Most welcome.Sorry, Ulmo. I find Hetch Hetchy repellent and a disgrace on the National Park System. O'Shaugnessy and his cronies pulled a fast one to get the Tuolumne dammed up for the swells in San Francisco in the early teens. I believe that it initially was just for drinking water, as San Francisco was growing and running out of water. It has been said by others who visited that area before it was dammed that Hetch Hetchy Valley was as beautiful as Yosemite Valley.
I do not disagree with you when it comes to clean generation of electricity. That is a worthwhile and noble goal. But it should not come at a price of defiling our national treasures.
(Apologies for the rant.)
PG&E desecrates most of the best trees in our State by cutting them down simply because they refuse to underground their power lines, and they spend more money ruining our daily visible trees than they would undergrounding the lines.
There is a stupid sense of many retirees that California is a nice sunny place to retire, so when they move in, and see a 100 foot 200 year old Redwood on their property, they think it doesn't match their real estate expectations, chop it down, and ruin the view for a hundred people around.
High density development strips barren all land and replaces it all with concrete, asphalt, cheap homes, cockroaches and noisy neighborhoods; not a tree in sight, except ugly yellow maple trees dead half the year. None of those residents ever get to see real native trees.
People move here from the East Coast, I don't know why, and then they miss their "childhood memories" of drives through the "fall colors", and replace all the beautiful forests with their ivies and dead short yellow trees, again.
Safety, make-work programs, and road width guidelines remove whole forests just to abide by some bureaucratic specification written in Washington DC, and probably originated in Beijing University. This is also true for carpool lanes, road expansions, emergy lane expansions, and road diet expansions. Get rid of those native trees, and by all means, install more ugly yellow short east coast Maple trees that are dead half the year and cost loads to clean up constantly, with fossil fuel blowers that put more pollution in the air than cars do.
I think all of that has a horrendous effect on how beautiful our environment more, and I daresay it is far more treacherous to our psyche, soul, mind, and intellectual ability than Hetch Hetchy.
But, I love Yosemite, and many of my screensavers are from there, however, many are from many other lands as well. I have to wonder if I should value my screensavers more or the view I see when I'm driving in my commute. Would what we lost from Hetch Hetchy be better or worse? I don't know if I'd go as far as to agree with you.
But, we can have a world where all those things are fixed:
- Don't use a one-size-fits-all standard for how road foliage should be done nationwide or statewide.
- Get rid of road diet. It's stupid.
- Reduce human density and reduce building density. Require more native tree land around each residence.
- Some anti-dam environmentalist told me that PG&E has already said they can create equal water and electricity from flowing rivers without dams. Let's fully replace 100% of all water and electricity generation currently made from PG&E's dams with facilities that get it from flowing rivers, concentrating on a few rivers at a time that already have dams, and as each respective river reaches its own 100% mark for replacing the existing dam's highest-ever design capacity (not just some reduced current capacity or usage), remove that dam. In this way, all the dams can be removed eventually with absolutely no reduction in human capacity and value.
- Underground all power lines. Government taxes us greatly, so they should use that copious amount of money to actually do something in our favor, and finally do something useful, like get rid of those unsightly utility lines.
One thing I am absolutely sick of from the "environmentalists" is their brazen support of dirty fossil fuels by tearing down all of our most precious clean energy resources: dams, nuclear power, solar power projects, and others. One of the basic principles I always apply to this is that no old power generation should be removed without first totally replacing it entirely with new clean power generation of at least as much, and not to double-spend that "new" resource for multiple "old" resources, and not to use previously built "new" resources to "assign" them to "old" resources; i.e., clean energy efforts should be real, not fake. "Environmentalist politicians" in California have caused more pollution in the last three decades than most countries ever made in their entire history. I really hate the blind politics-first aspect of a lot of these efforts. Throw a rule in there that there has to be new clean generation before turning off the first Watt of old clean generation, and define old clean generation to include nuclear and hydro. All this religious anti-Power politics is only hurting us. It's often easy to spot: anybody who says "conserve energy first" rather than promoting solar farms and batteries is usually on that bandwagon. I don't include you in that group, @cpa, but I am just cautioning against jumping on such bandwagons without making certain there is proper balance of creation and construction to the demolitions.
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