#USpolitics #WaterPolitics #LAfires #California
"Trump says he’s sending water to LA. It’s actually going to megafarms."
by Jake Bittle for Grist [Jan 28, 2025] [Audio available]
https://grist.org/politics/trump-california-water-los-angeles-fire/
Quotes:
"The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires."
"While President Donald Trump"../\...the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks."
"But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones."
"Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law."
"But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president."
"This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns."
"None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles.
For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage.
Even if Los Angeles were low on water, Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t help with that, because the federal government’s canal system doesn’t actually deliver any water to the Los Angeles area."
"[Alex Biering, California Farm Bureau Federation JdeB] It’s an attempt to tie water supply to a natural disaster, but those connections don’t exist in reality.”
"Environmental groups, meanwhile, have blasted Trump’s attempt to strongarm California water policy, saying his most recent order would be devastating for the state’s vulnerable fish species — and the integrity of the federal Endangered Species Act as a whole."
"California’s water system has been the subject of heated political debate for decades. Over the course of the 20th century, the federal government and the state of California built a complex series of dams and canals designed to move water from the northern parts of the state../\..down to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The federal government operates dams, canals, and pumping stations."
"The crux of this transport system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sensitive marshland region where two of the state’s largest rivers converge and flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This area is also the point where endangered fish species like Chinook salmon enter from the Pacific and swim upstream to spawn."
"It’s California’s own state-run canal system that actually delivers water to Los Angeles and numerous other cities in Southern California — and the federal government has no jurisdiction over this."
"Despite his East Coast upbringing, Donald Trump has fixated on Central Valley water issues for years. He chose David Bernhardt, who has lobbied for the influential Westlands Water District, to lead the Department of the Interior during his first administration."
“We’re driving up, and I had never seen it before,” he [Trump on the Joe Rogan podcast] said. “I said, ‘Do you have a drought? They said, ‘No … in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water gets routed into the Pacific.’ So I see this, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”
"Trump may go much further this time. His most recent executive order calls for another wholesale rewrite of the pumping rules, proposes building new dams around the state, and even suggests that his administration could declare the Delta smelt [that pesky little fish JdeB] functionally extinct."
"Some of California’s most powerful water districts, which are typically run by large agricultural landowners, have praised the executive order.
For instance, the Westlands Water District, which covers more than half a million acres on the west side of the Central Valley, said in a statement that they “welcomed” Trump’s “leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery.”
"“They can try a lot of this stuff,” said Biering, the California Farm Bureau advocate. “It’s just about: How many times do you want to get sued?”
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