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Why Is KCET Allowing Anti-Cadiz Water Project Invective?

“Just when it seems like … Cadiz can’t get any stranger ….” So starts the latest article by Emily Green, one of the angriest and most zealous critics of the Cadiz Water Project’s plan to conserve water that’s currently evaporating in the desert and use it to help address Southern California’s water crisis.

Hmm… What exactly got even stranger?

It’s this: A panel of independent and seasoned jurists at the California Court of Appeal weighed the evidence presented in thousands of pages of court records and CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) documents, heard oral arguments from all sides, then decided – based on these troublesome things called facts – that once again Green and her friends are all wrong and the Cadiz project is in total compliance with California’s tough environmental laws.

Emily Green smirks

Emily Green

Green could have accepted defeat after giving it her best shot. She might even have recognized that the environmental laws she champions actually worked, resulting in the careful design of a sustainable new water supply project. But no. Instead she attacked the California judicial system – courts that routinely uphold environmental positions – writing, “The court might as well have told us that yes, it’s checked, the wolf in the bonnet is our grandmother.”

To borrow a phrase, just when it seems Green’s tale can’t get any stranger, she actually found someone to publish her emotional download! Not the usual sort of outlet for print pieces, but KCET public (as in publicly funded) television, which is better known for its broadcasts than for its print pieces.

Her commentary, “Forget it, Jake: It’s Cadiz,” is a temper tantrum of personal attacks against Cadiz executives past and present, various public agencies and water providers, elected officials and anyone else who she thinks played a role in her imagined conspiracy to hoodwink the public by – OMG! – following the law, doing the science and responsibly bringing a new supply of water into the region.

Instead of being similarly responsible, Green works hard to deliberately misinform the public and refuses to address facts inconsistent with her conspiracy theory:

  • She says Santa Margarita Water District has no qualifications to be the project’s lead agency, but doesn’t mention that SMWD already manages a groundwater basin as a member of the San Juan Basin Authority, that it is one of the largest water recyclers around, that it captures, treats and reuses runoff, or that it’s a respected regional water leader.
  • She promotes the fabrication that pumping water at Cadiz will harm desert springs that are more than 10 miles away and thousands of feet higher in elevation than the well field. Independent reviewers, including those who have visited and mapped all the springs in the watershed, have found her allegation to be “impossible.”  And the Courts have upheld these findings. Twice.
  • Her claim of pollution, in which she suggests the low levels of Chromium 6 in Cadiz water its comparable to the high levels of the chemical Erin Brockovich exposed in Hinkley, is irresponsible. The levels of naturally occurring CR6 at Cadiz range from just below the state max of 10 ppb to a few parts per billion above (or about 1/10 of the EPA-allowed 100 ppb of total chromium), while the industrial contamination at Hinkley caused CR6 levels to soar more than 50 times higher, to 580 ppb. She also fails to mention that Cadiz has the commitment and the technology to meet the California CR6 standard before its water enters the Colorado River Aqueduct.

Why is KCET allowing anti-Cadiz Water Project invective? The public should know the truth about the project. They’re not going to get it from Emily Green, but they could get it from you. Post a comment on the story by clicking on the green word bubble icon under the headline, or better yet, send an email to contact@kcet.org. (You’d think a public television station would have a “Contact Us” page that doesn’t stonewall the public!)

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