Did I hear this right???? (About the water crisis in Georgia and endangered species)

[Stinky The Clown]

I've been out most of the day and (mercifully) away from the news. I just heard on MSNBC that Georgia Governor SonnyBoy has demanded the Corps of Engineers not release water from Lake Lanier to Alabama. He claims that to do so would be to further endanger a species of fresh water mussel and some other aquatic life.

Has he always been such an environmentalist?

Was he that vocal when the snail darter was fighting for its very existence many, many years ago?

My quarrel is not with the tactic nor with the notion that the water crisis is real. I'm simply commenting on the prima facia hypocrisy of a REPUBLICAN in a strongly REPUBLICAN state. Surely saving some insignificant bivalve is not a high priority with them ...... is it?

[ulysses]

1. the mind boggles.

No, I've never known Sonny to be an environmentalist.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. It's an excuse to turn the water off and...

an end run around lawsuits from Alabama.

The real reason the water's off, of course, is that there's not enough for both Georgia and Alabama any more, but there's some sort of ancient agreement that has to be dealt with.

Welcome to the opening salvo of 21st Century water wars.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. BINGO

[karlrschneider]

3. The endanged species depend on the flow out of the lake.

Georgians want to stop the release (conserve the water.) I think Perdoo doesn't give a shit about the mussels.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. I also think Perdoodoo doesn't give a shit about the mussels.

I was commenting on the prima facia hypocrisy.

[Warpy]

4. I understood it to mean water was being released

to support the endangered species. Sonny boy wants it all hoarded for drinking water.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. Whichever way he wants it, to use an endagered species in his argument boggles my lefty brain.

[ecstatic]

7. No... he's preparing to sue the Army Corps of Engineers to get them to STOP

releasing the water because we're in the middle of a dangerous drought and have 81 days of water left. Here is more info, if you're interested:

Metro Atlanta could run out of drinking water in as little as four months according to dire predictions from top water officials on Thursday.

...
Hunter and the mayor are also asking the Army Corps of Engineers to cut their daily water release from Lake Lanier in half. The Corps said that certain endangered water life needs the current amount released.
...
"We are saying that we believe, if you look back over the history of the lake and the river, that the fish will survive, but that we have reached a crisis for the humans," said Franklin.
...
For the past 16 years, the lake and the water taken out of it have been the subject of a lawsuit, and some are saying that with the condition of Lake Lanier, it is time to settle the lawsuit and issues like water taken from there to protect endangered mussels.


http://www.11alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=1...

[Stinky The Clown]

11. I was in Atlanta last week. I know you guys have a serious crisis to deal with

And as I said in the OP, I am not trivializing it at all nor objecting to the tactic (I don't know enough to have an informed opinion).

My whole point was the hypocrisy of using an endangered species to make a political play.

[tanyev]

8. Has Pat Robertson weighed in yet on why Gawd Almighty is punishing GA and AL?

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. If he does he should point out the incredible

sense of irony by that powerful god... you know the one that is raising its finger at the bibble belt that denies global warning is happening

[Whisp]

12. Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow

http://www.canadians.org/about/Maude_Barlow/Blue_Covenant/index.html

An Inconvenient Truth of water.

“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert."

“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities who will sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remote parts of the world left or sucked from the clouds by machines, while the poor die in increasing numbers. This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course.”

— Maude Barlow

[lovuian]

13. Water wars are coming and the Government sits on its duff

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0k8zkbDAsXI

its bad

[nealmhughes]

14. Florida is pretty ticked off about the brackish conditions of the Appalachicola Bay, too, destroying

oyster beds. The river rises in Georgia, then flows thru Ga to Alabama and empties in Florida, thus all three states have been "at war" with Alabama and Florida as allies against Georgia since the 1880s or so when the river began to be empounded.

Georgia seems to think that by rising in Georgia it makes it all theirs; which by their analogy would make all the Mississippi belong to Minnesota or all the Tennessee River belong to Virginia.

It seems that every time there is a concordat, that one state or the other gets miffed and files a new lawsuit in the USSC since it has original jurisdiction as cases between states do.

They may have to pull an Los Angeles water deal, but I really doubt that Tennessee, NC, or Alabama will be very hospitable to the Georgians. . .

It seems that it "never dawned" on the developers of Metro Atlanta that there might not always be a wet fall, winter and spring. . .