Image: Water Defense
Everyone talks about recycling water, and for good reason. It is a fine idea, especially in a state like California, which is primarily desert.
So why would environmental groups object? It may simply be because modern environmentalists hate science and corporations more than they love clean water. Regardless of their motivations, when recycled water in California is coming from Chevron and it's helping farmers that's a good thing -- unless you make money assuming everything a company does is part of a giant conspiracy to ruin Gaia.
In 2016, almost anything can be detected in water, or on land, or in the air. Our detection capabilities are so advanced we can now detect carcinogens that have been in nature for all of human existence; we just never knew it before. For out-of-state troublemakers Water Defense, this is a way to greenmail a corporation and a local government, so they used the modern technology they ordinarily distrust to find traces of industrial contaminants in water, then they insisted that although those trace levels couldn't harm anyone, a vaguely-defined "bioaccumulation" effect must be happening and local people are at risk from Big Business and the local government in cahoots. Naturally, the Los Angeles Times rewrote a Water Defense press release and started invoking an Erin Brockovich-type conspiracy.
There was just one thing missing; actual impartial data. The Cawelo Water District probably didn't like that New York rabble-rousers were claiming it put their citizens at risk and didn't know how to do their jobs, but they still hired a toxicologist to try and replicate the findings of the political science majors anyway.
The actual scientist completed a report, over 500 pages in length, and found that the recycled water from the Kern oil field was clean, the filtration system was still working fine, just as it has been for 20 years. Trace levels of anything are just that, negligible.
And Chevon sells the water at cost, for $30 per acre-foot, far below what state and federal surface water costs. That's a boost for local agriculture.
Maybe Water Defense needs to hire Fenton Communications to do their dirty work next time; they can stick "endocrine disruptor" in a press release and probably get the New York Times or "60 Minutes" to bite.
