Boxing with Barbara Boxer - California's 'greatest' environmentalist (until 2017)
Her gentry-journalist fans at ringside giggled and her corporate coach mocked me. The Poseidon desal wave seemed like a slowly advancing tsunami
Continuing with memories of my encounter with Barbara Boxer at the Sacramento Press Club on September 27, 2017. See Part I, here and Part 2, here for context.
Where I left off last time:
I was at the Sacramento Press Club, standing about 15 feet in front of the former U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer, who gained fame as an environmentalist lawmaker but now worked as a lobbyist for Poseidon Water.
Standing in the back of the room was her new boss, Scott Maloni, Poseidon’s VP in charge of marketing for his company’s proposed ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach.
He had recently hired Boxer to be the green bullet that would pierce through a growing wall of public opposition and slay the state’s regulatory dragons.
She was at the press club to talk about her new book and to promote the Poseidon project to a friendly audience.
I knew that Boxer and the audience’s knowledge of the project consisted mostly of Poseidon’s slanted talking points. So I tried to provide some context before asking my question, both of which took 78 seconds.
I explained that public money would pay for up to $600 million of the (at that time) $1 billion project. In other words, Poseidon wasn’t paying for everything, contrary to Boxer’s claim that it would.
And under the terms for receiving a $400 million public subsidy from Metropolitan Water District of Southern California meant to promote local water supplies (and needed to attract investors), Poseidon’s desalinated water would have to replace an equal amount of imported MWD water each year.
In other words, the ratepayers of the Orange County Water District (the agency sponsoring the project) would pay three times as much for about 10 percent of their water supply, due to the Poseidon project, without getting a single drop of water more.
“Isn’t that a —”, I started to ask.
“What’s your question,” Boxer snaped, inspiring laughter and disapproving mumbles from the audience.
“Isn’t that the definition of a scam?”
“Yeah! I know you,” she said, getting another good laugh from her gentry-journalist friends.
“You were on this TV show. Remember?”
She was recalling our separate appearances on a KPBS Orange County TV show days before. She had been interviewed on film, but declined to discuss Poseidon’s pros and cons with me face to face in the studio.
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
“And I was on the first part of the show and you were on the second part of the show and never the twain shall—but we met. It’s nice to meet you,” she smiled, making us all laugh.
“I don’t know anything going on about subsidies,” she said. “I don’t know anything going on about the price of water. What I do know is this: Orange County Water District wants this water.”
As for the higher cost of water, she said, “You don’t know. You never sat in meetings between the salmon fishery and the farmers. They were almost tearing each other’s eyes out” over water supplies.
It’s a “legacy project,” she added, stating that the people of San Diego County are “so happy with” Poseidon’s similar ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad, which has been operating since 2015.
And then she said it—the boast that Maloni and Brookfield-Poseidon were hoping to take to the bank.
“No one in the history of our state has been a greater environmentalist than I have,” she insisted.
She had always believed that climate change is real, she said. But if we aren’t prepared, and without the help of ocean desalination (and Poseidon in particular), the consequences will be dire.
“There will be dams built all over the state,” she ranted. “People are going to be lining up to buy bottled water. Maybe all of us in this room can afford to go to Costco and get big packages of safe drinking water, but not everybody can.”
The Poseidon HB project is carbon neutral and energy efficient, she claimed. “I helped them when I was a senator and I’m happy to be helping them now.”
Maloni seemed to think that Boxer had delivered a knockout punch. Her gentry-journalist fans sitting at ringside probably did too. Immediately after our mini-bout, Maloni mocked me in a text.
“Thank you for your question at Sacramento Press Club today,” he wrote. “I knew we could rely on you.”
In Maloni’s mind, the mind of Poseidon—the powerful god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, everything was going according to plan.
Next: Boxer and Newsom make a desal twosome.
It's extraordinary how these people always operate from the same playbook, mocking reasonable questions and objections, and making grandiose claims for themselves. What's shocking is that there seem to have been no other real journalists backing you up at the Sacramento Press Club! By the way, still reeling from watching Boxer's "interview" with her grandson, and embarrassing poem in praise of herself.. Thanks for posting.