Water conservation peaked in Australia in 1972 – our last big dam was Wivenhoe in Queensland, built 35 years ago.
Elsewhere in Australia, water conservation virtually stopped when Don Dunstan halted the building of Chowilla Dam on the Murray in 1970 and Bob Brown’s Greens halted the Franklin Dam in 1983 (and almost every other dam proposal since then).
The Darling River water management disaster shows that we now risk desperate water shortages because our population and water needs have more than doubled, and much of our stored water has been sold off or released to “the environment.”
However, we regularly see floods of water being shed by the Great Dividing Range, most of it ending up in the Pacific Ocean, while to the west of that watershed there is severe drought.
Our ancestors had the prudence and the will to build great assets like the Tasmanian and Snowy hydro schemes, Lake Argyle, Fairbairn Dam, and the Perth to Kalgoorlie water pipeline. What are we building for our children?
Politicians can pass laws or find money for games, stadiums, climate jamborees, study tours, gifts to foreigners, green energy toys, and useless giant batteries. Canberra alone spends a billion dollars every day.
Our engineers know how to lay large pipelines over hundreds of miles to export natural gas and bore road and rail tunnels through mountains and under cities and harbors.
But we cannot find the funds or the courage to build a couple of dams on the rainy side of the Great Divide somewhere between the Ross River at Townsville and the Clarence River at Grafton and some pumps, tunnels, and pipes to use and release it into the thirsty Darling River basin.
Someone is always cursing either droughts or floods.
We need to curse less and dam more.
Read more at American Thinker
There is a very good reason why governments have chosen not to build more dams on the eastern side of the great dividing range. This is because environmental flows are needed on those river systems to keep them healthy and also because of water allocations that are already made to agriculture and towns. If you want to live on the western side of the range then perhaps you need to be bringing those stealing all of the water on the western side of the range to account. Take a look at Cubby Station and other cotton properties in the middle of huge legal controversies at the moment with environmental water buy back rorts they are engaged with. How about having a think about whether people should even be growing cotton and other water intensive crops over that side of the range. It is development at all costs people like the person who wrote this article who are wrecking things for generations that come behind. Nicely said Dave O for what you said too. As for Spurwing Plover, well, it is the neo-colonial & neoliberal thinkers who have created the hell on earth that we are quickly heading towards thanks to Global Warming. We environmentalists are trying to save you from your own short-sightedness, greed and exploitative domination of nature that is killing the earth. It is you purveyors of the dominant paradigm who are sacrificing future generations to the horrors of climate change thanks to your domination of nature. Do you know what an anoxic event is? Scientists are beginning to become concerned this is where we are headed. An anoxic event will end all life on earth. This is the seeds you are sewing with your current rape and pillage of the earth.
No dams.
No to oil.
No to coal.
No to nuclear.
No to natural gas or any petroleum.
Yes to wind and solar.
Good luck, next generation. Can’t help but think they will rue the idiots that ruined their future.
Modern Enviromentalisms become a pagan new age cult where Nature and the earth have become new age deities to be worshiped and given sacrifices to(Abortion,Euthinasia)and who demands a whole lot of suffering and sacrifice just like the Aztecs did
If you figure out how to get their attention, let the folks in California know.