupy very secure jobs, as when Democratic former San Pedro Rep. Janice Hahn won a seat on the board last year.

          The more wide-ranging of these plans comes from John Cox, a San Diego County real estate investor who just now is the only 2018 Republican candidate for governor. As such, he drew 18 percent support in one recent major poll, topping the better-known Democratic likes of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and current state Treasurer John Chiang. He trailed only Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic former mayor of San Francisco, who scored 28 percent.

          Cox’s current initiative is a rehash of an idea he floated in 2012 which failed to draw enough petition signatures to make the 2014 ballot. It would essentially divide the current 80 Assembly and 40 state Senate districts by 100, creating neighborhood micro-districts of 5,000 and 10,000 persons each. Every district would get a representative – 12,000 in all.

          Recognizing this might be just a tad unwieldy, Cox would have the 12,000 new legislators elect “working committees” of 80 Assembly members and 40 senators – oddly enough, the exact sizes of today’s two legislative houses.

          The working committees would perform most tasks of the current Legislature, but the full bodies of 8,000 in the Assembly and 4,000 for the Senate would vote on all non-urgent matters and proposed laws. Lawmakers’ pay would be cut to $1,000 yearly.

          Cox is convinced this would take most of the big money out of legislative politics, forcing candidates to go door to door in their small districts rather than flooding airwaves and mailboxes with advertising. The actual, working lawmakers on the two active committees would then have just 99 constituents each (other neighborhood legislators) to please and pander to.

          Don’t expect this one to go very far once voters realize they wouldn’t even be changing the number of people in the Capitol, but would add a whole new layer of government.

          Meanwhile, the county proposal sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Tony Mendoza of Artesia could create the second most powerful political job in California in the Los Angeles County executive, and two other posts also certain to draw big-name candidates and big-money campaigns.

          His plan to add two county supervisors to the current five would reduce each Los Angeles County supervisor’s district population to 1.4 million from today’s 2 million.

          “By increasing representation and creating a professional management position, we will address multiple issues and actively improve local government,” Mendoza said.

          This one needs a two-thirds vote in both current legislative houses to make the 2020 ballot and become effective in 2022. A similar proposal failed in 2015 after drawing opposition from the then-current Los Angeles County board.

          The Mendoza plan also raises the question of whether it’s right for voters in the rest of California to decide the structure of politics in Los Angeles, when it won’t affect anyone but Angelenos.

Either of these plans would make for major upheaval, something voters historically have not been inclined to approve. But no one can predict the outcome of such a vote in today’s volatile political climate, not when it involves creation of thousands of new political positions for ambitious Californians to occupy.

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS ICONIC JOSHUA TREES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2017, OR THEREAFTER

           

 BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

  "CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS ICONIC JOSHUA TREES"

           

          Only four units of the entire 417-part system of national parks, monuments, seashores and historical sites carry the names of remarkable plants and trees. California hosts three of these – Redwood, Sequoia and Joshua Tree national parks.

          But by the end of this century, there could be little reason for the Joshua Tree National Park just east of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. That’s because its namesake cactus-like namesake shows signs of  gradually dying out due to changes in the local climate.

          This appears true despite denials of man-made climate change coming regularly from President Trump and the men he’s put in charge of agencies charged with protecting threatened plants, animals and fish, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. (Joshua trees don’t yet have formally endangered status.)

          The latest moves from these agencies indicate they will become even more enviro-skeptical than they’ve been in their first several months working for Trump: In mid-May, the EPA under Administrator Scott Pruitt – a longtime oil industry advocate who was formerly attorney general of Oklahoma – dismissed half the members of its key scientific advisory boards. At the same time, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke suspended more than 200 advisory panels on everything from invasive species to oil drilling.

          This means the ethereal Joshua trees can expect little help from federal agencies, despite their main habitat’s promotion from national monument to national park status in 1994.

          And they will apparently need some help – or a major shift back to old climate patterns – if they’re to survive into the next century.

