Critics call it a “sweetheart deal” between the Trump administration and the Central Valley’s largest agricultural water district, and they claim it unfairly lines the pockets of major farm owners while imperiling California salmon and other fish species.
Federal authorities have moved to reverse a Trump administration decision that cleared the way for Cadiz Inc. to pipe water across public land in the California desert.
The request filed in federal court Friday, which must still be granted, could deal a blow to the company’s decades-long effort to pump groundwater from beneath its desert property 200 miles east of Los Angeles and sell it to urban Southern California. The project is fiercely opposed by conservationists, who say it will dry up desert springs and seeps relied upon by Indigenous tribes and rare wildlife. Cadiz insists its plans won’t harm springs in the area.
A federal judge Monday threw out a major Trump administration rule that scaled back federal protections for streams, marshes and wetlands across the United States, reversing one of the previous administration’s most significant environmental rollbacks. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez wrote that Trump officials committed serious errors while writing the regulation, finalized last year, and that leaving it in place could lead to “serious environmental harm.”
Just before the Trump administration headed out the door, a federal agency this past December cleared the way for a private company to begin pumping groundwater from under the Mojave Trails National Monument in Southern California. The Cadiz water project would extract roughly 16.3 billion gallons of groundwater every year for 50 years from aquifers north of Joshua Tree National Park. The project would overtax the surrounding environment, according to environmentalists who filed a lawsuit to halt the project Tuesday.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Monday joined a lawsuit challenging a Trump-era rule revising nationwide standards for controlling and remediating lead in drinking water. While the final rule includes certain necessary updates to the existing standard, these changes are overshadowed by the unlawful weakening of critical requirements and the rule’s failure to protect the public from lead in drinking water to the maximum extent feasible, as required by law. In the lawsuit, the coalition argues that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) update to the Lead and Copper Rule is arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the Safe Drinking Water Act’s prohibition on the weakening of existing drinking water standards.
As wildfires, heat waves, water scarcity and threats to wildlife intensify in the West, California’s effort to confront these environmental crises now has support in Washington, a stark change from the past four years.
Even as former President Donald Trump spent his final days in office on the sidelines, lamenting his election loss, his administration continued to roll back environmental conservation and gut climate regulations.
The Trump administration on Thursday plans to hold the first oil lease sale in California in eight years, part of a last-minute rush to auction off as much federal land as possible before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.
Down to its final weeks, the Trump administration is working to push through dozens of environmental rollbacks that could weaken century-old protections for migratory birds, expand Arctic drilling and hamstring future regulation of public health threats.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
