Reposting for more eyes on, would like some feedback
Nunes has been talking about the water in California since 2002 when elected to Congress when environmental groups tried to get him on board to destroy the farms and land in California, watch the water, watch California. Like Kansas is Pompeo, Nunes is California
Man-Made Drought: A Guide To California's Water Wars
REP. DEVIN NUNES 05:33 PM ET 06/12/2015
In the summer of 2002, shortly before I was elected to Congress, I sat through an eye-opening meeting with representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council and several local environmental activist groups. Hoping to convince me to support various water restrictions, they argued that San Joaquin Valley farmers should stop growing alfalfa and cotton in order to save water — though they allowed that the planting of high-value crops such as almonds could continue.
Then, as our discussion turned to the groups' overall vision for the San Joaquin Valley, they told me something astonishing:
Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production. They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan: From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature. I was stunned by the vicious audacity of their goal — and I quickly learned how dedicated they were to realizing it.
"There's not enough water in California": Environmentalists often claim that the California water crisis stems from the state not having enough water to satisfy its rapidly growing population, especially during a drought.
However, the state in fact has abundant water flowing into the Delta, which is the heart of California's irrigation structure. Water that originates in the snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains runs off into the Delta, which has two pumping stations that help distribute the water throughout the state.
But on average, due to environmental regulations as well as a lack of water storage capacity (attributable, in large part, to activist groups' opposition to new storage projects), 70% of the water that enters the Delta is simply flushed into the ocean. California's water infrastructure was designed to withstand five years of drought, so the current crisis, which began about three years ago, should not be a crisis at all. During those three years, the state has flushed more than 2 million acre-feet of water — or 652 billion gallons — into the ocean due to the aforementioned biological opinions, which have prevented the irrigation infrastructure from operating at full capacity.
If at first you don't succeed, do the exact same thing: Many of the Delta water cuts stem from the radicals' litigation meant to protect salmon and smelt. Yet after decades of water reductions, the salmon population fluctuates wildly, while the smelt population has fallen to historic lows. The radicals' solution, however, is always to dump even more water from the Delta into the ocean, even though this approach has failed time and again.
The striped bass absurdity: If the radicals really want to protect salmon and the Delta smelt, it's a bit of a mystery why they also champion protections for the striped bass, a non-native species that eats both salmon and smelt.
Hitchhiking salmon: It is estimated that the San Joaquin River Settlement will cost taxpayers $1.2 billion – and it's clear to me that the total price tag will likely exceed $2 billion – in a disastrous effort to restore salmon runs to the San Joaquin River.
Moreover, the settlement legislation defines success as reintroducing 500 salmon to the river, which means spending $4 million per fish. The salmon, which have not been in the river for more than half a century, have proved so incapable of sustaining themselves that agents have resorted to plucking them out of the water and trucking them wherever they are supposed to go. It is a badly kept secret among both environmentalists and federal officials that this project has already failed.
https://www.investors.com/california-drought-caused-by-environmental-activists/