          That’s because the species shows signs of flagging in the ever warmer heat of the Mojave Desert. The plants, actually huge lilies and cousins of the far more common yuccas whose flowers dot much of California during the spring, depend on ground water to survive. Their extensive root systems can reach 35 feet underground and they also take in atmospheric moisture through their leaves, trunks and branches.

          But Joshua tree saplings are not so hardy. With much shallower root systems than their mature relatives, they are far more vulnerable to hotter and drier weather. That’s exactly what scientists project for the national park and the rest of the Mojave, where average temperatures are expected to rise four degrees by 2050, while rainfall drops by 2.6 percent in the same time.

          For the saplings to survive, they need to grow an average of about three inches in each of their first 10 years, then another 1.5 inches yearly after that.

          It’s apparently not happening for them in this mostly dry period, despite the heavy rains of the past winter. In the first year of a projected 20-year survey of Joshua tree population and growth both inside and outside the park, scientists from nearby UC Riverside found few or no young trees on about 30 percent of the species’ normal range. If that continues through the end of this century, Joshua trees could eventually exist only in about 10 percent of their current habitat. Essentially, new Joshua trees are not replacing older, dying ones fast enough for the species to survive much longer.

          The outlook can only get worse under current trends, which have seen nighttime low temperatures in Twentynine Palms, nearest significant town to the national park, rise by 8 degrees over the last 40 years.

          The great preponderance of scientists worldwide, with little to gain from lying about it, maintain human activity has caused much of that change in the local climate, part of a worldwide phenomenon. But Trump and his allies hotly deny this. Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, an avid backer of both Trump and Pruitt, insists this represents “rigged science,” saying the latest firings and suspensions at both Interior and the EPA mean that government will now “start dealing with science, and not rigged science.”

          The current supposed stewards of the national park system and its multitude of plants and animals do not appear serious about that duty, though, as indicated by shutting down their advisory panels or loading them up with representatives of industries that contribute to climate change.

          They also are in no mood to heed any advice that contradicts their beliefs. Joshua trees, beware.

          

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

CALEXIT MOVEMENT STILL ALIVE, BUT EVOLVING

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 30, 2017, OR THEREAFTER

           

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “CALEXIT MOVEMENT STILL ALIVE, BUT EVOLVING”

          For months, the small but growing movement for California to secede from the United States was stalled in part because its nominal leader lives (for now) in Russia and attended at least one Kremlin-approved event for separatist movements around the globe.

          But the movement is now changing. The Yes California organization is gone, along with its nominal head, Louis Marinelli (a former San Diego candidate for the state Assembly who teaches English in Russia); so is the putative proposition they hoped to put on the ballot next year.

          But the idea lives on with a new name and the same on-the-ground leader. Yes California has morphed into the California Freedom Coalition, which has announced plans to file a reworded secession initiative petition in Sacramento May 19.

          At its center remains Marcus Ruiz Evans, whose 2013 book “California’s Next Century 2.10” suggested a kind of semi-independent status for the state. Later, he began advocating complete independence.

          Evans’ biography reports he worked 10 years as a liaison between California and the federal government. He says the experience taught him this state is fundamentally different from the rest of America. At first, he pushed for a California status akin to Scotland’s within the United Kingdom, both areas at considerable variance with the rest of their countries. (The UK overall voted for Brexit, for example, while Scotland voted strongly to stay in the European Union.)

          Evans worked with Marinelli on this cause for more than three years. He says its evolution now teams him with a high-ranking Silicon Valley executive, a top sales counselor and a longtime activist protestor best known for campaigning outside the Texas ranch of then-President George W. Bush. Those individuals did not return emails asking them to confirm their involvement. But the activist, Cindy Sheehan, was due to lead a march to submit the new separation initiative.

          Evans promised the new petition would have a “better text” than the one he pulled back. If it passes with a large majority, the measure could put California on a course toward independence.

          Evans believes sovereignty would work out fine. He pooh-poohs the idea of a new Civil War, with the rest of America fighting to hang onto California.

