October 13, 2024
The Trump Obsession Comes for California’s Water
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A tiny fish trumps America’s food needs and the economy of the Central Valley.
A tiny fish trumps America’s food needs and the economy of the Central Valley.

Tomorrow, the Golden State’s Democrat-run, veto-proof legislature returns from its summer break and is expected to quickly take up S.B. 1, the “California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2019.” It has been proposed for one reason: Donald Trump is president. Under his administration, long-standing EPA regulations and analyses, and bureaucratic (state and federal) actions, related to water have been rethought, reviewed, and relaxed. Which comes to the progressive Left as a threat: All that water-denying is now at risk. 

Hence the bill.

Its consequence will be to preempt any possible forthcoming federal regulations that would result in people and farms (instead of, seriously, the Pacific Ocean) getting more, already available water. That might even be its purpose: For years, California’s bureaucrats, who are even more radical than Obama-era natural-resources federal regulators were, have shown great determination to deny the flow of fresh water from mountain snowpacks, watersheds, and reservoirs to the famous the Central Valley, which, when supplied H2O, puts fruits and vegetables on the world’s tables.

Whether or not the condition is drought in California, there is water to be had, from a system that (despite billions allocated in voter-approved bonding to update a system desperately in need of updating and new infrastructure) centers largely on fresh water flowing from the mountains into the massive Delta situated East of San Francisco. In years past, enough of the Delta’s accumulated fresh water was pumped and piped south, to the dependent, rain-scarce Valley, where farmers — or, in the jargon of the Left, “billionaire farmers” — grow your tomatoes, celery, almonds, pears, peaches . . . you name it. 

Now, rather than allow that pumping — because the pumps kill a threatened fish, the infamous Delta smelt (the farmers’ offer to hatch and repopulate the fish in the Delta is met with a bureaucratic no) — billions of gallons of fresh water instead flow from the Delta west, much of its passing under the Golden Gate Bridge on its way into the Pacific Ocean.

[…]

See Also:

(1) Why China Is Feeling Internal Pressure To Keep Raising Trade War Stakes

(2) Why ‘policing is racist’ is such a poisonous lie

(3) Why Trump El Paso Pic Triggered the Left

(4) Exclusive—Allen West: ‘There Has Never Been a Clearer Choice’ than 2020

(5) If Joe Biden is the best Democrats can offer, party is in trouble

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