Allen Henderson

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It was a subsidy that had an architectural elegance, a wonderful symmetry to it. Several of the “big farmers” who would get much of the water from the Feather River Project were oil companies—the same oil companies that were paying into the Tidelands Oil Fund. In exchange for a modest extraction tax—quickly offset by the billions they would make on the easily accessible oil—they would have their barren, worthless acreages in the San Joaquin Valley turned opalescent green. And they would get the growth, and the cars, and the freeways, that would increase the demand for—and the cost of—the oil!
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
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