Following the speaker’s prediction of 500 million jobs lost a month, Secretary of Energy Chu now warns there will be no more vineyards in California soon, indeed, no more agriculture at all as we know it. As an owner of one of those doomed vineyards of a small farm of some 135 years in our family, I wonder. While we’ve had unseasonably warm weather this year and so far only a so-so snow pack, this is not all that unusual in my 50-year memory of California climate and weather. And as I write I am pausing at a rest stop in a pouring rainstorm in Los Angeles on the way to drive up tonight through a heavy blizzard in the Sierra.

Until we more carefully study global warming, I suggest the energy secretary might more modestly support allowing reactionaries to add a few more feet to our dams–or maybe even build one or two–so that in good years, millions of feet of snow melt can be saved rather than go out to sea.

You see, our California reservoirs were built for a state of 15 million, not one approaching 40. Until we get wind and solar and hope and change, let us mere mortals at least accept that our freeways, canals, dams, airports, etc. were never designed to serve the present population. The old way of allowing environmentalists to stop needed infrastructure–rather than Mother Nature–may be the real culprit for our current malaise.

Second, there is a disturbing pattern of what I would call “the apocalyptic style.” We are not just to worry about global warming, but that there will be NO more agriculture at all soon!

Then President Obama says if we don’t act immediately on the stimulus, financial CATASTROPHE looms!

Let me get this straight: We borrowed and spent too much under Bush, so we must borrow and spend even more under Obama to rectify things? We rushed to do the fall bailout and now rue the waste and haste, so naturally we should hastily rush to do this even bigger stimulus? And we are not just losing jobs, but 500 MILLION per month! And this from someone who recently declared that she was SAVING THE PLANET–all 6 billion plus.