How Not to Get Things Done

When I look out one of my back windows I can see an electric-power generating station, which is situated just a few hundred yards inland from the ocean. It’s a peak-use station, and so it does not run all the time. It burns natural gas to turn its five steam turbines, and it uses seawater as a coolant, drawing the water from a lagoon. The company that operates the station owns a good deal of unimproved land around it.

Some years ago another company proposed building a desalination plant on a portion of the station’s property. The desal plant would take in a portion of the heated seawater that the power station discharges, run it through some complex machinery to remove salt and other minerals, and produce pure water, something of which Southern California is in increasing need.

Have you ever noticed how often in the newspaper or in a television news broadcast the headline, whatever it may be, is followed immediately by a subhead or second line that begins with something like “Critics claim…”? Have you ever wondered where all the critics come from, and why they so often claim unlikely things? Not that developments and proposals in the public sphere ought not to be criticized; far from it. Most benefit from the critical eye, and some, of course, ought to be tossed out as bad ideas. But might there be some limit?

The desal proposal looks like a good deal all around. We need the water (we’ve been “borrowing” water from Arizona for a long time and have now been told to stop) as demands continue to grow even as we sit out a multiyear drought. It’s a private undertaking requiring no public money. It even has an environmental benefit: the water returned to the sea after passing through the desal plant will be cooler than that now discharged directly from the power station.

So what’s the problem? I’m not sure I see any. But at every step of the approval process – and brother, are there a lot of those – “critics” appear to complain about this or that possible outcome. Some fish might die, as though otherwise they’ll live forever. There might be an endangered species on the property, although there is no evidence of any, which “critics” take as evidence that they haven’t been looked for diligently enough. There might be a better use for the land. It might rain.

So the Friends of the Sea and the Friends of the Land and the Friends of the Littoral, the Surfers Junta, the Beach Strollers Coalition, the Patriots United Against the Desalination Conspiracy (believing, perhaps, that it is a sneaky way of introducing fluoridation), and a dozen other groups nobody had heard of before yesterday and that may or may not have more than two members apiece, these all have their say and mount their lawsuits and get their names in the paper.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion; but that does not imply that the rest of us are obliged to indulge it.

Eight years now this has been going on. A cynic might tentatively conclude that delay is the whole point. That same cynic might wonder just how good the show will be when, the prices of oil and natural gas having hit some trigger level, someone gets around to proposing to build a new nuclear power station somewhere. Two words: “China Syndrome.”

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