          Part of his reasoning: A recent poll conducted for a television network and an online business publication found 40 percent of those surveyed in the rest of the nation would like to be rid of California.

          Evans also claims the Reconstruction-era Supreme Court decision Texas v. White would permit other states to vote to let California go peacefully. But that view was expressed in a dissent, not by the court majority. Which means there is no more of a mechanism for a state to leave now than there was before the Civil War. Of course, there was also no legal way for any colony to leave the British Empire, but it happened.

          Nevertheless, Evans maintains secession would be both peaceful and fiscally sound. “I don’t believe the rest of America would go to war with us,” he says. “Unlike the old Confederacy, California doesn’t talk about shooting federal troops and attacking federal forts and bases. California has a culture of non-violence and anti-war activity.”

          As for finances, while secession skeptics worry about losing federal grants and other spending, Evans notes that California gets back far less in federal spending than it pays in federal taxes. That’s unlike other states, including West Virginia and Mississippi, which get back as much as 50 percent more than they put in. If Californians paid the same taxes they do now, but sent all of it to Sacramento and none to Washington, D.C., he says, all those grants, salaries and Social Security payments would be covered, with plenty to spare.

          Meanwhile, poll support for the Calexit idea climbed from about 3 percent in 2014 to 32 percent in one springtime survey, the biggest jump coming when Donald Trump became President. That’s major growth, and the longer Trump remains in office despite decisively losing the popular vote, the more it may increase.

          Right now, this still looks like an extreme longshot, but less so than three years ago. And no one can safely predict where popular sentiment might go in the next 15 months, when secession could come to its first-ever vote.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CCAs BRINGING COMEUPPANCE TO BIG UTILITIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“CCAs BRINGING COMEUPPANCE TO BIG UTILITIES”

          You can call it a form of comeuppance for huge privately-owned California utility companies unscathed so far by exposure of their negligence and blundering of the past decade. They now find themselves deeply threatened by what some might consider a small army of mosquitos.

          No individual was penalized when a federal trial found Pacific Gas & Electric Co. guilty of criminal negligence in the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed eight persons and destroyed dozens of homes. The company itself was fined just $3 million, a pittance for the vast enterprise.

          Similarly, no company executive has yet been charged with anything criminal in the well-documented multi-billion dollar collusion between Southern California Edison Co. officials and Michael Peevey, former president of both Edison and the state Public Utilities Commission. They agreed privately to force consumers to pay the bulk of the costs for decommissioning the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in northern San Diego County, rendering subsequent public hearings completely without meaning. That case is still under investigation, more than two years after raids on Peevey’s homes uncovered key documents in the case.

But the PUC, a participant in the illicit meeting where the decision was made to dun consumers more than $3 billion for the closure, saw its members carefully maintain straight faces while fining Edison a puny $16 million for not reporting a meeting their own chief attended.

          Those paltry penalties deprived millions Californians of justice. But a different kind of punishment is now pecking away at the utility giants. This comes in the form of Community Choice Aggregations, arrangements where cities and counties can let electricity customers choose whether to stay with the existing utilities or switch to a locally-run public entity that buys power from generating companies at the source and brings it to consumers via utility company lines. Non-profit CCA prices are generally lower than those of for-profit utilities.

          How seriously do the utilities take the threat of CCAs? One indicator was the 2010 campaign for Proposition 16, run by and for PG&E, which spent $46 million qualifying and promoting the measure. That initiative would have allowed CCAs to form only after a two-thirds supermajority vote in any area involved. Essentially, that was an effort to kill the CCA idea. Even without much experience with CCAs, and with opponents spending less than .2 percent as much as PG&E, the measure lost by a 53 to 47 percent margin.

          The eight current California CCAs now operate in places as diverse as Sonoma County, San Francisco and the high desert city of Lancaster in Los Angeles County. Butte County is exploring the idea. So are San Jose and San Diego.

          But the most serious comeuppance so far for the utilities came this spring, when Los Angeles County supervisors – free to do this because Proposition 16 failed – voted to create a CCA that will buy power primarily from renewable sources like solar thermal arrays, wind farms, hydroelectric dams and geothermal wells.

