SOUNDING OFF:

For far too many years, the NIMBYs and “progressives” of Huntington Beach have been fighting ocean desalination with false claims of added harm to marine life, with diversions such as promoting fears over privatizing water, and with assurances that a water crisis is many years, if not decades, away. Well folks, the future is here, and California is now officially in a drought.

And here were are, scratching our heads, with those very same folks still fighting progress and Poseidon’s water desalination plant.

On the energy front, it’s been pretty much the same story, starting back in the late ’70s with “The China Syndrome,” with Jimmy Carter banning reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and later with bans on domestic land and offshore exploration and drilling.

With the fear and inaction these things helped to create, we are once again caught flat-footed and too beholden to foreign energy imports thanks in large part to those very same “progressives” who seem hell-bent on blocking any and all solutions to America’s energy and water needs .

The solutions are there, but the political will is not. Conservation must continue, and in fact we have conserved, both oil and water. In fact our oil consumption is just slightly more than it was in 1980, even with quite an increase in population over those years.

To me, the obvious answer to our energy issues is to announce an aggressive national policy of enabling domestic exploration and drilling, while expediting new refineries and nuclear power plants. In my opinion, to simply announce such a new, progressive and positive direction in our energy policy will have almost an instantaneous effect on the price of oil — downward (sorry, Mayor Cook). And moving away from coal and gas-powered plants would not only greatly reduce air pollutants/greenhouse gases, but also free up natural gas for transportation.

Similarly, the obvious answer to our water issues (along with continuing to conserve) is to put the same kind of national attention and effort into expediting ocean and brackish water desalination, and reclamation of sewage whenever possible for specific uses, maybe even toilet to tap eventually.

So the time has come to wake up from our paralyzed daze of ignorance and inaction, to put aside the rants and whining of “progressives,” and to finally take back control of America’s energy and water future.

TOM POLKOW is a Huntington Beach resident.