if you were in charge if you were the the water master of california what would you do to fix the future of california that's a big question

well you know it's how far do you want to go the the reason we like dredging is because it's relatively cost effective and as you say it it has you know very strong arguable position that that it helps everybody it helped the habitat It'll definitely help the farmers in the Delta, but we also believe at the very least it'll prevent a dangerous downside.

If everything fails in the Delta because we don't maintain the levees and we don't deepen the channels with sediment removal, we're going to end up perhaps losing the ability to export water to the aqueducts at all.

So you've got all kinds of benefits there, and it's a relatively cost-effective project.

So I would start right there.

The other thing is we've got this opportunity right now to work with people in the Colorado Basin to pay for desalination plants.

And if they would quit making the cost so artificially prohibitive, okay, if they would deregulate the process, it's absolutely astonishing to me that the California Coastal Commission is willing to be silent and actually endorse floating offshore wind When you can't even build a 10-foot, you know, wall, a seawall by here, you can't even demolish a shed or construct a new one if you're within three miles of the coast.

Do you think the young people are finally waking up or we're going to continue to kick the can down the road?

You just came out with a great article.

Yeah, you know, uh, I really shouldn't be talking with you right now because, uh, I may be overly spontaneous and uninhibited about this because that article, uh, was censored, uh, by a aggregator that typically, you know, will run the material that I, uh, produce having to do with water.

The title apparently was too incendiary.

Uh, here's the title: Without Sediment Removal in the Delta, Catastrophic Flooding is Coming to California.

So I changed the title.

Now the title [chuckles] at least on the website that I control, Without Sediment Removal in the Delta, California Risks Winter Flooding.

Uh, that still wasn't good enough.

it starts with the California government.

So the 500,000 acre figure, which I've read, how does that compare to what you think the total prescribed burn annual acreage should be? Like, where are we now and where should we be to actually have an effective strategy on that piece?

Well, you know...

That's a little bit of a loaded question for the simple reason we have to catch up.

And catching up means you'd have to do it at a rate that's greater than what might be a maintenance rate of controlled burns.

So that's a difficult number to quantify exactly.

And you also have to recognize the other three legs that this stool has.

can sit on.

If you look at all the CO2 that's been emitted into the atmosphere from these massive forest fires that have been uncontrolled, it has wiped out all of the emissions gains from this cap and trade, now cap and invest program that our Sacramento leaders have been managing.