When the new CCA opens next year, anyone in unincorporated areas within California’s most populous county can switch to it. Scores of cities in the county will also be able to join the CCA and provide residents the choice of whether to stay with Edison or opt out.

The city of Los Angeles, which has run a publicly-owned utility of its own for many decades, will not be eligible.

          No one has reported the exact amount CCAs already cost the big utilities, but it is sure to be in the billions of dollars once the Los Angeles County version comes online.

          The companies know the most effective way for them to retain customers under this burgeoning free-choice system is to provide better service. So Edison is building scores of new electric vehicle charging stations, which look progressive even though they serve only a tiny fraction of Californians. And PG&E has upgraded equipment in San Francisco, cutting the frequency of significant blackouts to an average of just 1.02 times per customer per year.

          CCA’s, of course, are not a direct punishment of PG&E and Edison for their blunders and illegal acts. But CCAs very likely would not be proliferating without that very recent history, which saw the big utilities create an unfriendly climate for themselves.

                  

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

CAN DEMS CAPITALIZE ON GOP’S RISKY HEALTH VOTES?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 23, 2017, OR THERE

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “CAN DEMS CAPITALIZE ON GOP’S RISKY HEALTH VOTES?”

          For the last seven years, most of the 14 Republicans representing parts of California in Congress railed against Obamacare, high corporate taxes and illegal immigration.

          But that was mere chatter. So long as a Democrat was president, nothing new was going to happen. And so, even though Obamacare policy holders, illegal immigrants and poor people abound in many of their districts, their talk never cost them much. That could change soon.

          For Republican Donald Trump controls the White House today and pushes constantly on those issues. He makes GOP congressional talk more than mere noise. What was empty rhetoric now can become reality. This was never more clear than when all 14 California Republicans voted to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare’s formal name, and replace it with far inferior health insurance.

          Example A might be Jeff Denham of Atwater, whose 10^th District contains a large Latino populace and about 100,000 persons whose health insurance comes via Obamacare. Denham won reelection last year by 51.7-48.3 percent over Democratic farmer Michael Eggman, the winning margin fully 70 percent below its 2014 level.

          In a town hall in his district about two weeks before the Obamacare vote, Denham assured more than 1,000 constituents that “I’m a ‘no’ on the healthcare bill until it is responsive to my community.”

          Turning him around was a last-minute amendment to create high-risk pools for persons with pre-existing conditions and provide $8 billion over five years to subsidize premiums a bit for this type of coverage, whose premiums have always been sky-high. At the same time, the bill takes at least $800 billion from Medicaid (known here as Medi-Cal) over 10 years.

          Medi-Cal covers about more 300,000 Denham constituents, many among the estimated 24 million persons likely to lose coverage under the Republican plan. Will those people brand him a liar and turn out next year to dump him? No one can predict.

          The healthcare bill passed the House by a narrow 217-213 margin, so if even two California Republicans had voted no, it would have failed. In Denham’s district, no one but him has claimed publicly that the $8 billion amendment (less than $200 million yearly to California) made it “responsive to my community.”

          Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco declaimed after the vote that “This vote…is a scar (Republicans) will carry.” But Democrats have been notably ineffective at unseating Denham and other Republicans from similar districts. David Valadao of Hanford is one: His Latino-majority district went for Hillary Clinton by 15 percent last year, but he still won by 9 percent. With many thousands of his constituents likely to lose coverage if the GOP changes become reality, can he survive? A lot depends on Latino turnout, notoriously unreliable. Both Valadao and Santa Clarita’s vulnerable-seeming Steve Knight criticized the Medicaid cuts, which could hurt tens of thousands in their districts, but still voted for them.

          The Orange County district of Republican Mimi Walters may also be in play. With fewer Obamacare recipients than many other areas, her district still went for Clinton last year. She ardently backed the GOP changes, celebrating the House vote with Trump at the White House. Will that be political suicide?

