California Gov. Gavin Newsom has expanded his state’s drought emergency to several additional counties. As it turns out, there are drawbacks to outsourcing your state’s water policies to environmental zealots who want to flush it all out to sea.
The emergency declaration now covers 41 of the state’s 58 counties. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 98% of the state is facing drought conditions. Newsom predictably blamed climate change, absolving the state of a water crisis that is entirely of its own making.
Around 50% of the state’s water is for environmental uses, while 40% is used for agriculture and 10% for urban usage. Agriculture’s cut makes sense — California’s Central Valley makes up less than 1% of U.S. farmland but produces 25% of the nation’s food, including 40% of America’s fruits and nuts. But that’s too much water for environmentalists, who are constantly demanding to add to the 50% of the water that the state already lets flow out to sea.
California is exceedingly poor in water management. In dry years, farmers are forced to pump more groundwater. New groundwater regulations have come down, but the core problem, the inability of the state to store water to use in years with little rain or snowfall, remains unaddressed. This is not the fault of climate change. California saw record rains just a few years ago, enough that the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that 87% of the state was free of any level of drought. The state couldn’t capitalize on those rains though, as trillions of gallons of runoff flowed into the Pacific Ocean.
Construction of dams and pumps designed to move water down the state are consistently met with fierce opposition by environmental groups, whose primary goal is protecting endangered species of fish. Species of salmon and the delta smelt have seen their numbers decline even with the added water protections, causing environmentalists to continue to push for even more water to be flushed out to sea as part of an effort to reverse this decadeslong trend.
The fish and their environmentalist backers have taken priority over the most fertile region in the world and the entire economy it supports. California politicians and national Democrats get to shrug off the crisis as an example of climate change, their pet issue that takes whatever shape that allows them to pass more regulations on energy and use as a political tool against Republicans.
Everyone wins, except for the farmers and low-income residents of California’s Central Valley. And the more the state mismanages its water supply, the more California’s breadbasket dries up, and more losers will be added to the list. Newsom and California know the state has a water problem, but no one wants to address the fish-sized elephant in the room.
