Outside of Mother Nature, who among us is responsible for the drought? A growing body of criticism is spreading up and down the state attesting that the drought is a man-made disaster brought on by misguided environmental policies.
In an average year, California reportedly gets enough snow and rain to put 200 million acres under a foot of water. Environmental opposition to dams over the past several decades has reportedly allowed the majority of that fresh water to flow in to the ocean. Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, is among many experts and ordinary witnesses to the extra-dry seasons who contend political squabbling is as good reason why our reservoirs are down, lawns are brown and environmental policies unsound.
“This is a man-made disaster,” Cohen said. “Southern California is an arid part of the world where droughts—even severe droughts—are commonplace. Knowing this, you’d think the government of California would have included this mathematical certainty in its disaster preparedness planning, but the government has done nothing, not even store rain, as the population continues to grow.”
Gov. Jerry Brown last week mandated the state’s residents cut water usage by as much as 35 percent. If consumers don’t abide by this new directive, they could face stiff penalties, forced installation of water restriction devices and even water service suspension. Critics of the guidelines say there’s plenty of water to go around…provided if it is managed properly. More than half of the state’s water flows from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the east down to the Sacramento-San Juaquin Delta in Northern California. Much of the mountain runoff is managed by two of the world’s largest water storage and transport systems—the federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project—each comprising a system of dams, reservoirs and distribution systems designed to send water to cities, town and farms statewide.
Most of the state’s 1,400 dams and reservoirs were built before 1980 and since then the so-called “environmental lobby” has advocated a halt of future water and distribution systems through various legal and political actions. Now most captured water is released into streams leading to the ocean—rather than the water delivery systems—in an effort to boost fish populations and to dilute the salinity of the delta. Releasing water is said to have saved the endangered fish population, including the tiny Delta smelt and its minuscule cousin the Longfin smelt, along with four varieties of Chinook salmon, Steelhead trout, and both green and white sturgeons. Despite the environmental measures, each of these fish populations has decreased. A state survey conducted in March found just six Delta smelt—four females and two males—prompting wildlife experts to estimate that the species’ population has dropped to 5,000 or fewer from the millions in the last 40 years.
“Droughts are nothing new in California, but right now, 70 percent of California’s rainfall washes out to sea because liberals have prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades, during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” said Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard and a probable GOP presidential candidate. “This is the classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”
Rep. Davin Nunes, representing the Central Valley, said roughly 21 million-acre feet of water is flushed into the ocean each year. One acre-foot of water equals 325,851 gallons which is about the average annual water usage for a suburban family of six people. The environmentalists, he claims, have no one to blame but themselves.
“The environmental groups did not expect to run everyone out of water, but they got greedy,” Nunes said. “They shut down the system and have run the whole damned state dry.” Nunes in 2012 introduced the Sacramento-San Juaquin Valley Water Reliability Act and co-sponsored the Sacramento-San Joaquin Emergency Water Delivery act of 2014 to “…restore water deliveries cut off by environmental lawsuits and federal regulation.”