          Another Rose Garden celebrant was San Diego County’s Darrell Issa, whose vote at almost the last moment may have been decisive. Issa, his fate in question for weeks after last year’s election, survived then by just 1,600 votes. He acted unworried after this vote.

          “Today…gives a voice to the victims of Obamacare…a failure from the get-go,” Issa said. But he kept his position secret until the last moment, refusing to reveal it until he actually pulled the lever. Would Issa have voted against the repeal or abstained if his vote had not been crucial for passage? Was he promised something for his vote?

          Those questions may go unanswered, but it’s for sure Democrats will use that vote against Issa next year. Uncertain, of course, is whether it will work.

          That’s the question about all the Democrats’ loud ventilating over the healthcare vote. Their talk will only matter if they can make this bill an albatross around Republican necks and oust enough GOPers to retake control of the House.

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

FEINSTEIN IN GOOD SHAPE – IF SHE RUNS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 19, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “FEINSTEIN IN GOOD SHAPE – IF SHE RUNS”

          Few California senators of the last 50 years have been more active than the Dianne Feinstein of early 2017.

          That’s important mostly because of Feinstein’s age – despite her dark hair, she’ll be 84 next month and will be 85 next November, when she may seek a fifth full term and sixth term overall.

          For sure, vultures are waiting in the wings for Feinstein to falter, just as they do for every politician over 75. The bulk of the electorate is much younger and many voters can’t even imagine a truly vigorous octogenarian.

          The latest polls reflect this psychological reality. While Feinstein gets a 59 percent job performance approval rating in a recent survey from the Berkeley IGS Poll, in effect the successor to the long-running and usually reliable Field Poll, the moment respondents were told her age, 62 percent said it would be a bad thing for her to seek reelection.

          This was good news for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and members of Congress like Adam Schiff of Burbank and Jackie Speier of San Mateo County, who have made some noises indicating they might be interested in a run if Feinstein drops out. All are Democrats, like Feinstein.

          In each case, these folks would have to wait at least six more years for a shot at the Senate if Feinstein were reelected. There is little likelihood any of them would oppose new Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris when she’s up for a second term in 2022.

          And no one knows who else might arise as a potential candidate by 2024, the next time Feinstein’s seat would be up for grabs. Schiff, for instance, was a virtual unknown when Feinstein last ran in 2012, but the House investigation into President Trump’s alleged Russia ties suddenly made him prominent, Schiff’s solid performance enhancing his standing.

          Similarly, while Garcetti was a mere city councilman five years ago, he was reelected by a huge margin this spring as mayor of America’s second-largest city.

          But these folks most likely will have to wait. For even though 62 percent say it’s a bad idea for Feinstein to seek another term, that’s before she’s matched up against anyone else. Incumbents almost always fare poorly in generic “should they run or not?” surveys, but when they’re put up against a real candidate, complete with warts and all, those poll results change quickly.

          Meanwhile, Feinstein has been acting like a candidate. She’s set up a finance committee and started raising money. She’s as vocal as ever in the Senate. And she’s keeping prospective successors guessing about her plans.

          In the Senate, Feinstein led the Democratic opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Neal M. Gorsuch. She has fought firmly against various Republican-proposed plans to revise the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. She’s stuck up, as usual, for women’s rights. These two causes combined in some cases, as when Feinstein argued that the health care plan put forward by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan would have ended a California requirement that insurance policies cover reproductive health services for women, including abortions.

          That policy, said Feinstein, “helps ensure women are able to make their own health care decisions…free from political interference.” So Feinstein is acting as determined as ever in fighting for abortion rights and women’s right, long two of her major causes.

          She’s also the only senator who said much when the Trump administration opened the way this spring for the private Cadiz Inc. to begin tapping ground water in the Mojave Desert and potentially sell it to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

          That’s not final yet and Feinstein wants to stop it, as she has helped do several previous times. “The detrimental effect this project would have on the California desert is irreversible,” she said. “Rather than allow a proper environmental review, the…administration wants to open the door for a private company to exploit a natural aquifer and destroy public land.” Cadiz strongly disputed that description.

