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The headline on this story is a recurring joke made famous by this column’s most celebrated alumnus, who parodied the environmental left by attributing to man-made climate change an increasingly preposterous list of unrelated events. In that same spirit, your current columnist will now go out on a limb and make the safest political prediction of the year. If the people of California suffer because Golden State officials have neglected the state’s water infrastructure, the relevant officials will not go on social media
to blame themselves. They also will probably not get very far trying to pin the blame on a weather pattern that has existed since long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. That leaves global warming as the most politically convenient landing spot for accountability avoidance. Rachel Becker of CalMatters reports in a story distributed by the Associated Press: With an El Niño winter threatening heavy rain, the State Auditor warns that California’s aging dams “continue to pose a risk to
public safety,” especially in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles areas… An audit released Monday found 57 dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition as of May, up from previous counts. That number is likely to keep rising, as state water officials reevaluate aging dams. The 40 riskiest dams — rated high or extremely high hazard — are located throughout the state, but cluster near densely populated coastal cities.
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