Rice (No, Not Condi) As A Green Strategy

Even an environmental skeptic like me has learned to look derisively at the rice crops around Sacramento each time I drive by or fly over them. "What a waste of water!" I think.

Well, according to Greenie Watch, I've been duped, along with millions of others. I should have known. Greenies hate the green world of agriculture because food feeds people and people are, well, bad. Here's a bit of Greenie Watch's analysis:

And the illogical notion that using water for rice farming takes more economically productive jobs from the semiconductor industry or commercial economy, as the Pacific Institute report contends, is nonsense. Halting water to rice growers or making them pay the urban retail price for the water won’t produce more semiconductor jobs or vice versa.....

The not-so hidden agenda of the Pacific Institute apparently has little to do with stopping waste or even preserving the environment as much as it does in stopping population growth and development. It is probably not coincidental that Stanford University professor Dr. Anne H. Erlich, co-author of the infamously wrong 1968 book The Population Bomb, is on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute.

What think tanks in “blue cities” like the Pacific Institute apparently want to do is to stop agricultural enterprises and new housing development from thriving in “red counties” where the population is growing. What might be called liberal Land Rover environmentalism continues to paint a distorted image of California agricultural water politics as a Cadillac Desert rather than as a horn of plenty for both the economy and the environment.

Read the whole thing here.