          Feinstein here did not sound like someone about to hand off a cause to anyone else.

          The upshot is that Feinstein appears to be in about as good political shape as she ever has been entering a campaign, bad news for the corps of candidates trying to look uninterested even as they eye her job.

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias @aol.com. His book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net 

WILL YUCCA MOUNTAIN BE THE NUCLEAR WASTE ANSWER?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
  “WILL YUCCA MOUNTAIN BE THE NUCLEAR WASTE ANSWER?”

          The longer Donald Trump remains President and Harry Reid remains retired, the greater the chances that canisters bearing more than 3.5 million pounds of nuclear waste from the shut-down San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) will end up beneath a mountain about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

          And the closer this proposed solution to a serious problem comes to reality, the greater the chances it will pit well-meaning Californians against each other, both sides with legitimate environmental concerns that so far appear of little or no interest to Trump’s administration.

          The waste involved, say San Diego-area consumer groups, is extremely deadly and could remain potentially lethal for about 250,000 years – much longer than the known history of the human race. Planned burial of the canisters near the beachfront abutting the SONGS site along Interstate 5 at the San Diego-Orange county line may be delayed as Edison and consumer lawyers try to negotiate another disposition for them. Those negotiations have already postponed a civil trial scheduled to begin April 14.

          Should the canisters stay beneath the beach and leak, they could endanger more than 8.4 million persons living within 50 miles, not to mention freeway drivers and passengers on an adjacent coastal rail route.

          Enter Yucca Mountain. The hollowed-out mountain was considered in the 1990s as a prime candidate for storage of nuclear waste from around the nation, now scattered widely in supposedly temporary sites.

          Then Reid, the recently retired Democratic Nevada senator and longtime Senate Democratic leader, stepped in along with now-retired California Democrat Barbara Boxer. Both expounded a theory that radioactivity from Yucca Mountain could trickle into underground water supplies that eventually flow to the Colorado River upstream from the aqueduct belonging to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides significant supplies to about half of all Californians. They warned that stored waste at Yucca Mountain could pollute much of California’s and Arizona’s water supply for generations to come.

          Any threat to those water supplies can only create pressure to draw  more water from rivers in Northern California.

          Yucca Mountain also became highly unpopular in Nevada, whose citizenry resisted becoming a dumping ground for the most toxic waste in America when there isn’t even a nuclear power plant in that state.

          Now comes the Trump administration, which has seemed to care little about polluting anything, from air to water to the airwaves, where it admits purveying “alternative facts.” That’s another phrase for lies, distortions and exaggerations. Meanwhile, no one has either proved or disproved the potential threat from a Yucca Mountain dump.

          So far, Trump proposes spending $120 million to restart the licensing process for the site. But Yucca Mountain could end up costing more than 1,000 times that much – a possible $100 billion for things like 300-plus miles of new railroad track to bring waste there, advanced robots to work underground with waste canisters, and building of massive underground titanium shields designed to keep waste from most of the 48 contiguous states contained for hundreds of thousands of years beyond the lifetime of anyone alive today.

          Trump’s aim is to keep nuclear power plants operational as long as possible. They currently supply about 20 percent of America’s power, with more than two dozen now storing radioactive waste on or near their own sites on a longstanding “temporary” basis.

          The renewed controversy would not be happening if Reid were still leading the Senate. The strong push by San Diego County residents to move SONGS waste far away from them will only add pressure to the drive for Yucca Mountain.

          There is no doubt America needs a waste storage site, as all existing ones are at capacity. Yucca Mountain got its newest boost the other day, when Energy Secretary Rick Perry – a determined rival of California during his eight years as Texas governor – quietly visited the area.

          But Nevada officials are united against it, including Democrats like Reid successor Catherine Cortez Masto and Republicans led by Gov. Brian Sandoval. So far, no California official has been involved in the new push for the site.

          More and more, this looks like a political landmine, with legitimate environmental worries on both sides of a decades-old dispute.

         
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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net