WhatFinger


There's much more to California's drought than lack of rain.

California's Water Crisis



California is currently in the grip of one of the worst droughts in state history. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed an executive order that imposes water restrictions on residents, businesses, and farms across the state. While the state is clearly experiencing this drought, the extreme weather shortages are an ongoing and man-made human tragedy—one that has been brought on by overzealous liberal environmentalists who continue to devalue the lives and livelihoods of California residents in pursuit of their own agenda. It comes down to this: which do we think is more important, families, or fish, asks Carly Fiorina. (1)
She adds, “With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could have been avoided. Droughts are nothing new in California—the state has suffered from them for centuries. The difference now is that government policies are making it much worse. Despite the awareness around this issue, liberals continue to develop and promote policies which allow much of California's rainfall to wash out to sea.” Specifically, these policies have resulted in the diversion of more than 300 billion gallons of water away from farmers in the Central Valley and into the San Francisco Bay in order to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered fish that environmentalists have continued to champion at the expense of Californians. This water is simply being washed out to sea, instead of being channeled to the people who desperately need it. (1) While they have watched this water wash out to sea, liberals have simultaneously prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades. “We haven't built a major dam in this state since 1979,” reports Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “Meanwhile, the population has nearly doubled. We aren't going to solve our water problems until we begin building more dams. We can't build more dams as long as the radical environmental laws make their construction impossible.” (2) Republican Devin Nunes said this about the water shortage in California: “In the summer of 2002, I sat through an eye-opening meeting with representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council. They told me something astonishing. Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production. They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan: from Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side. Productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature. (3) Nunes adds, “Much of the media and many politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley's water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor. From my experience representing California's agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a long-term campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.”

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Twisted Truths (Lies?)

As radical groups have pursued this campaign to dry up the San Joaquin Valley, it's worth noting some of their stunning contradictions, hypocrisies, fallacies and failures:
  • - There's not enough water in California- On average, due to environmental regulations was well as lack of water storage capacity (attributable, in large part, to activist groups' opposition to new storage projects), 70% of the water that enters the Delta is simply flushed into the ocean. California's water infrastructure was designed to withstand five years of drought, so the current crisis, which began about three years ago, should not be a crisis at all. During those three years, the state has flushed more than 2 million acre-feet, or 752 billion gallons, into the ocean.
  • - Farmers use 80% of California's water- This statistic, widely parroted by the media and some politicians, is a gross distortion. Of the water that is captured for use, farmers get 40%, cities get 10% and a full 50% goes to environmental purposes—that is, it gets flushed into the ocean. By arbitrarily excluding the huge environmental water diversion form their calculations—as if it is somehow irrelevant to the water crisis—environmentalists deceptively double the farmers' usage from 40% to 80%. (3)

Anti-nuke activists killed one solution

Art and Noah Robinson argue that the state's water problems could have been solved if it had tapped the energy in an existing nuclear power plant—now shut down due to opposition by anti-nuclear activists—to desalinate water, producing enough fresh water for the entire population of California. (4) Hardly reported at all is the closure of the San Onofre nuclear power station located on the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. The station once had three nuclear reactors but one was closed some years ago by California's 'anti-nuclear' politics. The other two are now being similarly destroyed. The electricity generated by San Onofre units 2 and 3 was sufficient to produce 3.6 billion gallons of fresh water per day. Estimating personal water use at 100 gallons per day, California's 38.8 million people use 3.9 billion gallons of water per day. The political tragedy that has destroyed the San Onofre nuclear power station has been perpetrated in the shadows. Few Californians realize that, had this power station remained, it could have been used to prevent the grass around their homes from dying, report the Robinsons. (4)

Summary

Besides the drought, California has a major activist problem. Read pretty much any newspaper covering this crisis and you will read about evil homeowners who water their lawns, or farmers taking water for their own evil purposes (creating food and keeping people employed). You will read almost nowhere that this crisis was caused by environmentalists. It is well known that they have blocked the construction of new dams and water transmission facilities, but beyond that, we are literally flushing water into the sea to protect a bunch of insignificant fish. (5) References
  1. Carly Fiorina, “Carly Fiorina: the man-made water shortage in California,” time.com, April 7, 2015
  2. Greg Corombos, “Bone-dry California dumps water to make fish happy,” wnd.com, April 11, 2015
  3. Rep. Devin Nunes, “Man-made drought: a guide to California's water wars,” news.investors.com, June 12, 2015
  4. Art & Noah Robinson, “Anti-nuke activists killed solution to water crisis,” wnd.com, April 14, 2015
  5. Newsmachete, “The most amazing truth about California's water crisis,” American Thinker, July 12, 2015


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Jack Dini -- Bio and Archives

Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology.  He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.


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