The White House and congressional leaders are bracing for a fight over how best to respond to a historic drought in California after the first mandatory water restrictions in the state’s history were issued this week.
Republicans argue that dry conditions aren’t solely responsible for the alarming water shortage, accusing the Obama administration and congressional Democrats of diverting water away from Californians in the name of rigid environmental protections.
The White House counters that the drought is inextricably linked to climate change, which validates the president’s aggressive and controversial plan for combating warming temperatures.
Perhaps the only thing both camps agree on is that the situation is dire.
Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown is ordering local water agencies to slash use by 25 percent, but many doubt whether localities can meet that benchmark or if it will make much of a difference in addressing the crisis.
Lawns will certainly become browner and showers shorter, as Californians grapple with the changes. The order does not apply to the state’s large farms, however.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is pressuring California’s Democratic senators and the White House to drop opposition to GOP legislation that would allow officials to pump more out of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Liberals say such efforts would put various species of fish at risk.
“The environmental movement decades ago began to wage its war on the delivery of California water to the more arid regions of the state, which is also the most productive agricultural land in the country,” McCarthy told the Washington Examiner. “Fast-forward to today, and the influence of these environmentalists has penetrated the White House.”
The majority leader pointed to the Obama administration’s interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, which it has cited as justification for blocking Republican efforts to deliver more water to California’s Central Valley. California is responsible for nearly half of all U.S.-grown fruits and vegetables.
“I have asked these [federal] agencies to increase the pumping so that we can salvage whatever water Mother Nature had blessed us with,” McCarthy said. “But even in the face of the worst drought in our lifetime, the refusal to move off of demands from environmentalists has resulted in the loss of millions acre-feet of water.”
Water issues are hardly new for Californians. Water is a constant cause of tension between regions in the nation’s most populous state, often pitting agriculture against more urban areas.
However, this is no ordinary moment in the never-ending spat.
The winter snowpack from which California draws its water is at just 6 percent of typical levels, forcing the state to tap reservoirs and groundwater at a rate that makes experts uneasy. They also say that water rationing alone cannot solve the problem.
For his part, Obama has framed the drought as indicative of a much larger national problem: climate change.
“One thing that is undeniable is that changing temperatures influence drought in at least three ways,” Obama said during a visit to California last year. “No. 1: More rain falls in extreme downpours — so more water is lost to runoff than captured for use. No. 2: More precipitation in the mountains falls as rain rather than snow — so rivers run dry earlier in the year. No. 3: soil and reservoirs lose more water to evaporation year-round.”
Obama was never forced to formally oppose the GOP legislative efforts to bolster water delivery to drier areas of the state, as the measure never made it to the floor of the Democrat-led Senate for a vote last year. That will likely change in coming months under new Republican leadership, putting the White House at risk of appearing more beholden to environmental interests than farmers and residents.
Those at the center of the state’s water wars say they are fed up with the federal response and urged leaders to unite behind a plan rather than trade ideological barbs about the root cause of the drought.
“There needs to be much greater federal investment in new local water,” said Mark Gold, acting director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “We’re definitely in a severe drought. Whether that’s exacerbated by climate change is almost beside the point. The water is just not here. Five percent snowpack in the Sierras should terrify everybody. The system we had in place was never designed to deal with this dire of a situation.”