It’s highly unlikely but somewhere in America there may yet be a more heart-wrenching example of human misery caused by Big Green environmental extremism than the dust bowl that California’s Central Valley is becoming. Regardless, the House of Representatives has an opportunity today to put an end to the needless devastation wreaked upon America’s most fertile farmlands in order to protect the delta smelt, a three-inch fish found almost exclusively in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley estuary. Big Green extremists claim the Endangered Species Act requires the delta smelt to be protected, even if that means putting thousands of people from hundreds of productive family farms in the unemployment lines. House members can stop this insanity today by passing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act.
The bill is needed because, beginning in 2009, 300 billion gallons of water — enough to cover an area the size of Rhode Island — that used to go annually to irrigate the nation’s most productive farm lands have instead been diverted to maintain the level of salinity in the estuary required by the delta smelt to spawn. Rather than irrigating crops, the diverted water flows out into the Pacific Ocean. The result is double-digit joblessness, loss of farms owned by families for generations, and the wasting away of thousands of acres of lands capable of growing as much as half of all the vegetables, fruits and nuts consumed in America. The Big Green extremists and their San Francisco Democrat allies look the other way when confronted with the horrendous consequences of their ESA worship.
