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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.

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.

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.

Overhead irrigation systems have revolutionized agriculture across the United States and in other parts of the world, using less water than furrow irrigation and requiring significantly less labor and maintenance than drip systems.

But in California, the No. 1 agriculture state in the nation, it hasn’t gotten off the ground. That could be changing. University of California Cooperative Extension and Fresno State agricultural production scientists researched overhead irrigation at the UC West Side Research and Extension Center for five years, growing wheat, corn, cotton, tomato, onion and broccoli, comparing them with crops produced under furrow and drip irrigation.

The United Nations will be discussing recommendations from a new report about climate change-related loss and damage, including a case study of how the San Joaquin Valley is coping with drought, during the second UN Environment Assembly (UNEA2), May 23-27 in Nairobi, Kenya.

The policy recommendations developed by Dr. Gil Harootunian, Fresno State director of university initiatives, focus on how the Valley can best cope with drought. They are featured in “Preventing the Avoidable, Dealing with the Unavoidable,” published May 19 during the Science Policy Forum at the UNEA2.