…“A ‘crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ So is a non-crisis.” – —author
“’There is no drought’… You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to the sea in order to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”
— Donald Trump, Fresno, California, May 27, 2016
“We have been assured that once the winter rains and snow returned so would California’s water supply. Despite storage levels near or above 100% in California’s major reservoirs, we understand … FWS (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) is “now proposing… actions that will significantly reduce the water available to Californians”.… FWS has requested up to 300,000 acre-feet of water be purchased to further increase (Sacramento) Delta outflow this summer for Delta Smelt – something not required by the Delta Smelt biological opinion…the cost could approach $500 million.”
“Climate change is likely to increase the frequency of warmer winters and low snowpack.”
– Ben Chou (Natural Resources Defense Council), “California Needs Proactive Ways to Deal with Drought,” EnergyNewsData.com, April 3, 2015.
“Nature makes drought; man makes water shortages. Government water conservation policies, misinformed by the environmentalist ideology of the NRDC, are worsening the water shortage.” (below)
Ben Chou’s March 31, 2015 column on the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “Switchboard” website, cross posted on April 3rd at EnergyNewsData.com, requires rebuttal if we are going to deal with the California drought empirically and not ideologically.
Chou correctly writes that California’s April 2015 snowpack is indicative of the amount of water that can be carried forward into the hot summer months. Even so, water supplies are measured in California over a 5- and 10-year meteorological cycle.…
“Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought”
– Dwight Morrow, American businessman and diplomat, quoted in Outlook and Independent, Vol. 156 (1930), p. 289. Ascribed to an October 1930 speech in The Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), p. 672.
In California the Democratic Party, in near monopoly power in the state, have for the past two decades been underfunding big water infrastructure projects and diverting water from farms to fish. They have been taking credit for the moral high ground of allegedly saving a few fish from threatened extinction at the cost of four billion gallons of water per fish.
But now that there is four-year long green drought they want to place blame for it on others.…