Making oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires?

 

Paradise lost

There is a movement among some states to make our oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires, when cities have dried themselves out over the last 40 years, starting in 1986.  

Cities, states, and the EPA bought into a conjoined hoax that started in ‘86: the idea that “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that must be conserved!” ignoring both the water cycle and normal cost accounting.

 That same year, we heard about global warming.  I think the financier started the hoax but needed proof.  He started the “scarce and precious” water scare.  What could go wrong? 

Cities overcharge their ratepayers for their use of water and undercharge them for overhead, a system designed to jack up the price of water use.  In Grants Pass, water unit rates carry 40% of overhead and increase 5.28% over inflation every year.  It’s the only way they can pay the overhead. 

Mankind has changed weather three times, and it always involves water:

 

·       killing beavers, who kept water in the land.  This caused country and cities to burn and turned most of the West into desert. 

 

·       cities built water plants to keep cities from burning, by piping water into every occupied building.  People gardened. The water was cheap to use.

 

·       sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw! This is not waste; it feeds the water cycle, making rain.  Rain returned to cities and their surroundings.  The ‘80’s was a wet decade. 

In 1986, cities began to buy into rationing water by rates. They ration clean water with high unit rates, causing many ratepayers to eliminate their greatest use of water: Property maintenance.  These people lose their best insurance against wildfire: a green, watered yard.

 

2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, and X.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook.

 

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Coal is the only fossil fuel

 Coal is the only fossil fuel.  It was formed only in the Carbonaceous Era, when trees didn’t rot because fungi could not use lignin.  Trees died, fell, and piled up.  As dirt covered them, they formed charcoal and slowly fossilized into coal.  The Carbonaceous Era ended when fungi evolved to use lignin.

Oil and natural gas are not fossil fuels; they come, not from ancient land animals, but from organic mud that builds up on oceanic plates that eventually slide under continental plates, the mud lubricating the process, and is refined in the upper layers of the mantle from the churning of magma, heat and pressure.  

I figured this out over a decade ago.  Last year, I found an article in Live Science, “North America is dripping down into Earth’s mantle,” by Sasha Pare, April 2, 2025.  The mud on top of the plate below the center of the continent is refined into: water; salt; oil; and natural gas.  Being lighter than melted rock, they are pushed toward the surface.  

Springs of fresh and mineral water are common and keep rivers running.  Salt gathers in caverns near the surface.  The carbonaceous portion, oil, and natural gas sometimes find cracks that reach the surface, which is how mankind discovered tar pits and used tar to seal Moses’ basket and ships.  In 1859, oil was brought to the surface in Pennsylvania and refined into kerosene.  Being cheaper and brighter burning than whale oil, it saved sperm whales from extinction.

 2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook.

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com 

 

Many Poor and Middle Class Can’t Grow Food

    

My backyard garden, 9-4-2014

In 1985 people grew food without thinking about the price of water.
Paying the full water plant overhead monthly with base rates left only pennies on the dollar for unit rates.  Utilities did not depend on use to pay the overhead.  We thought of water as “free from the tap.”  We grew so much food that it was hard to give it away, except to our Food Bank. 

Rationing of water by price in Grants Pass grew slowly from sometime in the 1990s to 2005, when a new city manager hired a rate consultant to set our rates, and my water bill doubled.  Soon water was so costly that our Food Bank bought farmland outside our city to grow food, using volunteers to do the work. 

Such water rationing has cost us a generation of gardeners willing to garden other peoples’ yards, because they never learned how.  It has made the poor and lower middle class poorer every year, as unit rates increase 5.28% above inflation to pay the overhead.  Forty percent of our overhead is paid from water use, which decreases as unit rates increase.  Many people have lost their homes to high utility rates.  

Electricity and Natural gas are also rationed by price, but water and sewer are local monopolies.  Water is not precious; it is vital to health and wealth.  Overpricing use of any utility is not good for utilities or people.  It is theft based on fraud, the idea that these are “scarce and precious” resources.

 1-21-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council 

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Anonymous Prophets of Drought

 

When people can't afford to water their yards, they often neglect to cut their weeds.  Grants Pass depends on citizens to report property neglect, but few do so.  We had two decades of drought until the eruption of Hunga Tonga, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, blew its top on January 15th, 2022, sending 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere, though the flooding of California and other places started in September of that year, and continued through winter and spring.  Fall to late spring rain and flooding around the globe are expected to continue for another two years.

In 1986 in Grants Pass, we were told that we would be in drought that year, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  We had 103 days without rain that year, 97 days the next.

 In 1986, we first started hearing a new meme in the media: “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource!  Only 2 percent of the water on earth is fresh water, and it must be conserved!”

 Interestingly, no one stepped up to write a book about it like Bill McKibben did about carbon dioxide and global warming.  This was because the movement to ration our water by rates, the way electricity and natural gas have been rate-rationed for over 50 years, required rationing of water to provide evidence for global warming.  

Water vapor is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas, but it also cools and thus moderates temperatures.  Their push to tax carbon dioxide has always been noisy; rate-rationing of water has been very quiet.

Building water treatment plants allowed cities to bring clean water to every building and fire hydrant, protecting both the cities and the surrounding countryside from wildfires, using irrigation and evaporation. 

But rate-rationing of city water has stopped our rain, because not enough people are watering.  Please bring back the rate system that will give us cheap water to use again.

                                            1-7-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com