The 20th century dams and canals that gave birth to modern California — to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to the San Joaquin Valley farms that feed the nation — are near the end of their engineered lives. The rivers and aquifers they tap are, simply, tapped out.
Bernie Sanders mocked the presumptive Republican nominee for his recent comments on the drought in California, calling out Donald Trump over his dismissal of climate change.
“You see, we don’t fully appreciate the genius of Donald Trump, who knows more than all the people of California, knows more than all the scientists,” Sanders told the crowd of more than 5,000 people who braved 92 degree heat to hear the senator speak.
They told Vince Calcagno to cut his water use by more than a third last year as the desert summer loomed with its 112-degree highs. He stood near the swimming pool in his pretty back yard off a Palm Springs golf course and wondered, “How am I going to make this work?”
It worked as badly as he envisioned. After months of almost no watering, “the back yard looks pretty awful now,” Calcagno, a retired restaurant owner, said recently. “It’s brown and full of crab grass.”
Congressional battles over California water have intensified, unleashing a surge of mostly divisive and ill-advised federal legislation. On Friday, presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump even dived into the fray at his Fresno rally when he declared, “There is no drought,” accusing state water officials of denying water to farmers to save a 3-inch fish. None of this will help California’s ongoing water concerns.
In a case that highlights how difficult it is to enforce agricultural water reductions in California, a state panel has moved to dismiss a $1.55 million fine it levied last year against a Delta-area agency accused of ignoring an order to stop diverting water in the drought.
State water regulators alleged last June that Byron-Bethany Irrigation District in the southern Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta defied a state order issued to dozens of senior water rights holders. The order told them to stop pulling water from streams and rivers due to extremely dry conditions.
House Republicans are trying a new approach to divert more water from Northern California.
Check that. They’re dusting off a stale and disreputable tactic: attaching a proposal that can’t pass on its own to unrelated legislation that has bipartisan support. In this instance, they’re hitching a ride on Senate-approved energy measures that reached the House floor this week. One is a must-pass bill that contains $37.4 billion in funding for the upcoming fiscal year. The other is a broader energy policy bill.
When California officials announced an end to restrictions on urban water use last week, they cited the recent wet winter as one reason. El Niño, the climate pattern that brought a succession of storms to Northern California, had given the state a reprieve from its water woes, they said.
Those storms left a mountain snowpack that while ordinary by historical standards far exceeded the meager accumulations of 2015.
El Nino couldn’t bail California out of an unprecedented drought. Don’t count on La Nina to do any better.
California, in its fifth year of drought, gets most of its water from November to March. The El Nino that’s been in place for about a year helped fill some northern reservoirs but failed to bring much relief to the southern part of the state. And it’s unclear how much more help La Nina can deliver, if it takes over.
Wading into a longstanding California water war, the House of Representatives Wednesday endorsed a Republican plan to shift more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers and cut the flow for threatened fish and growers in another part of the state.
Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., tried to strike that proposal from a spending bill, but lost a 247-169 vote that broke mostly along party lines. He says the plan would pump too much water to Central Valley growers at the expense of the inland Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The House voted 247 to 169 Wednesday to keep to a measure affecting California’s drought in an appropriations bill.
Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Stockton) had moved to strip the measure from the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2017. He and other Northern California Democrats argue it would have a severe effect on the Endangered Species Act and Clean Air Act.
The House passed Hanford Republican Rep. David Valadao‘s bill almost a year ago , but the Senate has refused to take it up, and many state Democrats object to it.
